With us always: Ministering Jesus in a culture of poverty, unemployment and AIDS[1]

                                                              

Stuart C Bate, OMI^[2]

 

Archdiocese of Durban, Clergy Meeting.  Feb 7 2001

Keynote address

 

A. Introduction

 

1   “The involvement of the church at grass roots level in Poverty/Unemployment/AIDS” was the topic given to me. My reaction to it was “Who could ever talk about all of that?” I was reminded of the words of Jesus “You have the poor with you always” (Matt 26:11). The same is true for the sick. The lepers of his time are the AIDS victims of ours. Then I recalled another phrase of Jesus: “Remember I am with you always, yes to the end of time” (Matt. 28:20). And so the phrase “with us always” is the key to this address. It applies as much to the context of human suffering and need in which we minister as it does to the presence of the one who brings life, hope and salvation to that context. Both of these are with us always.

2   So what then changes? We do: Human beings. It is different  human beings who make up different times and places: different contexts, different cultures.

3   For example, the way human poverty is experienced changes with context and culture. In Jesus’ time as in ours it is a largely urban phenomenon. In former rural societies dependent on hunting and farming poverty was the lot only of the excluded. Shaka’s mother was one such as was Hagar, Ishmael’s mother. Poverty in urban settings is much more common and problematic. As people move into modern society and culture the perception of poverty is created in them as they become aware of their status as ‘have nots’. The modern culture creates a series of new wants in them. These are desires for certain kinds of clothes and food, for different types of housing, transport, recreation and so on. As people become aware of their deprivation in the face of others with these things, so feelings and desires change. In this way poverty is created from culture. Studies of stress levels amongst racial groups in KZN have shown that stress levels are highest in Durban amongst urban Zulu females followed by urban Zulu males and lowest amongst rural Zulu males. Whites, coloureds, and Indians of both sexes fall between these two extremes (Bate 2000:127). The stress created is in fact a good measure of deprivation. Poverty is experienced as the realisation of deprivation increases manifest in the lack of access to the wants created by the modern Western society in which we live. So the very meaning and experience of poverty in a society is always conditioned by the culture of the society and the wants that culture creates out of human needs.

4   It is culture too which mediates change in our experience of sickness and health. Illnesses have changed with time and place: once: leprosy and possession by evil spirits, then plague and madness, elsewhere umkhuhlane and ufufunyane and today AIDS and stress. Indeed the very system of sickness and health within a human community is always cultural. This is because people’s experience of unwellness, whether in themselves or from what the  community indicates to them, has to be understood.

5   The process of understanding what is “wrong”works within an  explanatory model of sickness and health which helps people to put labels on what ails them and what can make them better. In this way people can identify if sickness is caused by a germ, a demon, a neurosis, an ancestor or some other factor. The labels are given by the culture and accepted by the community which shares the culture.

a   Amongst South African Christians there are at least five competing cultural systems of sickness and health. These are:

C             Western medical model (curing disease)

C             African traditional model (restoring life by restoring relationships)

C             Psychological model (restoring sanity: a western traditional healing form)

C             Medieval model (saving the soul from sin)

C             Neopentecostal (casting out demons of illness)

C             AIC model (casting out evil spirits through the power of God, restoring relationships and creating Zion on earth)

b   People get sick and well again within the framework of one or more of these depending on their beliefs. It is these beliefs which form part of their system of understanding and truth. All sickness and health can be dealt with in terms of any one of them. Each is more effective in ceratin areas of sickness and less effective in others.

6   So all of this means that responding to the needs of people today expressed as “Poverty unemployment and AIDS” in our topic, requires a response to the needs which have been mediated by culture. We also need to recognise, and this is difficult for some of us that we too live in a world of culture and so our ministerial responses will also be mediated through our own cultural framework. Indeed I have suggested elsewhere that all Christian praxis may always be expressed as culturally mediated Christian responses to culturally mediated human needs (Bate 2001b). And this means that if we are to be effective ministers we will have to recognise the role that culture plays in our own lives and in the lives of people we serve. It is to a brief analysis of this role of culture in our lives and the lives of those we serve that I now turn.

