(This is long but worth it. Sullivan has just finished describing a sudden sickness with recurring fever going as high as 105 degrees).
From then on, the fevers spiked at lower and lower levels, fading out into a low-level malaise, and I lay in bed for days, wondering what kind of flu this was, slowly coming back into territory my body seemed to recognize and master. And it was on one of those afternoons, as I lay in bed, watching a television movie, that I felt something change around me. I know where it was on the wall, a space that had no shape, a presence that had no form, something that I can only call an intensification of light and space. And as I lay there, I felt it intensify, and I felt it announce itself. For a moment, I thought the fever had made me hallucinate, but I felt my skin and it was cool. My eyes rested quietly in their sockets, my mouth was moist, my pulse normal. The television flickered in front of me, but my mind was dead to it. And this presence, although it had no shape and spoke no words, nevertheless commanded a tone, a tone at once admomitory and intimate, firm and solid but of a kindness I could not even allow myself to feel. It was, although soundless, a tone of voice, a tone of voice in a space of light, an insistent, minatory, so-personal voice. And although I couldn't hear it, I knew it; and it knew me.
And then it was no longer there. The space dissipated, the tone seeped away, the intensity ebbed. The wall became the wall again, the air became the air, the bed held my body with tangible familiarity...
Two weeks later, I walked into my doctor's office and my life changed for good. The news of my HIV infection was the last thing I expected, and the first thing I feared. It instantly altered my vision...
And so my friends came to help me. They gave me a bed and an ear; they even wandered into my life aimlessly and wandered out again; they lay down on the grass with me and looked vacantly at the sky; they heard me sob, and saw me physically convulse in shock. And one in particular came over one morning, someone who had once been close to me but who had drifted somewhat apart, and I told him the news. And it took a few seconds for it to sink in, but as it did, his face collapsed and he said, quite simply, and quite clearly, "Andrew, Andrew," and in the timbre of his words, and in the repetition of the name and in the mixture of concern and disappointment, shock and warmth, I recocgnized at once the voice, instantly and shockingly, and I recognized the tone. And then a few days later still, this time on the phone, another person in my life responded to the news in exactly the same way--"Andrew, Andrew"--a lament, an invitation, a sudden acknowledgement of what had until then been undetectable. And I heard it again; and I knew where it was from.
And then a few days later, when for the first time I actually sat down and prayed, I found myself with a copy of the Bible, and like some schoolboy, flipping through it for some sort of comfort, I came haphazardly upon the end of Luke's Chapter 10. And this is what I found myself reading:
"In the course of their journey he came to a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister called Mary, who sat down at the Lord's feet and listened to him speaking. Now Martha who was distracted with all the serving said, 'Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself? Please tell her to help me.' But the Lord answered, 'Martha, Martha,' he said, 'you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part; it is not to be taken away from her.'"
"Martha, Martha." I don't think Jesus ever speaks to anyone else in the Gospels that way. "Martha, Martha." He repeats the name twice, exasperated but loving, admonitory but intimate. It's one of the many details that convince me that so much of the Gospels is true, the kind of intimate, intensely personal way of speaking, a detail that would never have been invented by someone trying to bludgeon the reader into some didactic lesson, the kind of address that a real person once used for a real person, and a real person he loved, as much as for her faults as in spite of them. "Martha, Martha." "Andrew, Andrew." It is not the tone simply of love; it is the tone of friendship, an unmistakable tone, a tone that I did not only recognize but suddenly, heartbreakingly, knew.
--Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival