A World AIDS Day Weekend . . . and a Date

I wonder why it is I seem to be able to be up on Mondays to blog?

The past weekend was a challenging one. I learned on Saturday morning that, rather than just serve as Co-emcee to the World AIDS Day commemoration at U of M/Flint, I was giving the Keynote Address. This made Saturday a little fuller than I had anticipated, and I was already running behind due to the move-in of the Valley School to our classroom building at UU Flint. (Lost my day off then and there.) I completed the Keynote, differentiating it from my sermon on Sunday, and then went downtown with St. Sebastian (a treasured painting by Michael McConnell) in tow.

The Commemoration was quite different from any I've attended. It was held in the Happenings Room, a pretty nice, if cement block institutional, half-round room with a crackly sound system. Seats were set around tables, and the buffet was a real "groaning board" of sandwiches and crisp breads and hummus and sweets . . . Ken from Good Beans catered the affair, which was funded by the LGBT center at U of M.

The people who came arrived as families. I was happy to sit with Pedro, a leader of a support group at the Wellness Center, and his sister and a bunch of young men who had just come from a Central Michigan University football game. At other tables, mothers and their kids were present, and the mix of skin colors was far more representative of the disease and its impact.

This was not your crowd of single white gay men in Boston!

My speech was directed more toward those gay men who were not present. As I spoke, I wondered if I was entirely off-base. Yet I saw that the program included a great variety of folk with different ways of sharing, and as long as I kept my speech short, I thought it would be fine. (And I think it was.)

The candlelight vigil outside was appropriately brief. It was cold and windy, snow-on-the-way, and Rev. Allen Biles' prayer combined Protestant orthodoxy and a little New Age thought in an inclusive way.

I went on a date, my first date in nine months or so, after the Commemoration. I was a little surprised that my date didn't come to World AIDS Day, but I guess I shouldn't have. Very few gay men came. But I was pleased to have my date show up in his truck and wiling to bring St. Sebastian back to the church for Sunday morning.

We went to the Mongolian Barbeque on Miller Road, a couple of miles from my house, and had a pretty pleasant time. I'm not going to share the contents of the date (I really do hold some things to myself!), but will say that we kept it brief with promises of something in the future.

I wondered Sunday whether there would be many people in church. Mid-Michigan was under Winter Storm Warning, and there were predictions of treacherous driving and encouragement for people to stay at home. As it were, the roads had some slush on them, but the major arteries were salted, sanded and plowed, and while we had a small crowd at church, it was no where near the emptiness I anticipated.

The service itself was a little cluttered. Through a series of missteps and miscommunications, the contribution banks that were to have been handed out on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and then again on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, were still waiting to be distributed. And so the Children's moment became not about children and HIV but about Guest at Your Table boxes. Because the Valley School news was so impossibly fresh, I invited the Chair of their Board to speak for a moment and be welcomed and hailed by the congregation. And because our Music Director is crazily finishing her first semester of graduate school AND singing in the Nutcracker, our musical connections have been unharmonious, let me say.

But the center of the service was a presentation on HIV/AIDS. I was surprised at how emotional a subject it was to become, especially when talking about some of the spiritual questions around HIV, I was overwhelmed with feelings when I spoke about the condemnation some religious leaders gave to those with HIV; about how perverts deserve their fate, and how AIDS is God's judgment on our immoral society.

I was trying to celebrate the work of Rev. Rick and Kay Warren and their HIV AIDS Conferences at Saddleback Church, and how they are coming under fire from some Christian evangelicals for the invitation to allow a variety of voices to speak about the struggle against HIV and AIDS. That Warren is willing to say that he believes that any sexuality expressed outside of marriage is wrong, yet still he wants to be effective in the real world, and that Jesus himself is his example, causes him to consult with gay organizations about effective community building strategies in the fight for popular HIV education. I wanted to celebrate this . . .

But the thought of my own Leonel once praying, "Almighty God, Heavenly Father, I repent entirely of all of my life," filled me with grief. This sweet, spirit-filled, Jesus-loving man, feeling so condemned that he must repent of everything . . . this was overwhelming to me, and I needed to stay in the pulpit, silent, tears streaming down cheeks. I fought through the words of Paul: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I selected that text for Leonel's funeral in April 1996. What was amazing at his funeral was to hear from Padre Julio, the Jesuit from Spain who became Leonel's confessor in his final months, that in Leonel's last conversation he said, "I may be dying, but I am conquering." And I would say, "more than conquering." Somehow, in his final weeks, he moved from self-condemnation to self-acceptance, and when I think of that, I am enraged at the religious condemners who, it seems to me, know nothing of the spirit of creation, and saddened by loss.

Yesterday afternoon's meditative Peace Prayer service, hosted at our church and "arranged" by me although made real by the people who showed up, gave me time to decompress a bit. The evening Yoga class by Sue Kirby made me unkink some of the knots in my body and person.

I am thinking that I need some "away" time today, away from people and away from immediate responsibilities. I will teach a Bible Study tonight (and the next two Mondays) and am pleased that Rev. Beth Rakestraw will be my partner in this. More tomorrow . . .

Cold this morning, but the sky is becoming a shining blue. Some fluffy clouds. And the dogs next door are barking. A good sign.

Good morning.