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Balm in Gilead Remains Rooted in the Black Church
By: George E. Curry
NNPA Special Correspondent
Originally posted 10/28/2009
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Pernessa C. Seele, founder of a religious-based organization called Balm in Gilead, could not have gotten a more dramatic introduction to the impact that HIV and AIDS have on the Black church, a cause to which she would devote the majority of her adult life.
It was the mid-1980s and Seele and a very close friend would travel together from their Manhattan apartments to attend Sunday services at the Brooklyn Truth Center.
“Probably two years into him being the minister of music, he got sick,” she recounted. “No one knew what was going on and the choir at the church actually watched him just wither away.
One Thursday, he didn’t show up for choir rehearsal. We knew he was sick; he didn’t tell anybody what was wrong.
“One of the choir members said, “Let’s go to Manhattan and find out what happened to him.’ After the service, some of the choir members went way up into Harlem and discovered that he had died alone in his studio apartment in Manhattan. We didn’t know what it was.”
It wasn’t until two weeks later when a violin teacher for a cultural arts program Seele operated at the time provided a plausible cause of death.
Seele recalled, “He said, ‘It was probably Grid [gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome]. I think they now call it AIDS.’ He was fumbling. At least he gave me a perspective of what it might have been. He said, ‘I tell you Pernessa, if I ever got that, I would kill myself.’ Six weeks later, he jumped off the roof of his apartment building. That’s when I first discovered HIV and AIDS – in New York, in church.”
She continued, “I had no idea that church and AIDS was going to be my lot in life. Looking back, I guess I was still in preparation at the time.”
Seele was still in preparation in 1989, when she became the AIDS administrator of Harlem Hospital.
“I came out of Lincolnville, S.C., where the church was the center of everything,” Seele said. “My job called for me to go up on the floors and talk with people. The people who were dying of AIDS wanted someone to pray with them. This is Harlem. At the time, there were over 350 churches alone. So everybody was affiliated with some church or some mama or uncle or aunt who was affiliated with a church.
“They wanted me to be that pastoral person. I did not want to do that – I just didn’t want that role. I’ve always had issues around my own immortality and death and dying. I really just didn’t like my job.”
So, she decided to get some Harlem pastors to pray for and with the dying victims. When she shared her idea with her supervisors, they wished her well, knowing that similar efforts in the past had failed. But they underestimated the perseverance of Seele.
In preparation for creating support among the faith community, she learned of an organization called Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, headed by Rev. Preston Washington, pastor of Memorial Baptist Church. She decided to visit his church one Sunday, patiently waiting her turn in line to greet him at the end of the service.
“When I finally got up to him, I said, ‘Dr. Washington my name is Pernessa Seele and we are having a Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS.’ Seele explained, “’We’ was me and the Lord. I got his attention and he invited me to the meting of the Harlem Congregations for Community Involvement. At the meeting was the leadership of the Harlem faith community, the Islamic communities as well as Christians were there. I shared my little vision and essentially that’s how it got started.”
What Seele described as her little vision grew into a big vision, one that would mobilize Black churches in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa around the issue of HIV/AIDS.
She gave up her day job at Harlem Hospital and created Balm in Gilead, an organization that takes its name from Jeremiah 8:22 [Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?]
She took the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS national, with the first Sunday in March kicking off the annual Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. More than 15,000 churches particpate in the week-long onservances.
Next March, she will take a larger step, expanding the Black Church Week of Prayer to a National Church Week of Prayer, targeting Whites as well as Blacks for the first time. That’s part of a larger effort to direct more of the group’s activities back home.
Her mission abroad began with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, The group applied for a grant to work in Uganda.
“When we got funded, they said, ‘No, no, we don’t want you to just work in Uganda,’” Seele said. “This is a typical CDC story. ‘We want you to work in Cote d’lvoire, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa.’
And they gave us a little bit of money. As crazy as we are, we said, ‘Okay,’”
Balm in Gilead worked primarily through established religious organizations, often bringing the various groups together for the first time. Now, after cuts in funding, the group works abroad only in Tanzania.
It is also expanding its work in the U.S., where the Black church gets a bad rap for its efforts to combat HIV and AIDS.
“People who are beating up on the church are usually not in the church,” Seele said. “They have issues with the church. They are talking about church the last time they’ve gone, which was maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Or, maybe nothing was happening in their church,” she said, emphasizing the word “their.”
Seele acknowledges that the faith community has not always been supportive of anti-AIDS efforts, especially when it was considered a White, gay man’s disease. But she says that, too, has changed over the past two decades.
She points to a meeting of Harlem religious leaders, including Church of God in Christ Bishop Norman N. Quick, as an example.
“Bishop Quick got up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay with you because I have to go and funeralize my nephew.
And I want you to know that my nephew died of AIDS.’ Everybody was like, “Whoa.’
“Here’s a Church of God in Christ bishop saying that his nephew had died of AIDS. He went on to say, ‘You know, I have sent a whole lot of homosexuals to hell. But when my nephew became HIV positive, I could not send my nephew nor could I send my sister to hell.’ That was a groundbreaking moment for Harlem.
“A conservative bishop like Bishop Quick of the Church of God in Christ actually stood there and openly said, “I have AIDS in my family. I have sent a lot of homosexuals to hell, but I have changed.”
Not only has Bishop Quick changed, but so has the Black church. And a large part of the credit should go to the Balm in Gilead.
(To view excerpts from George Curry’s interview with Pernessa Seele and other AIDS activists, visit www.youtube.com/blackaidsmedia. This series is made available as part of NNPA’s support of Act Against AIDS and the Black AIDS Media Partnership’s Greater Than AIDS campaign.)
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