“You will behold great sorrow, and in this sorrow you will be happy. Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow.”—Zosima, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
“Dr, i cannot agree with Dostoevsky all the more. i have seen happiness in this great sorrow but i wish to tell you that the pain at times has been too much. Like the whole of this past week since the therapy was horrendous and in such cases, it does affect my will to press on.”
Christ the King Church member Dr. Jon Fielder continues his work in Kenya
Dear Christ the King Family,
Those of you who have received letters from me may recognize the first quote above, a passage from that greatest of Christian novels. I append it to the end of every message. The second excerpt is from one of my Kenyan patients, a young HIV-positive man who works for a Christian clinic run by an Africa Inland Mission doctor in the slums of Nairobi. Being employed and educated, he has access to the internet and occasionally updates me on his progress. The above was written after yet another painful series of injections administered by me to treat the extensive Kaposi’s sarcoma that riddles his leg. Fortunately, with both chemotherapy and antiretroviral drugs, his condition has improved significantly, but at a cost much greater than simply the price of the medicine.
I have been drawn to the Zosima passage because to me it reflects the theology of the Cross: the broken body of Christ, Mary and others weeping at the foot of the Savior, an unknown and indescribable joy rising three days in the future, on the other side of death and the grave, a joy experienced only after the most intense sorrow—not merely joy instead of or in place of sorrow. But is this merely the philosophical conceit of a comfortable Westerner, transported to this land of intense misery? Surely, if given the choice, no African AIDS patient would want the virus. It is easy to say suffering is a part of life, as long as you are not the one doing the suffering. A quote (perhaps wrongly) attributed to W.H. Auden captures this sentiment: “We are put on this world to help others. What those others are here for I don’t know.”
Perhaps it is better to state the challenge as Carl Frederick Buechner does: “Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.” This formulation recalls another saying of Dostoevsky’s Zosima: “All is like an ocean, all flows and connects. Touch it in once place, and it echoes at the other end of the world.” Some merely call it empathy.
What we do, and how we live our lives, as persons of affluence and privilege, can have profound effects upon the well-being of others. The prophet Jeremiah describes the challenge: “This is what the Lord says, ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.’” (Jer. 6:16).
“Mtoto ni sawa”
A young woman was brought to the clinic at the urging of her friend, a community health worker trained by our AIDS program. She had consented to testing the previous week and was found to be HIV-positive. She was now bringing her one year-old daughter, apparently healthy but potentially harboring the virus. With the test result in hand, I called her back into the room. I struggled for a moment as I searched to find the proper Swahili words, for I almost never shared such news: Mtoto ni sawa. The child is OK. The child is negative.
With this the young woman let out the Kikuyu exclamation for pain, “Chi,” pronounced like the mathematical probability. I wondered why she used this expression. The news was good, wonderful in fact. But as she breathed deeply in and out, looking wildly about the room, I realized that she had been carrying a tremendous burden of anxiety and despair which could not simply dissipate with three words: Mtoto ni sawa. But as she calmed down and prepared to leave, joy overtook the worry, and she was thankful. Now we must concentrate on keeping the mother healthy, preventing her baby from becoming yet another orphan. Please pray for Esther.
When counseling patients, we often try to portray HIV as merely a “medical problem”—not a sin, not a judgment, and not a condemnation.But many patients cannot themselves conceive of HIV this way. The virus is merely the most emblematic example of the desperation that marks their lives: poverty, sexual abuse, forced prostitution, hunger, lack of access to medical care, family dissolution. By treating HIV with antiretroviral drugs, we do not remove the rest of these elements from their immediate, everyday existence.
But as Christians we do have a responsibility to convey the proper theology,
which is that sin is a state we are all born into, and from which Christ frees
us. We must do more than speak these words to our African brothers and sisters.
We must live them.
I shared with Amanda the other night that I have come to the realization that
I am devoting my life to a lost cause, this battle against HIV. The infection
rates are not slowing, tuberculosis has exploded out of control, the continent
is a cauldron of disease and degradation, and a generation of parentless children
will enter a world bereft of their cultural heritage and any sense of moral
authority.
It helped to make this admission, because doing so shifted the focus from my own efforts and definitions of success to God’s calling and plans. We are meant to share the love of God in Christ Jesus with those who suffer. And we are admonished by Our Lord that the call to mission is not subject to human terms and conditions: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God” (Lk 9:62).
Amanda and I hope to have an opportunity to speak with many of you as we visit our partnering churches this November.
Grace and Peace,
Jon and Amanda
Jon F. Fielder, MD
Consultant Physician
Africa Inland Church Kijabe Hospital
Kijabe 00220, Kenya
254-733-652-024 jfielder@kijabe.net