notes from norwich

Ash Wednesday

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:36:13 -0500

“Remember that from dust you came, and to dust you shall return.”

With these frank words the priest dips her thumb in the ashes of burnt palm fronds and traces the sign of the cross on my forehead.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the forty-day season of reflection and penitence called Lent which ends with the festive triumph of new life we celebrate on Easter Sunday.

I always wipe the ashes off my forehead as soon as I leave church after the Ash Wednesday service. I take literally Jesus’s admonishment, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”

For me receiving the ashes on this particular day is simply a way to share with others, in a spiritual ritual, what I do every day.

Every day I observe what I have called my “sacrament” of pill-taking. Why a sacrament? Because each time I take my HIV medication I’m reminded of my mortality, reminded that I would very likely get sick and die from AIDS if I didn’t take those little pills.

Because I have this daily reminder that I will one day die--my doctors tell me it will likely not be from AIDS--I can “do” Ash Wednesday, though I’m not big on drawing it out for forty days.

I much prefer to live a Mardi Gras kind of life. I don’t mean the kind of license and wild abandon often associated with Fat Tuesday in New Orleans.

I’m talking about the amplified and intense pleasure of living that I feel because I’ve had to confront the fact that I will one day die.

I’m talking about the tears that fill my eyes as I watch Olympic athletes demonstrate what it looks like when human beings focus their energy and strength toward being the best they can possibly be.

I’m talking about tasting not only the ingredients in well-prepared food, but also tasting the love that has gone into the preparation.

I’m talking about the choice I make on a daily basis to embrace hope rather than despair, to look forward rather than back, to see (and trust) the promise of spring in the two-inch-tall daffodils popping through the cold February ground.

One day we are all destined to return to the dust from which we came. But until that day comes, I hope not soon, I will do what I need to do to stay alive.

I’ll wipe the ashes off my forehead, the tears from my eyes, and turn my face upward, like the daffodils, to soak up the warmth and light that even in winter tantalizes me and beckons me onward toward spring.

Haiti’s Suffering

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:48:57 -0500

My heart broke along with all the bones and hillside homes shattered by the devastating earthquake in Haiti two days ago. I watched, helplessly, as the images beamed across the miles onto the TV.

My memory carried me back six years to the days I spent in Port-au-Prince in November 2003. I was there to report on the work of USAID-funded HIV education programs for Haitian youth, and to advise my Family Health International colleagues on how to engage Haitian media in telling the stories of the young people with whom they were working.

I interviewed young Haitian women and men, smart and determined to make a difference in their country by helping their fellow young people to protect themselves against HIV. I marveled at their passion and the warmth and graciousness that are hallmarks of Haitian culture.

One day I hired a taxi driver to give me a tour of the city. The older gentleman and I spoke French as he showed me the presidential palace, Notre Dame cathedral, the waterfront. He waited for me outside for more than two hours while I attended a special holiday youth variety show. The $50 fare might have been steep by local standards, but I considered it a bargain for the experience of seeing this gentleman’s city through his eyes.

My own eyes certainly saw the poverty: the flimsy concrete shanties, the vendors peddling their fruit and crafts on the dusty streets, trying to make a few dollars. I had seen the same kind of poverty in Nigeria a year before.

In fact, I was struck by the resemblance between many of the Haitians I saw in Port-au-Prince and the Nigerians I’d seen in Lagos. Then I realized it wasn’t a coincidence: Many Haitians were descended from Nigerians who’d been brought to their island home as slaves in those earlier, shameful times.

But what I also saw, and the reason Haiti and her people left such an impression on me was this: Joy. Laughter. Bright, cheerful colors in their paintings. Happy, foot-tapping rhythms in their music. Faith. Hope.

It was the smiles I saw in Haiti that made the most lasting impression on me, smiles amid the poverty and squalor every bit as dazzling and warm as the Caribbean sunshine.

I’ve drawn faith, hope and strength from those remembered smiles as I’ve had to face my own difficulties the last few years. If the citizens of Port-au-Prince could smile and laugh when their lives were so challenging, surely I could also find it in me to press on.

