I drove across town to Maple Avenue United Methodist Church. It was dark, cold; the streets were wet. I was running late, but thankfully it started late.

The room was nowhere near full. But it was diverse. Wide variety in ages, including college students and some much older. There was also ethnic and gender diversity. In some ways, this was much more comfortable for me than Sunday mornings.

Aside from the opening prayer, there was virtually no overtly religious feel to this service: a gathering of remembrance and hope for World AIDS Day. What there was, however, was palpable desire for community.

The first speaker described her son, who died of AIDS three months ago. Of course she is still grieving. Her tears were mixed with pleas for help. Not for herself, but for the people like her son.

Her son was gay. And he was diagnosed with HIV more than twenty years ago. He was a survivor.

He was also funny and loved by the people who knew him. At least those people who knew him away from home. Here, she said he felt alone and isolated. Even within the local gay community, he could not find support. He was stricken, diseased, like one with leprosy.

This mother’s witness to her son’s suffering moved me beyond measure. Her concern was not only for her son’s physical suffering, speaking to how he would pick at his sores (what a physical image to remember), but to his social and emotional suffering. He felt rejected by “his” people. He felt separated from those who are most likely to understand that suffering.

I would never pretend to understand: his experience, his mother’s, and the local gay community. Nor would I ascribe any ill will to them. This mother certainly wouldn’t. She wasn’t angry. She was hopeful. She was pleading to us to make a different world for someone else’s son.

The service was pretty and emotional; respectful and hopeful; and we were given a few calls to action. Get tested. Help spread the word. It was a positive experience.

In my car, I sat in silence for a moment and I cried for the suffering. The suffering of complete strangers. Of these survivors and these people left behind. This small group, gathered on a dark night in a church tucked away from the common spaces.

I want to be here, with these people and to witness to their suffering. But the “here” was gnawing at me. This is the place that people could gather for World AIDS Day. This may be the only church that could be the event’s home. Perhaps, tucked away, it is the only place many of those there felt safe.

I cried because I wasn’t sure that our church would be any better of a home for this event.

I cried because all of this suffering is in silence and in darkness. Suffering happening with only the closest of family members and the true friends that stick it out until the end. An end that could come very fast or take more than 25 years.

I cried because this disease doesn’t just kill our bodies, but it kills our spirits. It kills our ability to be intimate: not just as a euphemism for sex, but in its truest sense. It kills our healthy cells and replaces them with fear.

As I drove home, the quiet car and the hum of road noise didn’t match the volume in my head. The darkness outside matched the season’s theme so earnestly: the memory of the candles we lit in the service reminded me of the flame kindled from Sunday morning. Advent began in our cold worship space (the heat wasn’t working) with a single candle lit, alone with three friends still waiting to join him.

Alone among friends.

Perhaps our gravest sin is found not in those spaces of intentional abuse and suffering, but in the multitude of ways we perpetuate suffering. Our fears. Our cynicism. Our hatred spilling forth and over those already suffering. Those people whose great desire is for us to simply treat them as people and their suffering as real.  While we, afraid of the contact, of even human touch, reject them.

As if sympathy is more contagious than a disease. And we’d rather stay cynical.