 

B.  What do we mean by culture.

1.  All of us tend to think that other people see the world the way we do. But the fact is that they do not

2.  We tend to think that our values, beliefs and priorities are the beliefs, values and priorities of other people. But in fact they are not.

3.  We tend to think that what is common sense to us is common sense to others but once more this is not the case. Common sense is the sense of a community: it too is cultural

4.  It is only when we begin to recognise the role of culture in our way of seeing the world and understanding it that we can begin to lay the groundwork for a deeper level of ministerial response to all the people in our society.

5.  In South Africa, however, issues of culture have to be treated warily since in our  history the use of a cultural approach to faith and life led to apartheid as a social response to a perceived “race problem”. This ‘ministerial response relied on Ethnos theory and Volkekunde to identify “cultural groups” each proposed to have a life of its own, each supposed to form a society of its own and each called to have a Christianity of its own.

6.  The apartheid solution to this problem was to keep people apart and to allow the different world views to operate separately within different social and geographical contexts. It was an unworkable alternative. It denies the reality of our common humanity and that we share a common land, a common world and many economic and social ties. Indeed to the extent that we are in social communication we also share a common culture. Apartheid can only work when people do not know of one another’s existence and have no social relations at all.

7.  In the new South Africa, the problem of cultural difference has not disappeared as some would have us believe. It is part of the human condition of our society and we have to face it. Today’s mistake is an assumption that difference does not exist and that because we are now a liberated nation, we are all the same and we all see the priorities for our new nation in the same way. This is not true. So we must recognise this cultural complexity and the effect it is having on our South African society.  How can we do this?

8.  The first step is to recognise that there are different world views operating in our society: probably as many as 20 or 30. For the sake of simplicity I will focus on two principal world-views: the Modern Western and the African Traditional.

9.  One of the functions of world view is to provide us with an explanation for our experiences. The world is very complex and so our world view searches for ways to make sense out of this complexity. Without the explanatory function of world view we would be unable to make sense out of events such as lightning striking one house rather than another, sickness affecting some people but not others or the fact that some people have fortune in life whilst others don’t .

1.  The world view searches for ways to find unity underlying apparent diversity, simplicity underlying apparent complexity, order underlying apparent disorder and regularity underlying apparent anomaly.

2.  Every culture tries to find a set of basic entities or forces which are in fact operating within or behind our world of experience and a set of laws which explain the behaviour of these entities. In this way the world view allows us to refer to the entities and the laws in order to explain the world of our experience

3.  In this regard, Modern Western culture and African culture could not be further apart and it is only in the recognition of this difference by BOTH groups that the process of communication can begin, let alone ministry.

4.  In modern Western Culture these basic entities are impersonal, material, concrete and particle like. They are photons or atoms or molecules or cells or organs. The laws are scientific (which means verifiable and repeatable) like the atomic theory of matter and the cell theory of life and the germ theory of disease. These laws are developmental or evolutionary because reality and experience emerges from the aggregation and complexification of the constituent parts.

5.  In African Traditional Culture these basic entities are completely different. They are personal, spiritual, intangible and relational. That is the very opposite of the Western model in each category. They are ancestors, kin, community, spirits, life and amandla. Small wonder then that we misunderstand one another. The laws are customs regarding correct interpersonal and communal conduct based on values such as respect, status and social responsibility particularly to the family and kin group. These laws reflect reality understood as the result of change within the interpersonal and communal relational field. This leads to understandings of human experience based on social harmony and its distortion or rupture.

10. When there are problems or difficulties in society, Westerners will ask the question “what is the problem” and search for the scientific reason behind the issue. Traditional Africans will ask “who is to blame?” and examine the interpersonal relational breakdown in the social fabric.

1.  When people get sick Westerners get confined to the organic issues whereas Traditional Africans will look for an interpersonal cause: social disharmony resulting from interpersonal jealousy, bad relationships with the ancestors or evil expressed in witchcraft. Much of the HIV-AIDS conflict is around this kind of difference of perspective. The ethnocentric person only sees his own view as correct and cannot understand the stupidity of people with a different view.

2.  Human Social life in the Western model is about development and progress. It is about setting up efficient scientific systems of social function.

