spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

try to address interpersonal mechanisms and attitudes in relation to HIV/AIDS, and to make life
as comfortable as possible for those who are infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. The motif of
quality of life (in medical, social and spiritual terms) proved to be the common characteristic of
the various elements within the HIV/AIDS discourse.
The description of the discourse on HIV/AIDS (see Chapter 4) revealed that the notion of quality
of life has various meanings in the discourse on HIV/AIDS. First of all, there is the medical
understanding of quality of life, in which the diminishing of quality of life is related directly to
physical impairment. Quality of life from a medical perspective means that, when human life is
afflicted with a malignant disease, the body is still able to function as long and as normal as
possible, with the help of medicine and treatment. From a social perspective, a very different
dimension of quality of life is accentuated, namely the correlation between the sufferer and his or
her environment. Quality of life, then, is not so much a matter of how the sick person faces life
despite the disease in his or her body, but rather how the sick person is able to live positively and
with dignity. There is another dimension to quality of life that is becoming increasingly
centralized within the ‘beyond epidemiology’ approach of social scientists: that is, the spiritual
dimension. In the Christian tradition (as well as in other religious traditions), the restoration of
the spiritual balance is vital in order to be able to live meaningfully, which results in a focus on
quality of life in terms of the renewal of the personal relationship with God.
It can thus be said that the medical, social and spiritual dimensions defining quality of life
suggest that the search for the relief of suffering, for the restoration of dignity, and for the
renewal of the meaning of life are concrete expressions of the search for healing. Within the
discourse on HIV/AIDS, there is no reference to healing in which the virus has been eliminated
from the body, and/or that the infected person experiences complete restoration of physical and
social functions (even though it is not difficult to find claims of full physical healing on the basis
of prayer and deliverance ministry by particular religious communities). Clearly, within the
discourse on HIV/AIDS, healing in relation to quality of life refers to something other than the
removal of the virus from the body. Being such an essential feature of the discourse on
HIV/AIDS, the notion of quality of life offers an alternative understanding of healing, namely
that the presence of quality of life amidst illness and suffering means a rejection of the
disqualification of human life. Human life may be infected with a deadly virus that cannot be
removed from the body, yet the disease will not be allowed to disqualify life. The notion of
quality of life implies a new perspective on healing: that is, healing is the retrieval of quality of
life in the context of illness and suffering. This also means that healing is no longer defined only
by objective results of medical tests, but that the patient’s subjective experiences (on the basis of
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