The Many Miracles of Bethany House

When Michael Harank arrived in Oakland, California, in 1988, AIDS was ravaging the gay community. At the time, the disease was a death sentence, and people infected with HIV/AIDS were often shunned out of fear.

Hraank came to Oakland to work as a nurse with the AIDS Minority Health Initiative. As a Christian and a Catholic Worker, he soon felt called to do something more.

“I called myself a Christian and a follower of the teachings of Jesus,” he recently told Mercer Island High School senior Julia Sommerfield in an interview she did for the student-run FM radio station. “And if you’re serious about wanting to be a disciple or a follower of Jesus of Nazareth…you clearly see that Jesus was a friend of the poor, of the marginalized, of the ostracized.”

As a gay man himself, it seemed obvious that people with HIV/AIDS were poor, marginalized, and ostracized.

“I prayed that God would open up an opportunity for me to address the needs of people with HIV and AIDS who were dying, and voila, God opened up that possibility,” he said.

After opening Bethany House of Hospitality, Harank and a circle of volunteers spent the next nine years working to break through the fear and stigma of AIDS with love. Along the way, he participated in an underground clinic and witnessed more than one Lazarus-style “resurrection.”

Here’s that interview, lightly edited for clarity. If you prefer, you can listen at CatholicWorker.org.

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Julia Sommerfield: You’re listening to 88.9 The Bridge. I’m Julia Sommerfield, and what you’re about to hear is a very special interview with Michael Harank. Michael Harank worked at Bethany House from 1990 till 1999.

Though Harank has helped many people throughout his time as a nurse, Bethany House was where he made his greatest impact. Here he helped homeless men, women, and children with HIV/AIDS, making a difference not just in their lives, but in the world today.

Michael Harank: Hi, everyone. I’m still working as a nurse. I’m 71 years old in May, and I’ve been a nurse now for 37 years. So, when I arrived in California in 1988, after graduating from nursing school, I got a job as a nurse with the AIDS Minority Health Initiative here in Oakland, the first Black community-based organization that worked with people of color.

And during the year and a half that I worked as a nurse there, I discovered that there was no residential hospice here in the East Bay. San Francisco had four of them. And of course, this was a time when people were dying from AIDS because there wasn’t a lot of treatment and there was no cure.

There’s still no cure, but there wasn’t a lot of treatment. So, people were dying by the thousands, the tens of thousands throughout the world. So, I visited and worked with mainly African-American families and men and some women.

And I decided, well, there’s no residential hospice, a place where people can come and die with dignity and comfort. So, a religious order agreed, the Redemptorist Fathers and Brothers agreed to rent me this house. Actually, we didn’t have to pay rent because it was originally supposed to be for priests with AIDS, but no one ever showed up.

No priest, after a year and spending thousands of dollars renovating the house, no priest ever came to take up residence there. And understandably, because they were very fearful. So I asked the Redemptorist Fathers and Brothers if I could use it as a Catholic Worker house for what one novelist called the first children of the church, and that is the poor.

And so, they agreed to that. And so, in 1990, within a week, even though the house had been empty for a year, I had three guests at the house.

Julia Sommerfield: Was that Bethany House? Did you start?

Michael Harank: Yes, that was Bethany House. I started Bethany House as a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. We didn’t call it a hospice because of the connotation of that word.

I didn’t want it to be a place where people thought they came to die. I wanted them to come to live before they died and not just survive. Because when you’re homeless, you’re living in a survival mode, necessarily.

And I wanted them to truly choose to live before they died. So, I didn’t call it a hospice. It was called Bethany House of Hospitality because Bethany was the hometown in Judea of Jesus’s close friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

So, it was also the home, the place where Jesus resurrected Lazarus from the dead and gave him new life, a miracle that changed everyone’s life in that village and in the world.

Julia Sommerfield: When you started working there, how many people did you initially have working with you? Were you kind of running the thing on your own or did you get more volunteers over time?

Michael Harank: I was connected with one of the Holy Spirit Parish in Berkeley, California. And when I announced that the house would be opened and requested volunteers, people came eventually, within six months, to help out. And our first guest actually was only there for about three months before he died, an African-American man named AJ.

