October 1997

First Person

by The Reverend Robert Hensley


To Be, or Not to Be…

…is certainly a real question, but are we ready for the implications for pastoral care that this involves? For so many, for so long, we have been preparing to die. Affairs have been put in order, wills written, services arranged, good-byes have been said. Then all of a sudden we are told, “Well, it seems we have a new little cocktail that is going to stem the relentless growth of your virus, maybe even eliminate it, stimulate your immune system and restore you to a semblance of your former self, and ain’t life glorious and grand?”

Say, what?

What most would think to be a cause for celebration turns into a spiritual crisis. After all, I was ready to die. But this wasn’t expected. Now, not only is my immune system on the mend, but the virus is suppressed and there is no reason that I cannot return to the work force. And all of this after months, if not years, of being on disability.

by The Reverend Robert Hensley

This, my friends, is the major issue that so many of us who have been living with this disease have to face. How do we spiritually cope with literally being given a new lease on life…or perhaps more ‘borrowed time,’ to steal a phrase from Paul Monette? What are the social, physical and spiritual implications of all of this? How are we as pastors to help people back through the obstacles that empowered them to accept their shortened span of life? This is going to take a lot more work than you would imagine. Helping people put the awful reality of the Resurrection into the perspective of their own lives on a very real and fundamental level is not going to be easy. It’s a lot easier to accept as a story from the Bible than an actual event taking place within our own lives.

Yet this is simple compared to the new mood among young people and not a few older ones who really ought to know better. Unprotected sex is on the rise. A general feeling that the worst part of the epidemic is over seems to be invading not only the gay community, but the young heterosexual community who seem to have gotten the idea that since there are all of these new therapies around, there is no longer any need to worry. But we need to worry.. And perhaps now more than ever before.

I pray that I am over-reacting and that the good news of the present will continue to be the better and better news of the not-too-distant future. But if I am right, we have much more work to do. For now we have an epidemic of over-confidence to fight, which is so much harder to deal with than the epidemic of ignorance that some of us seem to believe that we have won…all too prematurely, I might add.

We must all of us take the lessons that NEAC has helped us to learn and cling to them tenaciously, because they will help us during the times that are to come. I continue to be a person of hope, but years of reality have taught me to be cautious and realistic as well. May our God continue to be with us as we face the coming days.

Robert Hensley is a licensed priest in the Diocese of Washington and a person living with AIDS. He has been in clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health since 1989 and was formerly on staff at the Dallas AIDS Interfaith Network, where he developed AIDS Care Teams.