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| On December the first this year throughout the world, World
Aid’s Day is celebrated. This remembering of all those who have died of
Aids and their partners and families and friends now takes place every year.
The theme this year is stigma and discrimination. I have an image before my eyes of a painting I saw in a Benedictine monastery. It was a ‘pieta’, not a traditional one where Mary holds her dead son, but this one was of an emaciated living Christ, holding the dead body of a victim of Aids. There was little to distinguish one from the other. When we celebrate Christmas, the extravagant love of God for us, with all the festivities, the carols, the parties, the coming together of families and friends, it is worth remembering the chilling prophecy of Simeon to Mary: ‘This child will be a sign that will be rejected. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.’ Luke 2.34-35 I know a lot about the pain and rejection of many gay people, a pain and a rejection that drives some to take their own lives. It isn’t that long ago that a gifted young monk and priest did exactly that after the lynch mob mentality of a Sunday tabloid was going to ‘out him’. I was encouraged recently when Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor refused to acquiesce to the request of some prominent Catholics to stop the monthly Mass for gay people at St. Ann’s Church, Soho. This making flesh of the son of God at Christmas is as one poet put it, a call to ‘wake up!’ ‘All your words were one word: Wake up!’ Antonio Machado I feel that many people outside the gay community are sick and tired and ashamed at the way, even the church in parts speak of people who are gay. I feel that Christmas calls us to share in the extravagant love of God, calls us to go further than we thought we could possibly go. I’ve seen this in the love and care of the partners and friends of Aids victims and it has been for me nothing less than inspiring. No one can grow alone. We are what our relationships enable us to be and we do not need cold words, especially from the church, which I believe sometimes drive people over the edge. This child in the manger is no cold word of God, but rather the one that enables us to experience a spring of possibility breaking in our hearts, and as the poet Rumi writes ‘When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, we shall be a mighty kindness.’ |
