The Open Secret of Advent
Guest Blog by Richard Carson, ACET Ireland
World AIDS DAY 1 December 2021
I'm gonna get myself unfurled
From this mortal coiled-up world
Jesus gonna be here
Gonna be here soon
Tom Waits, Jesus Gonna Be Here.
Anyone else exhausted yet? It’s been almost two years of Covid, Covid, Covid and still it goes on. Boosters, HEPA Filters, Omnicron variant, every few months seems to bring a new lexicon for our conversations. It’s all consuming. A global pandemic will do this.
Data, announcements and commentary on the latest developments come at us at a hundred miles an hour. We scroll, with our shoulders slouched into the screen, in hope that the next tweet will complete our insights and give us the full picture to unlock our way to a new beginning. Covid grinds us into such temporal assumptions. The temptation, more than ever, is to believe that our own perception of the way things are is the reality for all.
However if our experience of HIV & AIDS has taught us anything it is that when it comes to the past two years, there are stories of struggle, hope, pain, grief, despair and resilience that would astonish you but you will never get to hear them. They are in homes and families, communities and places of worship, which are beyond our own but may be right next door. Our proximity cannot assume propinquity (a word I learnt recently that determines closeness not by position but by kinship or attraction). On grief alone, were we to return to the tradition of wearing bereavement garments after a loved one’s death, the scale of our shared trauma might be more apparent.
In Jim Cotter’s prayerful and poetic reflection on Psalm 63 he says:
“I search for you in unexpected places, at the edges of the known, in the language of dreams, in the wilderness of the city streets.”
Advent begins in the dark but points us to light that came to us from beyond our understanding and awareness. It is the same today where every now and then light gets through to broader audiences. Michael J. O’Loughlin’s new book on the early history of Catholics and AIDS has the beautiful title Hidden Mercy. With an endorsement from Pope Francis it seeks to tell some of the stories from the 1980s and 1990s that have, so far, remained hidden; they are stories of “compassion in the face of fear”.
The individuals, families and communities we support in ACET have been places of hidden mercy for our staff and volunteers over the past two years. For families experiencing addiction in the community, the very space of the family home has been transformed as drug use and drug related intimidation moved closer to the doorstep and kitchen table. The expectations of distancing, isolating and lockdown looked very different to what most readers experienced.
In Migrant Plus, our work with communities of migrant descent, the sustainability of many community spaces, including places of worship, has been precarious with the question not so much whether permission was granted to meet or sing but whether negotiations with landlords would make meeting even possible as rent arrears increased. Almost all of the national messaging and guidance, on vaccines or restrictions, assumed cultural starting points vastly different to the majority and at some distance to those of global majority background.
We know from our fundraising for HIV supports and community development in rural Zimbabwe that late 2021 has provided a very different epidemiological picture there than the high vaccination levels of Ireland. The continent of Africa continues to experience the exclusion of inequity. Even with HIV and AIDS as a living reminder of our neglect, the colonial understanding of Africa as resource for the global north, subject to our own understanding of comfort and safety, remains deeply entrenched.
This hidden mercy is mutual of course and in all of the above settings as we bring hope and healing we receive as much as give. And while there are quiet spaces of private celebration the good news is that with HIV there is increasingly cause for public rejoicing.
The ongoing development of drug treatments for HIV is stunning, The first long-term injectable treatments have just been approved for use in England and Wales meaning that people living with HIV will only need to take treatment, and then just two injections, 6 days a year. Life can now be lived as long as anyone else and sexual transmission of HIV by those on treatment is now impossible. People living with HIV are experiencing aching joints, weakening eyesight and hearing, haemorrhoids, the risk of heart disease and cancer and much more - the same fragility of old age and at the same time as the rest of us.
Whether in our news headlines, in the quiet spaces or hidden in plain sight, the task of advent is to bear witness to the hope that is both beyond us and at hand. It transcends the certitude that we are in control. Michael Longley’s short poem Birth tells the open secret of Christmas, that light has come into the darkness in the most unexpected place and way.
The cosmos-shaper has come down to earth:
Mary is counting his fingers and toes