3.  Human social life in the African model is about maintaining harmony and fulfilling ones duties to one’s family both the living and the living-dead (ancestors).

4.  This leads to all kinds of conflicts. Let us look at the issue of poverty: one of our topics. Someone who has accumulated lots of wealth and property is adjudged successful and effective in the western model whereas such a person would be looked on as somewhat strange in the African model where sharing amongst the community is a primary value. The question would be asked as to how this person got so wealthy when everyone else is so poor. And the problem would be compounded if such a person did not share his wealth particularly with his kin. Sharing one’s wealth with one’s kin is something that usually only happens at death in the Western model

11. Ministry today requires a recognition by all of us that different groups of people in our society are perceiving our new society in different ways and so have different priorities and different wants.

1.  It means that we should recognise the values in cultures and accept into the Church’s praxis what is compatible with the gospel. This is the focus of much of current African inculturation.

2.  But inculturation of ministry is more than this. It also means that we need to recognise that the gospel will not always accept the conclusions of culture since culture too has to be evangelised to the roots and transformed as Evangelii Nuntiandi 20 tells us.

3.  Culture sometimes brings bad news to people and this is the case with regard to poverty, unemployment and AIDS. When this happens our Christian praxis in faith is called to bring good news. This is the precise meaning of evangelisation. It must be good news. The bad news wears people down and makes then disillusioned as a result of the cares and pressures of this world. This can happen to us ministers as it does for those we serve. Being a minister of the gospel is the abiltiy to bring good news to people in the bad news of the events of their lives.

4.  This may be a little difficult to understand and is best illustrated by an example. For the rest of this address, I will take the context of HIV/AIDS and attempt to show how cultures and world-views can often bring bad news to this world and  how the Christian message can bring good news.

 

C.  Good News for AIDS Myths.

1.  All cultures are based on a set of symbolic foundational narratives which define the origins, beliefs and values of the people. These are the culture’s myths.

1.  ‘Myth’ is a somewhat complex term who meaning is disputed. Here I shall combines its anthropological sense as the foundational symbolic narratives of a society together with  its more general usage as defined in the American heritage dictionary:

1.   Any real or fictional story, recurring theme, or character type that appeals to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideals or by giving expression to deep, commonly felt emotions.

2.  The major point about myth as Eliade (1963:1) has explained is that ‘...”myth” means a “true story” and beyond that a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant.’

3.  The ‘truth’ of the story is found in the meaning or understanding which it communicates and which is shared by all who believe it: ie all who share the particular cultural paradigm or ‘world view’. So for Christians, the Jesus narrative is  truth; for scientists the narratives of Newton and Hume; for Zulus the narratives of Shaka and the rise of the Zulu empire.    

4.  Here I want to examine four current myths around HIV/AIDS in order to identify the truths they are communicating. Each of these myths implies bad news for HIV+ people. My response is to examine them in terms of the Christian narrative in order to see if they might be transformed into good news for people.

5.  The four myths are: the myth of margins, the myth of evil, the myth of social disgrace and the myth of incurability.

 

2.  The myth of margins

1.  In most first world cultures, HIV/AIDS is understood as something that happens to people who live on the margins of society.

1.   In this culture, ordinary people are deemed to live a normal lifestyle which includes living in a nuclear family, following the social conventions, being educated, getting a job and settling down. One’s life is lived amongst family and friends in relative peace and harmony and most needs are fulfilled. This, of course, is the myth of the ‘American dream’ or of European ‘civilisation’.

2.   People who do not follow the norm are marginal and as such are unlikely to participate in the good life promised by the myth. As a result unfortunate things may happen to them. Homosexuals, for example, are marginals in this culture. They are considered to engage in all kinds of perverse activities and are seen to be deeply twisted and dangerous people. They get AIDS because of their perverse and marginal sexual behaviour. Drug users too are considered to be degenerate. Such people are too weak to live a normal life and so enter into a world of fantasy and denial, destroying themselves and their families. They get AIDS because of their marginal degenerate behaviour. Blacks (in the first world) and Africans (ie  Blacks living on the African continent) are considered by the myths of this culture to be primitive people only recently civilised and so really not yet fully human. They get AIDS because they are still too primitive to behave in a sexually and socially mature way.

