Delivered on World AIDS Day at Good Shepherd Wellness

I am honored to be here… and wish that there was no such thing as World AIDS Day. I wish there was no such thing as AIDS. I wish there was no such thing as a single designated day each year to remember this epidemic and the precious lives it has taken. I wish that love and advocacy and support would spread infectiously throughout the calendar. I wish that every day the LGBTQ community would feel more love than hate.

A reading by Sidney Greenberg in A Treasury of the Art of Living:

Oriental rugs which are found in many homes are all woven by hand. Usually, there will be a group of people weaving a single rug together under the directions of an artist who issues instructions to the rest.  He determines the choice of colors and the nature of the pattern.

It often happens that one of the weavers inserts the wrong color thread. The artist may have called for blue and instead black was used. If you examine an oriental rug carefully, you may be able to detect such irregularities. What is significant about them is that they were not removed. The skillful artist just proceeded to weave them into the pattern.

We too should like the pattern of our lives to be woven exclusively of bright colored threads. But every now and then a dark thread steals into the fabric. If we are true artists of life, we can weave even this thread into the pattern and make it contribute its share to the beauty of the whole.

This reading makes me think of the AIDS quilt. It too is woven together by a group of people: in this case, a group of people tragically connected one to the other, square by square, story by story, emotion by emotion. People who had to choose what to fit on their square… How do we write their name? Do we include a photo? A nickname? Hobbies? Favorites? What colors should be there? How much should the square represent them and how much should it represent our world without them?

Unlike an oriental rug, there is not an overall pattern for each square represents a unique individual. There is not a color scheme, for AIDS attacks without bias. There are not set borders because though remarkable medical progress has been made, AIDS is still taking lives… and adding squares to this quilt. There is not an overseer for God is not behind this disease.

When I think of the similarities to the oriental rug, I think of the stitching that binds these panels one to the other. They are stitched with love and tears. They are stitched by survivors and advocates whose hands are calloused, whose eyes are blurry from tears, whose shoulders are burdened because of all the loved ones they have lost.

But the thread, the thread is as strong as steel. The thread binds lives together, lives that are now only in the past, lives in the present and the lives of the generations to come.

Like all quilts, this one offers the warmth of remembrance, the warmth of embrace, the warmth of a parent tucking a child in for eternal rest, the warmth of a community who celebrates life even as it grieves.

Zichronam livracha.

May the memories of the victims of AIDS be for a blessing.