It’s painful to see those smiles turned to anguish and grief and sorrow. It’s as if Hope itself has been dealt a severe blow when even these most hopeful people are hurting more than ever, and the hurt is open and raw.

Haiti will rise again from the rubble. Haitians will once again show the rest of us that, although a natural disaster may afflict our bodies and destroy our homes, it can never extinguish the divine spark of life that fills our hearts.

Christmas

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:00:27 -0500

I put my (Episcopal) priest on notice a couple years ago.

I told him, “I love Christmas, but you lose me in Lent.” I can celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation, marvel at the idea of Love incarnate.

But the grim, depressing season of penitence isn’t my thing. Life throughout the year has enough challenges than to call them all to mind and spend forty days flagellating myself for my shortcomings.

And yet . . .

And yet I discovered that the marvelous wonder of Christmas is its celebration of life and renewal against the backdrop of winter’s bleakness and hardship. It’s precisely the same thing we celebrate at Easter, the end of Lent.

At the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday, we hear the stark, startling words, “Remember that from ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” That’s a pretty clear reminder that we are mortal and will one day die.

At Christmas we hear the stark, startling words of the prophet Isaiah, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”

Wow!!

It seems the only fitting response to that kind of message is to leap to our feet, singing and dancing, reveling in the amazing gift of life.

I thought about these things three years ago when I was in New Orleans for a December conference, sponsored by the National Association of People with AIDS.

The French Quarter was decked out for Christmas, and the revelers were reveling—as they do there all year long.

When I pointed out that the purple, gold and green of Mardi Gras were also ideal Christmas colors, the owner of a souvenir shop told me people actually repurposed their Mardi Gras beads and baubles for Christmas.

It only made sense. Mardi Gras, after all, marks a celebration of life in defiance of death and the dolor of Lent that begins the day after “Fat Tuesday.” Mardi Gras floats feature death masks, as if underscoring the point that life is for living while we’re alive.

That year, and each year since (until this year, which has been another story), I decorated and displayed a Christmas tree bedecked in Mardi Gras “throws” and crowned by a beautiful mask. I called it my Tree of Life.

That little tree represented to me the flame that burns within me, urging me to take care of my health, tend to my spirit, love while my loved ones are with me—and never forget the priceless, sacred and fragile gift of life.

Lent will come again, soon enough. Winter will have to be endured between now and then.

But for now, at this winter solstice, on this shortest day of the year, I want to bask in the sunshine, enjoy the beauty of the snow we got over the weekend, and remind myself of the reasons Christmas is my favorite season.

It has so little to do with the commercial charade and orgy of spending the popular culture wants to force upon us. But it has everything to do with standing, silently, and reflecting on Isaiah’s words.

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”

Life is here, to be lived. Now! The glory of Love is risen upon you.

Arise, shine!!

World AIDS Day 2009

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

It seemed right, on World AIDS Day 2005, to begin that day taking the pills I would have to take the rest of my life—barring a cure—to treat the HIV infection I’d only recently found out I had.

Every December 1st there is so much positive energy and good will directed at those of us living with the virus.

So on December 1, 2005, and every day since, I have swallowed the pills, inhaled the positive energy, bathed in the good will.

But even before I became a “person living with HIV,” I was already a man who’d been deeply wounded by the losses of people I loved to this terrible plague.

For many years World AIDS Day has been a day that, even more than other days, I mark the wrenching from my life of so many whose lives affected and shaped mine.

There’s no avoiding the sorrow of this day as we remember our losses—of friends, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, co-workers, neighbors, and that sparkling someone we knew only because her smile brightened our days when she served our breakfast sandwich at McDonalds.

HIV has snuffed out more than 25 million smiles since 1981.

We can be encouraged by the fact that “only” two million people died last year from HIV-related causes, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS). That’s a 10 percent drop from the 2004 peak of 2.2 million deaths.

We can rejoice that more people are able to live with, rather than die from, HIV infection—an estimated 33.4 million worldwide—because effective medical treatment now reaches an estimated 42 percent of those who need it.

But we must continue to work to make sure the other 58 percent who aren’t receiving life-saving treatment will finally get it. We must focus prevention efforts like laser beams on those at highest risk.