2.  Good news for the myth of margins

1.   The principal good news for the myth of margins is that Jesus identifies the marginalised, expressed as the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed, as the preferred benefactors of his message of salvation.(Luke 4:18). Those who are marginal for culture are central for Jesus.

2.   He shows this in his attitude to lepers (Mt 26:6-13), tax collectors (Mt 9:1-10), prostitutes and adulterers (Jn 8:1-11) and to the unclean like the haemorrhaging woman (Lk 8:42-56).

3.   These affirmations imply that the involvement of Christians with PWAs^[3] is of the essence of ministry and Christian love. Christians above others must accept, love and care for HIV+ people. They must bring them to the centre.

 

3.  The myth of sin and evil

1.  This myth comes from various religious cultures. Belief in the gods of the religion implies adherence to the moral codes on pain of religious and social sanction. The religious sanction is expressed as a breakdown in the relationship between the spiritual power(s) and the person whereas the social sanction is expressed as being cut off from the religious community.

1.   In the Christian culture the former is expressed as sin against God and the latter as excommunication, backsliding or unchristian behaviour.

2.   In African traditional culture the former is endangering life by destroying relationship in the community including with the ancestors (Magesa 1997:166-169). The latter is witchcraft, participation in evil and ‘the enemy of life’ (:186).

3.   These symbolic narratives inform the truth that participation in sexual behaviour which contravenes the sexual codes is participation in evil and as a result the ultimate outcome of the behaviour will be evil. In this myth, then, HIV/AIDS is the result of evil behaviour.

4.   In the Christian religion this is expressed as punishment for sexual misconduct. Waliggo (2000:48) graphically recounts the sermons of a Catholic Priest in Uganda warning his people that because they have not followed the sexual teaching of the Church ‘“It is now time to reap the fruits of your stubbornness”’. Waliggo (:48) continues: ‘The preacher seemed to take “joy” in the increasing deaths of the disobedient members of the Church’.

5.   The disease HIV and the resulting illness AIDS is interpreted as God’s punishment on people who refuse to follow Christian moral behaviour. A survey of secondary students at Mpolweni mission in Natal during 1993 revealed that 32% believed that ‘AIDS is God’s way of punishing people who are immoral’ (Webb 1997:176).

2.  Good news for the myth of sin and evil.

1.   Sometimes Christians identify themselves as the ones who condemn others for their sinful behaviour and participation in evil. But condemning categories of people in this way is however itself deeply unchristian. The distinction between the sin and the sinner is sometimes lost in Christian attitudes towards perceived sinful behaviour

1.  It is a consistent message of the New Testament that the sin is condemned but the sinner is not. Jesus comes to save not to condemn (Jn 3:17. See also Jn4:1-30; Mt 7:1-5; Mk 10:46-52).

2.  When categories of people are mentioned in the Gospels like tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners, lepers and so forth, they are never condemned by Jesus, only by the religious leaders. Indeed the only category of people singled out for condemnation by Jesus are the very religious leaders themselves! This is something that seems to be woefully overlooked by condemning Christians today.

3.  Before judging behaviour as sinful we must recognise that it is motivated by a whole series of contextual factors including upbringing, psychological balance or lack thereof, social, political and economic conditions.

1.  Very few sex workers, for example, choose their lifestyle but are driven into it through poverty and fear only discovering too late the harm they suffer.

2.  Psychosexual development and sexual orientation is influenced by a number of genetic as well as socio-cultural factors.

4.  This is why Jesus says ‘Do not judge and you will not be judged’ (Lk 6:37; Mt 7:1). Remember that the religious leaders of his time accused him: ‘the son of man came eating and drinking and they say, “look a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners”’  (Matt 11:19). 

2.   So the good news for the myth of sin and evil is that when applied to HIV/AIDS sufferers this myth is largely a lie. Christians must accept the person and must also recognise that what happens to people has a number of causes besides personal sin. And no-one here is going to throw the first stone since all of us are sinners (John 8:3-11).

