This week, The AIDS Institute's faith program, United Faith Action Network (UFAN), is urging all communities of faith to join in activities related to the Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. I strongly support this work. Indeed, as early as 1992 as the Program Director of the North Side AIDS Outreach Project, I helped launch the first of these campaigns in Saint Louis, Missouri. Now I give leadership to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Hartford, CT.

We need to pray and pray hard for people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and we need to provide people with valuable information about this epidemic in all the places we congregate. I urge you to go to the Balm in Gilead website, www.balmingilead http://www.balmingilead/ for a wonderful list of educational suggestions. Even more than this vital educational work, however, now is the time for those of us in the Black church to also start having the difficult conversations about the inconsistencies we've witnessed in our churches.

For more than two decades, I've found myself in the midst of a continual stream of conversations both private and public regarding sex, sexuality, sexual orientation and the Black church. What all the conversations have taught me (all the weeping with families who lost someone to the disease, all the counseling with those living with an HIV diagnosis) is that we must start preaching a different message. We have to start talking honestly about the gift of our love and our sexuality.

If we don't do this, we risk treating people with HIV/AIDS as a disease rather than as family. James Baldwin wrote," Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be."

This "guarding and keeping" business is something we find ourselves doing quite a bit in our churches, in the multiple ways we perpetuate the "down low." We do this most obviously when we deny our attraction to people of the same sex. We also perpetuate the down low when we turn a blind and hostile eye to our friends, neighbors, family members and ministers who are looking for a place where they can be honest about who they are. We perpetuate the down low yet again when our pastors and church leaders start HIV/AIDS ministries as community outreach services in our churches while simultaneously abusing our same gender loving brothers and sisters in the pews.

As Baldwin suggests, a system that requires us to pretend to be something we are not in order to preserve some kind of false reality, like the nonsense that same gender loving people aren't part of the African American experience, keeps us tied up in a knot, keeps us looking over our shoulders, and most unfortunate of all, keeps the light of the spirit from coming into our lives and the lives of those we love.

If there ever was a disease that demanded we start acting like Jesus by opening our hearts to all of our neighbors, this is it. The Jesus I know stretched forth his hands offering a healing touch. But to get there we need first to be honest about who we are and about who is suffering in our communities. It isn't just those who fit into some convenient demonized "other" category who are suffering. It is our own families: our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles, our cousins and grandchildren, our fathers and mothers. As we celebrate this Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS campaign let's as a community take some positive steps toward healing.

We can start this work by being authentic: if we are honest about our own sexuality and in the meantime making space for others to be honest about who they are, we will have done an extraordinary thing. The most prevalent way that HIV/AIDS spreads is through secrecy and shame. If all religious people in particular stopped being agents of the closet and started being agents of healing and honesty, we could stop the down low and could make a mighty dent in the spread of HIV/AIDS.

In another piece by James Baldwin, he writes "the question remains: What do we do with all this beauty." It is not the disease but the beauty of the human connections that emerge from our work to end the spread of HIV/AIDS that will save us all in the end.