Advent and World AIDS Day 2020
Founded in 1988, World AIDS Day was the first public health awareness day recognized globally. Observed on December 1st of every year, World AIDS Day is when organizations and individuals around the world endeavor to increase HIV/AIDS awareness, and rally to eradicate HIV related stigma to move closer toward ending the HIV epidemic. World AIDS Day offers a global platform to recognize the role of networks of people living with or affected by HIV, peer educators, counselors, community health workers, door-to-door service providers, and faith-based organizations, at a time when COVID-19 demands an urgent response of unlimited resources, while funding cuts and visibility for civil society are jeopardizing the sustainability of services and advocacy efforts.
The 2020 international theme for World AIDS Day is “Global solidarity, shared responsibility” to highlight the necessity of oneness, togetherness, and connectedness in the HIV response at the international, national, and local levels. The theme for the 2020 United States observance is “Ending the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: Resilience and Impact” - an effort to unite the 2020 international theme of “Resilience” set by the International AIDS Society (IAS), with the federal “Ending the HIV Epidemic” plan introduced in 2019.
More specifically, "Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America," is a ten-year, $291 million investment beginning in fiscal year 2020. The plan leverages the powerful data and tools now available to reduce new HIV transmissions in 57 geographic focus areas where more than 50 percent of new HIV diagnoses occur. With an ambitious but achievable goal to decrease new transmissions by 75 percent in five years and by 90 percent in 10, the U.S. HIV epidemic would be reduced to less than 3,000 new diagnoses per year by 2030.
“Resilience” refers to resilience in science, resilience in policy, resilience in financing, resilient communities, and resilient individuals in what has been our relentlessness to stay the course of ending HIV as public health crisis despite being in the midst of a competing public health crisis created by COVID-19. As such, local and international interfaith communities have not only called for resilience, but also for renewal of a movement so abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Christians in particular, World AIDS Day presents a unique opportunity to theologize resilience and renewal in the context of HIV and AIDS given that December 1 falls within the first week of Advent. The word ‘advent’ is a Latin derivative of adventus meaning “coming.” For Christians it’s a time of expectant waiting for the coming of new life in the birth of Jesus Christ. Yet it’s a season that has the potential to transcend faith and meet people living with HIV where they are at this time in the epidemic’s 39 year history. At the height of the scourge in the late 80s and early 90s, the church was often the final resting place for people who had died from HIV related illness; a place to dignify the dead where they were not always dignified in life.
In a 1994 New York Times article titled, “Ritualizing Grief, Love and Politics; AIDS Memorial Services Evolve Into a Distinctive Gay Rite,” Tom Viola of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS was quoted saying to a priest, "I'm tired of being welcome in the Catholic Church dead. Until they welcome us live, it would be ridiculous for them to have the last word at memorial services." HIV was a death sentence back then, and the church had gotten good at welcoming people dying with HIV. For many Sundays since, churches have observed World AIDS Day by re-memorializing the fallen through prayers and litanies of remembrance.
But what about the living?
HIV is no longer a death sentence. It no longer has the last word. People living with and at risk for HIV are in a season of Advent - experiencing new life in the birth of innovative treatment and prevention modalities. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has birthed the Undetectable Equals Untransmittable (U=U) movement, where a person being treated for HIV can achieve a viral load so low that HIV is undetectable in their bodies, thereby ensuring they cannot transmit HIV to someone else. Similarly, the advent of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has ushered in an era of HIV prevention for people at high risk for HIV transmission, with just a once daily single-pill regimen of HAART.
This renaissance has gifted us the first generation of people living with HIV over the age of 50, and we’ve never been closer than we are right now to achieving the first generation without HIV/AIDS. Greater global solidarity and shared responsibility is urgently required to get there, ending the epidemic once and for all.
The strong advocacy role played by communities is needed more than ever to ensure that HIV remains on the political agenda especially in the era of COVID-19, and that decision-makers and implementers are held accountable. Even more than that, the faith community is needed to lead the charge in humanizing the response to ensure that we treat people and not just disease.
On this World AIDS Day and in this season of Advent, churches are called into expectant waiting not for the coming of death – or even the remembrance of it – but for the coming of new life to be enjoyed by the fellowship of people of faith and goodwill who include people who have not only survived HIV, but who are thriving. Churches are encouraged to redefine theological healing as not just the complete absence of disease, but the presence of life through treatment and prevention. And finally, churches are morally mandated to love our neighbors as God loved us - eradicating stigma, embodying love, and ending the epidemic – one day, each year, until we find a cure.
What a tremendous opportunity before us to give people living with HIV their roses while they’re alive and well!