And eventually there became a whole circle and community of volunteers who would help drive people to their doctor’s offices, who would cook food, who would accompany people when they were in the dying process so that nobody was left alone when they were actively dying. And they would help also with gardening. We had a garden in the backyard.

It was a three-bedroom house, a ranch-like house with lots of trees in the background and a creek in the backyard that you could hear when the water was flowing. So, it was a very beautiful place surrounded by nature. So, yeah.

Julia Sommerfield: Sounds really pretty. Who were some of the first patients that came in? Were there any that when you met them, you felt some sort of impact either within yourself or towards them or that you just remember really distinctly?

Michael Harank: One of our first guests was a man named Henry who was in his 30s at the time. He had been a Vietnam veteran with shrapnel still in his knee. And he had been involved with drugs and the BDS community, the sex community in San Francisco.

But when he came down with the diagnosis of AIDS, there was no place for him to turn to. He was in the hospital and none of his friends in that so-called community came to his aid. And I received a call from the hospital saying that he needed a place to stay, that he was homeless.

So, I took Henry in. And Henry was actually our longest guest. He’d lived for three and a half years and on the treatment that he was on.

When he first came, of course, when everyone first came, they sort of couldn’t believe that this was a safe place. They didn’t have to fill out any applications. For the invitation, I would say, well, yeah, the application is come have dinner with us or lunch and see if this is a good place for you.

And that happened. And eventually, Henry went through in that three and a half years, a very radical transformation where he went from just surviving, as he had to do when he didn’t have any place to stay. He didn’t have any family.

And he eventually opened up. He was full of fear and suspicion and distrust. And eventually, when he really learned that this was a space for him to truly live and to begin again, the life adventure of trust and vulnerability, he really transformed himself by making himself available to therapy, to massage…there were volunteers that gave massages…and to a wider community, he was a frequent visitor to the Center for AIDS in Oakland, which was started by Mother Teresa’s brothers. It was a day center.

So, he made wonderful connections with them and felt a value and a self-worth that he had never felt before. And when he died, he had made arrangements to have his friends with him when he died. And he even picked out the music.

And he had a devotion to Native American spirituality. And he made this incredible outfit with his own sewing machine, he did this, it was amazing.

And he made a complete outfit, including the headdress, and wrote out the Our Father prayer in Lakota, in the Lakota language. And he requested that we say that prayer, but also requested when he was dying, and actively dying, he wanted a Gregorian chant, the Kyrie Eleison, which means in Greek, “Lord, have mercy,” to be playing.

And that’s what happened. He died, the chant in his room, and incense, and his friends, including myself, surrounding him, and he died a very peaceful death.

Julia Sommerfield: Did you work in taking care of patients? Or did you just run the whole house as you were the one who founded it?

Michael Harank: Yeah, it depended upon what their needs were. Henry lasted three and a half years. Our shortest guest was there for eight days.

And he was in bed most of the time. So he had to be cared for, bathed, and fed. He was there for eight days.

So, there were various nursing activities that I was able to do, but not restricted to the nursing. I cooked, I cleaned, I took people to the doctors, and therapists, and the AIDS center. You have to be flexible. Yeah.

Julia Summerfield: How many people were living in the house at a time? Because you said it had about three bedrooms.

Michael Harank: There were three people at a time living at the house. They each had their own room. There were big bedrooms.

And people said, “Well, why don’t you double up? Because there’s lots of people who need the service.” And I said, “Look, when you’re sick like that, you need your own space to be able to live, to become aware of what your needs are, and not to be bothered by other people’s needs who were also dying.”

Even though people were very kind to one another in the house, people had their own rooms. And that was their sacred space. Many of them had never had their own rooms.

So, to be able to have that space in which to really enter into a new possibility, the possibilities of truly living before you died, then that was helpful to people.

Julia Sommerfield: Do you know how many people over the time that you were working there ended up living in the house?

Michael Harank: Yeah. Over those years, nine years, there was about 30 people that came through the house. And they all died except for the last two.

Because by that time, in 1996, the medicine for AIDS, the treatment for AIDS, they were called protease inhibitors, came out. And that really did save people from dying, most people from dying. And so, when those medicines became available, people didn’t stop dying, but people were able to live with those medicines.

So that was a real radical change that happened in 1997. Yeah.