We can’t ignore the fact that 2.7 million people were newly diagnosed with HIV in 2008—including 56,300 here in the United States.

We can’t pretend the political, prejudicial denial of focused prevention for those who most need it--men who have sex with men, women and men whose only way to make money is by selling their bodies--is acceptable. Scientists determined more than two decades ago that only explicit, targeted prevention education works.

No matter which aspect of the HIV pandemic you consider on this World AIDS Day, one thing is clear: Far too many of us must live, 365 days a year, with the fear, rejection and uncertainty that haunt even those of us whose HIV infection is well-managed with effective medication and good medical care.

Far too many of us are living, 365 days a year, with sorrow we can bear only because we store the treasured memories of lost loved ones in a ‘safe’ place in our hearts.

Whether it’s mourning the loss of someone, or of our own innocence, forced upon us by this pandemic, so many of us can only visit the place within where we keep our memories on World AIDS Day.

It’s unbearable to live with them the rest of the year.

Why it’s sometimes important to challenge the law

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:54:38 -0500

I booked an appointment this morning to drop off my VW Jetta at an auto body shop. After getting three estimates, including State Farm’s “official” one, I got a check for $1,817. That’s $500 less than the insurer estimates it will actually cost to repair the car, also known as the deductible.

Now I can fix the damage caused when another car, speeding up a one-way street on a pouring-rain October Sunday morning, struck my car as I was pulling out of a left-hand parking space.

Of course no car was visible when I looked out the rearview mirrors and signaled. And there was plenty of distance to stop in time to prevent hitting me if the young man driving the other car had been driving responsibly in the rain.

But he wasn’t. So my 30+ years of driving without an accident or insurance claim came abruptly to an end.

I’ve pled not-guilty to the ticket I received for “unsafe movement.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I’d said to the cop. “Isn’t giving me a ticket for pulling out of a parking space when there was no approaching car to be seen in my rearview mirrors kind of like “guilty for being black?” Guilty for driving?!

Naturally he didn’t make the connection--when I pointed out the expired registration sticker on the other driver’s windshield (actually a ticketable offense)--between the young man’s apparent lack of awareness and irresponsibility in not having replaced the registration sticker in the two months since it had expired, and what just might be his lack of awareness and irresponsibility behind the wheel.

“Maybe he hasn’t had a chance to replace it,” said the cop.

Oh. Of course. That must be it.

“If we ticketed everyone for every possible offense, that’s all we would do,” said the cop. “I’d go around checking the wear on tires.”

Come to think of it, this dim bulb might have done exactly that because worn tires might be precisely the reason why the driver said to me, and repeated to the officer (who again seemed to miss the obvious): “My car is so light I have a hard time controlling it in the rain.”

So I got the ticket. For, basically, “failing to yield the right of way”—to a car that I didn’t see in my mirrors, and that obviously didn’t see me even though the photographs I’ve taken to document my argument show ample distance to stop safely and avoid hitting an emerging car if you are driving safely under the wet road conditions.

I’ve already sent a five-page statement to the Central Infractions Bureau, with the photographs showing sight lines, and what I think is a rational analysis of the facts of this situation.

The cop couldn’t “prove” the driver who hit my car and messed up the parked car across the street was speeding in the pouring rain. So he chose to take the word of the young man who claimed he was abiding by the speed limit, who seemed not to be a very credible witness on his own behalf (he’d also mentioned an earlier accident).

So I will hope the Bureau, or the Superior Court if the Bureau chooses to further pursue the $103 ticket for “unsafe movement,” takes a more rational view of the situation.

My car will be fixed one way or the other, because my collision insurance will pay to fix it (all but the $500 deductible, that is). State Farm will also fix the other driver’s car. I’m told my premium won’t increase because I’ve never had an accident before.

But I will feel vindicated only if the ticket is dismissed. And yes, I will be glad to see State Farm shake down the other guy’s insurance company to be reimbursed. I could wind up being reimbursed $500.

I expect this isn’t the first time a police officer hasn’t drawn logical conclusions from circumstantial evidence. But it’s the first time I’ve been affected directly by a cop’s erroneous reasoning. And I’m glad to challenge it even if he represents the law.

Justice is bigger than the law.