Deficiency Syndrome, commonly known as AIDS has become a major concern around the world. The number of people with AIDS or the Human-Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is growing rapidly. In the last few years Africa has been hit by a plague of terrible proportions. In some cities 40 per cent of the adult population is infected. Statisticians produced their grim forecast: in the year 2015 there could be 70 million cases of the disease in Africa. More than a quarter of a million children are already orphans: in 2015 the number of orphans could be 16 million.
Some 40 per cent of children born to infected mothers could develop the illness and many would die before the age of five. The whole system of medical services was affected as most beds would be required for this pandemic. In Africa the disease is most widely spread in the western-central, eastern and southern regions of the continent. Countries with a high proportion of infected people in the population include Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zaire and Kenya. In Kenya the disease affects men and women in their most active years, as well as infants infected by their mothers already before birth.
The disease is mainly spread in the larger cities by migrant workers, with their families in the countryside and prostitutes in the towns. Through their medical work the Churches in Kenya soon became involved in AIDS work. Initially the activities focused on patients coming into the health institutions with AIDS symptoms. Technical solutions were sought. However, it soon became clear that the medical/technical part of the problem was not the whole problem. It is as important to deal with the social, psychological and economic consequences. Here the local congregations have a very important role to play.
The hospitals cannot care for patients dying of a disease for which there is as yet no medical cure, so the patients go home to be cared for by their relatives. As AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, usually both husband and wife are infected and become ill, and are thus dependent on others. Here congregation members as well as staff from the health institutions coming on regular visits play an important role. As the disease particularly affects young adults, mothers and fathers, many children have been orphaned and many old people have lost the support of their children.
These are groups for whom the Church has traditionally taken special responsibility. Pastoral care and education are important activities that are part of the role of the Church, its priests and pastors and catechists, all of whom have a heavy task to fulfill. Much support is needed, much love and acceptance. Yet many churches still ignore this reality and practice a conspiracy of silence and rejection. This work discusses the problem of dualistic thinking in the Christian tradition and offers insight into the need for wholeness in the way churches understand and interpret scripture.
Then it considers what it takes for the church in Kenya to be a church for troubled waters; a church with AIDS. The spread of AIDS within our time is a crisis that may be changing our habitual way of looking at things. This crisis is an event of such magnitude that it is causing a paradigm shift, or a change in perspective. We see life through mental structures born of our experience and culture. When there are no challenges to these structures, the style of our vision persists.
To change our paradigm, or way of seeing, involves not only challenges to cultural assumptions but also challenges to our internal structures, with all the threat, uncertainty, and necessity for individuation this entails. Such changes deeply touch our emotional lives, often producing great pain. Today we deal with the challenge that living with AIDS presents to the dualistic perspective from which many Christians approach life, a perspective embedded in our New Testament tradition. AIDS is at present a terminal disease. Thus, it poses many questions about God and life in the face of seeming hopelessness.
It also presents the church with a crisis of self-understanding through the discovery of the barriers our perspectives erect to ministry and caring. By serious involvement in this struggle and with others involved in the AIDS crisis, some Christians are finding their understanding of faith, faithfulness, and community changing. The crisis of AIDS, then, calls on us to ask what it means to be faithful to Christ as Lord in our time; to seek to discern where God is acting within history in our time; and to go again to the well of our biblical tradition so as to draw from it those living waters that may nourish and inform.
The early church provides us with a helpful model in the way it came to terms with the inclusion of the Gentiles into a community that was originally Jewish and was under pressure from Jewish authorities to remain faithful to Jewish traditions. According to Luke’s description in Acts, the church was forced to follow where God was going, and to include those whom God was including in a mission to Gentiles the church was not sure it wanted (20:28).
Its reluctance is understandable, but the amazing thing is that it eventually came to terms with its new inclusive community, because it felt God had legitimized it. In Kenya, AIDS is associated with homosexuality. In Africa, almost all those infected with the AIDS virus are heterosexual. AIDS is a complex social phenomenon that connects all of us with three terrifying realities: death, sexuality, and otherness. AIDS is a disease that is transmitted through the exchange of body fluids, either sexually or by other means.
It has as yet no known cure, although researchers continually draw closer to treatments that hold the symptoms in check. AIDS Still largely affects those who are experienced as other, as outside the defined norm, although it is rapidly spreading among teenagers of all racial-ethnic and social groups. For two thousand years, the church has claimed that death has lost its sting, that Christ is Lord both of life and of death; and yet we have lived as though death were an evil power that wreaks havoc where it will, scything through our lives with bitter vengeance.
We are taught to regard death as punishment for sin, rather than as part of the normal course of mortal human life, a final step into eternal life in the presence of God. Thus, when faced with a disease that as yet has no cure, we are terrified. We burn children out of their homes, we let persons with AIDS die on the streets of our cities, and we try to exclude them from the workplace. From some of our churches come thunderings about the wages of sin, and from some of our people, threats and acts of murder and abuse. AIDS faces us with our deepest fears about death.
The church has historically done an even less estimable job on questions of sexuality. The great doctors of the church have claimed that we are sexual beings because we are fallen, sinful beings and that, at best, we were given this great source of communication and pleasure merely for the procreation of the race. We are not comfortable with our nature as sexual beings. We do not speak of it in church meetings or in public worship. Sexual activity is, by and large, something that occurs in privacy, in the bedroom, and is not spoken of by decent people.
To be faced, then, with a disease identified as transmitted primarily by sexual activity is to have to face our own ambivalence and confusion about our own sexuality and sexual activity, as well as that of our children. And if the disease is also deadly, our shuddering terror rises to great heights. Added to death and sexuality is this third ingredient: that the sexual activity in question is being engaged in by those who are experienced as thoroughly unacceptable in their personhood, by those who are other, whose very existence threatens the defined norm by which people are judged in our society and in our churches.
AIDS is presently a disease of socially stigmatized groups. Those who have the disease but do not belong to these groups are called “innocent victims,” people who, because of their class membership, do not seem to deserve Ares: hemophiliacs, infants born to mothers with AIDS, the heterosexual spouse of a gay man or intravenous drug user, heterosexual teenagers, transfusion recipients. Declaring one group guilty and another innocent provides categories of condemnation for those who do not fit the defined norm.
Those who are other have been declared guilty in their essence as human beings, and, as the theological statement of the black Episcopalians argues, such a declaration provides an opportunity for invoking the wrath of God on those who are seen to deserve punishment. Medically, everyone is innocent. A virus attacks human beings when and where it can. It is no respecter of persons. Distinguishing between means of contracting the disease is a mechanism of oppression, and must be recognized as such, especially in the church.
Having moved around the theological spiral of engagement from experience to response and analysis and to new questioning of the tradition, we now come to alternative suggestions for study and action. Our study of the church with AIDS includes ways that our understanding of the church and the crisis of AIDS shifts as we begin to work for justice and healing together with others. In Kenya, AIDS discourse is also permeated by Christian views of morality, especially amongst adherents of the more fundamentalist sects.
Religious songs of the Kenya Youth (Assemblies of God) condemn, ‘the evil of AIDS’ as the product of an ‘adulterous life’. Youthful members of their congregations often take the lead in these denunciations, as if to distance themselves from generally negative views of youth. Church members and leaders in Kenya not only blamed the youth and unfaithful for their sinning ways, but also parents for being lax in moral education of their children.