 

4.  The myth of social disgrace

1.  A third set of symbolic narratives emerge within those cultures where AIDS is interpreted in terms of social disgrace.

1.   The truth the myth communicates is that AIDS is a shameful thing to be sick with and an even more shameful thing to die of. A WCC study noted that: ‘People living with HIV/AIDS face insolation and discrimination in virtually all societies and cultures’ (WCC 1997:69).

1.  This myth informs a number of behaviour patterns. For example it encourages people to avoid testing since discovering that one is HIV+ condemns a person to the stigmatised group. It is best not to know.

2.  When one is confirmed as HIV+ the myth appears again in the person’s desire to avoid the information getting out. Often the power of the myth is so strong that even people who are directly involved like the spouse or sexual partner are deliberately excluded from knowledge with the result that they too become infected.

3.  Then as people develop ‘full blown AIDS’, and it becomes clear to all that they are sick, the[Comment1]  narrative of social disgrace motivates families to hide their sick away, abandon them to institutions or even worse behaviours.

1.  When asked the question: ‘What should happen to people with AIDS?’ the answers of people from a number of different locations in Southern Africa could be classified into ‘...three groups: “kill”, “isolate”...and “care”’ (Webb 1997:165). 14% of respondents believed that people with AIDS should be killed, 55% that they should be isolated and 27% that they should be cared for. This latter figure increased to 40% when the person with AIDS was a relative (: 166).

4.  A final behaviour pattern informed by this myth concerns behaviour at funerals. In South Africa it has been noted that whilst large numbers of people are dying from AIDS this fact is rarely alluded to in the funeral. The mention of HIV and AIDS is usually systematically excluded from any discourse during the death rituals. Instead people are said to have been ‘very sick’ or to have died from tuberculosis or a liver infection or some other disease. However in the informal discourse of those present, in whispered tones amongst small groups of people outside the church or away from the grave, the people ‘know’ that ‘she died of AIDS’.

2.  Good news for the myth of social disgrace.

1.   Jesus did not see physical defilement as sin. What defiled was one’s innate character, attitude and value system (what comes out of a person’s heart) (Okure 1999:2). Against his own culture, “Jesus did not advocate that lepers and persons with unclean diseases should be treated as outcasts from the rest of society. The gospels show him touching lepers. He praised the woman with the flow of blood for her faith and called her daughter, somebody who belongs to the family. A true Christian cannot use the OT laws and prescriptions for ritual and cultic purity or external holiness to gauge how to deal with HIV/AIDS patients”. (Okure 1999:2).

2.   In the gospels Jesus’ response to those experiencing social disgrace is to welcome the ostracised and indeed to focus his ministry on them. This attitude is found in Jesus’ willingness to eat at Zacheus’ house (Lk 19), in the parable of the pharisee and the publican (Lk 18:9-14) and in his admonition to invite not friends and family to a lunch or dinner but ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind’ (Lk 14:13). Jesus’ own reputation in his time was one who kept company and ate with ‘Tax collectors and sinners’ (Lk 5:29-32). Those whom the world is ashamed of are the ones to whom Jesus turns. We as church are called to this same example.

 

5.  The myth of incurability

1.  The final symbolic narrative we shall examine in this paper comes from the culture of Western scientism. In this myth, HIV/AIDS is incurable. This means that experiments done in terms of the scientific method have shown that  HI virus once inside the human organ cannot be eliminated. It will eventually replicate to such an extent that it will overcome the body’s immune system allowing other infections to weaken and eventually destroy the organism which is the human body.

1.   This myth informs a number of behaviours among those who find their truth in it. The most common of these is the conviction that becoming HIV+ is a death sentence. Once I know I have the virus, I know that I will sooner or later die of it. This is traumatic for all people but particularly so for young people.

2.   Acceptance of the incurability of HIV/AIDS creates the feeling of being cheated out of life. This can lead to a complete revision of a the meaning of one’s own identity and one’s life project. Horizons become narrowed around the ‘fact’ of ‘the few years left to me’. I will never have a family or if I do never see them grow up. I will not see my grandchildren. My ambitions with regard to career and future are truncated and my humanity is reduced to the few years left to me during which time I will become increasingly sick and then die.

