EDGES MAGAZINE Issue

July 2000

THE FUNERAL OF MY FRIEND
WITH AIDS


Father John Michael Hanvey is part of the THOMAS Team


On Easter Tuesday I went to the National Art Gallery, to the exhibition ‘Seeing Salvation’. The piece of art which spoke to me most powerfully was not a painting but a sculpture. It was a disturbing image of Christ naked,crowned with thorns, scourged and sitting on a stone pillar with his right hand holding his head. His eyes were wide open but empty, his gaze unseeing. He wasn’t looking at anybody. There was a Spanish child in front of me crouching down to look into those eyes,but they were the eyes that would pass little children and the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. The hand holding the fractured head seemed now to be denied its former power to heal. He was in the middle of the dark night of torches and fists and false kisses,and miracles were out of the question.

It brought to mind another piece of art I had seen at a Benedictine convent. It was a pieta. Traditionally, the pieta is of Mary holding the body of the dead Christ. This time it was the wounded, wounded,wastedwasted Christ holding the wasted body of an AIDS victim. The dead young man was reflecting the image of the Christ figure.

The response to the article I wrote in the last edition of Edges ‘Queer as Folk’ brought varied responses, all but one moving and humbling, people struggling with understanding who they were and where their sexuality had brought them to in the context of the Gospel and the Church.

As I reflected on these two pieces of art I couldn’t help connecting them with my real life experiences. It forced me to think again about the funeral of a good friend who died of AIDS whose last request was that I conduct his funeral. Whatever blessings I gave that day I felt that I left very blessed myself by the experience.

These pieces of art also forced me to think about the Holocaust which forced the Jewish people to wear the Star of David on their clothes and also made gay men wear a pink triangle on their clothes,marking them out for death in the gas chambers, another final solution. Just as the holocaust was almost incredible in the heart of Christian Europe so is the preaching of homophobic views against gay and lesbian people in the name of Christianity.

There is a section in biblical theology called the ‘Hard sayings of Christ’.There have to be many hard sayings for a world that is often confused about the eternal truths but all of them need to be tempered by unconditional love, because many people are fragile and sensitive individuals fractured by life and often not knowing why. Everything that Edges is about and our organisation T.H.O.M.A.S.is about this.It doesn’t take too much lovelessness and insensitivity to stop peoples mind’s dancing, for which they were created.

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