spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

himself in the history of salvation. God’s saving grace has been revealed in His broken body.
This means that the Christian idea of beauty hinges on the ugliness of the cross (Von Balthasar
1982:124; see also Viladesau 2008b:135-152).
The work of the Spirit entail a redefinition of beauty on the basis of the cross. Viladesau
(2008a:187) actually refers to a converted sense of beauty, since God’s glory and beauty are
revealed in the opposite. This converted sense of beauty is to be applied to creaturely life as well,
when speaking of one’s involvement in the beautification of life. In terms of creation, beauty
implies the consent to being a creature. This means the acceptance of one’s vulnerability,
implying that one carries visible and invisible wounds, diseases and trauma’s. Yet in the consent
to being a vulnerable creature, is the beauty and the quality of creaturely life revealed, and is
God glorified (Eiesland 1994:89-106; Reinders 2000:159-174; Berinyuu 2004:202-211; Yong
2007:155-192; Reynolds 2008:159-174).
The relation between Spirit, vulnerability and beauty is, thus, that the Spirit is involved in the
beautification of vulnerable life. Accepting one’s vulnerability implies unveiling the quality of
one’s life, because creation is meant to be vulnerable and finite. Retrieving the quality of one’s
life amidst suffering, threats and damage, is synonymous with healing and retrieving wholeness
that is not qualified by the presence of disease and wounds. This kind of quality of life is a
converted sense of health: what health means becomes clear in the opposite, in the presence of
suffering.
Once again we turn to the story of Grace Banda, to provide an example of health as a consent to
being vulnerable: Grace Banda’s late husband had contracted HIV. Like many people in her
environment, he had been ill for some time. There was this skin rash, fever, loss of appetite and
steady weight loss. He died eventually from meningitis. Grace Banda feared that she would soon
follow him. More information was becoming available on HIV; people were learning more about
it. Everyone knew that if a man died of AIDS, then his wife would soon die after him. For Grace
Banda, it was not a question of whether she would die, but when. Her husband’s death had made
the family vulnerable, socially, financially, and perhaps now even physically. She asked God to
give her one more year, to prepare her children for the life that was awaiting them without their
mother, and without a breadwinner. At the clinic, where she went for the HIV testing, she was
invited to come to a support group. There she met others who were HIV-infected, and was able
to talk, to cry, to pray, to share, and to give and receive hope. By joining the support group,
Grace Banda entered the process of accepting her vulnerability, her positive disease status,
amidst the suffering of stigmatization, the dependency on ARV medication, and the fear of dying.
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