This Sunday was World Aids Sunday and Adriaan shared his thoughts with us about how we respond to Aids and those suffering with it
Here are two poems and a picture that Adriaan shared with us:
Bearing the Stigmata
I sit in the dark pew
abandoned
they shrink from me
fearing the cup we will share
stained with my blood
my diseased black body
despised
quietly condemned
leper of this age
place of condemnation
my Holy Mother
denying me my
birthright
I am
stoned again
for adultery
stoned for my race
for the sins of my brothers and sisters
my cross of shame
uncleanness
You stand in the altar
bruised
head bent
light from the rose window
reflecting the anguish
in your eyes
taking the burden of the stigmata
stigmata in your palms
balm for my spirit
hurt
I hear your words resound through the nave
Those who are whole do not need the physician
You slowly alight
from the cross
and begin
writing with your finger
across the altar
chancel step
altar rails
and down
the
aisle
"Bearing the Stigmata", by Devarakshanam Betty Govinden
Published in Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Stories and Poems from Southern Africa, compiled and edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas (Cape Town: Kwela Books 2004), p. 142-143.
We turn to God
We turn to God when we are sorely pressed;
we pray for help, and ask for peace and bread;
we seek release from illness, guilt, and death:
all people do, in faith or unbelief.
We turn to God when he sorely pressed,
and find him poor, scorned, without roof and bread,
bowed under weight of weakness, sin, and death:
faith stands by God in his dark hour of grief.
God turns to us when we are sorely pressed,
and feeds our souls and bodies with his bread;
for one and all Christ gives himself in death:
through his forgiveness sin will find relief.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Man of Sorrows” by W. Maxwell Lawton
You can see this painting and the story that Adriaan referred to here