3.   This is a recipe for anger, hopelessness, rage, and irresponsibility. What is the point of responsibility when I’ll be dead next year? What is the point of the family when my ancestors have abandoned me? What kind of God of love can do this to me?

4.   This myth empowers the search for a cure. It tells us that since there is no cure, all our resources should be mobilised in finding one. Everything else is really secondary. Billions of dollars have been spent on developing a cure for the disease which HIV causes.

2.  Good news for the myth of incurability.

1.   The phrase “AIDS is incurable” whilst true of the organic level is confusing on the human level for two reasons: both of which bring good news to this myth.

1.  The first comes from recent advances in medical research which have turned HIV infection from an incontrollable progressive disease leading to death to a chronic presence which can be managed by drugs to ensure many years of relatively healthy life.  In this way it resembles diabetes and we can speak of healing through medication which maintains well-being. In a scenario like this, good news becomes the provision of such medication. Unfortunately this involves a struggle for access to the medication which though cheap to produce is expensive to procure and outside the reach of many poor people and poor countries.. This struggle, against our own government and the pharmaceutical companies becomes the principal means to good news for HIV+ people. It is part of the Christian struggle for justice.

2.  The second is on the level of human perception where the difference between curing disease and healing illness becomes important. Healing illness is a human process achieved by transforming human perception from unwellness to wellness. Healing is concerned with the perception of well-being both by the person with a virus and by the community she belongs to.

1.  This is why diseases which may not be cured in the clinical sense may indeed be healed in the human sense. By human sense I mean in the psyche of the person and in the cultural understanding of the community. It is in this way that traditional healers often claim to heal AIDS (Bona:22-24). The healing is achieved by developing perceptions of wellness both within the individual’s psyche and the primary social community she belongs to.

2.  Some may complain that this is to feed illusion and perhaps this would indeed be the case if such healers were to prevent a person receiving the best available medical care. But in the human condition surrounding HIV/AIDS a major problem is the sickness that is created in people’s minds by the myth of incurability which affects growing numbers of people from all backgrounds in Africa today. A person who feels well in himself may continue to be judged as sick by the community around him since he is ‘HIV+’. In that way he will not be healed. 

3.  Healing will be promoted in someone who receives both medication to help establish a healthy physical equilibrium togther with psychological reinforcing of wellness and the support of a community who recognises the healing as such. When medication makes a person feel well and when her feeling about herself is that she is well and the community affirms that she is well, such a person is healed. The cultural attitude which sees an ‘HIV+’ person as incurably ill clearly militates against this.

4.  The healing of illness understood in the human rather than the organic sense was clearly at the centre of Jesus’ healing ministry. His healing was a healing that brought life (Jn 5:21; 10:10). It was a healing that rescued someone from sin and despondency to well-being and hope (Matt. 9:1-8). This is the meaning of sozo and therapeuo the words mainly used for healing in the New Testament.^[4] They are not words that refer to clinical medical acts but to acts which build the fullness of human life. The ministry of Christian healing includes prayer, counselling, affirmation, caring for people, forgiving sins and showing love. In these and many other ways Christians are called to heal both HIV+ and PWAs. It is our mission as it was Jesus’.

 

D.  Conclusion

1.  All cultures have their myths. They are the symbolic narratives which identify fundamental truths within the culture. As time changes however, cultures change and their myths are re-evaluated. In this way the falsity of myth becomes apparent.

2.  In the inculturation process the church is concerned to evangelise cultures by transforming them under the light of the gospel. What is of value from the culture is accepted and what is not compatible with the Christian message is challenged and enlightened by the good news.

3.  In the process of inculturating the church’s healing ministry we have examined some prevalent cultural truths around the phenomenon of HIV/AIDS. We have identified their mythic source and sought to investigate this under the light of Christian faith to show how these myths need to be transformed to help Christians struggle against this plague. All Christians are called to be healers as Jesus and the disciples were. Each is called to bring his or her talents and gifts to this ministry. In this paper we have sought to examine some ways in which this could be done by bringing good news to some AIDS myths.

 

Bibliography

 

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