Julia Sommerfield: I wasn’t alive at that time, so I don’t know. I know what I’ve read, learned about, but they teach a lot of stuff in school, at least from what I’ve gone through about AIDS and HIV and kind of how that looked like for people. What was it like in that time when it was more new and scary? And there was just so much, I know, a lot of fear and hesitation.

Michael Harank: There was a lot of fear, a lot of stigma, and a lot of shame that people had. And that was sad. Even among hospital healthcare workers, there was a lot of fear and a lot of stigma.

Because you were dealing with a group of people who were identified as gay, addicted to drugs, drug users, and it was terrible, the fear that people had of these folks. And how do you break through that fear? And how do you break through that stigma?

You break through it with love. That’s the only cure for those very human and deeply human fears that we have as human beings when we’re confronted with infectious or contagious diseases. But you don’t define people by their disease.

If you do, then you’re missing out on the other parts of their humanity.

Julia Sommerfield: What drew you towards that work? Because I guess you had to be a person who went beyond the fear and stereotypes and what people were labeling those with AIDS and HIV as. What called you to do that work?

Michael Harank: I felt a vocation to do this work because I called myself a Christian and a follower of the teachings of Jesus. And if you’re serious about wanting to be a disciple or a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, then you look at the life and the teachings that Jesus had, that Jesus lived, and you clearly see that Jesus was a friend of the poor, of the marginalized, of the ostracized during the time that he lived. Well, I asked, who are the people that are ostracized and marginalized and stigmatized?

And for me, because I’m a gay man myself, I was able to see that the people who were suffering from HIV and AIDS, the majority were the people during that time who were marginalized and who were ostracized and who were stigmatized. And so the call to create a space of healing and justice and love, most of all love, was a calling that I felt very deeply after I graduated from nursing school, because I had previously worked with people with cancer in New York City when I was at the Catholic Worker, and that was my first experience as a nursing assistant. And then eventually, I went to nursing school and graduated in 1987, came to California in 1988, and then I felt a vocation to work with people with HIV and AIDS, but especially people who are homeless.

That was the motivation. It’s my Christian faith that gave me a sense of vocation to do the work and to not wait for somebody else to be doing it. I saw the need. The need was desperate here in the East Bay, and decided, okay, I prayed that God would open up an opportunity for me to address the needs of people with HIV and AIDS who were dying, and voila, God opened up that possibility.

And it was scary to think, “Can I do this?” But I mean, for me, God gives to us what we need when we do the work of God, which is the work of love and justice.

I never worried about money. We were all volunteers. None of us got paid for doing the work, including myself, because that’s part of the Catholic Worker philosophy, is that you live simply and in voluntary poverty to be able to share the gifts that you have with other people.

The house was financed by private donations, and we published a newsletter a couple of times a year. Sometimes the guests would write for the newsletter, and it was really quite beautiful. They would write about their experience at Bethany House.

Julia Sommerfield: You said it was scary for you. What was some of the hardest or scariest things about working or just general struggles that you had trying to build Bethany House up?

Michael Harank: Well, it wasn’t scary. That might have been not a good word to use.

I mean, there were fears. As a healthcare worker, there were fears of infection, of contagion. Even though I knew that HIV is not easily spread, during the early years, people didn’t know that. But a needle stick as a nurse, if you get a needle stick, you could get infected.

Working in the hospitals or giving injections to people, that could happen, and it did happen to healthcare workers. So that was one of the fears, but that never happened. You just have to overcome the fears with trust.

You have to accept that maybe even if this does happen, even if I got infected through a needle stick, I would still be able to be treated. That’s the principal fear. Of course, other healthcare workers shared with me that they had nightmares about being infected, but that was the chief fear about being infected.

Julia Sommerfield: What were the treatments at the time or just some idea of what they were like? I know you guys were primarily making people comfortable, it sounds like, but what was some of the medical treatment?

Michael Harank: Well, Bethany House also participated in an underground clinic. There was a medication from China that was called Tricosanthin or Compound Q. Because there was very few treatments, people were willing to risk doing treatments.

This organization called Project Inform, which educated people about treatments, decided that they would sponsor several clinics around the country where patients would infuse Tricosanthin or Compound Q via IV. We had to do that underground because we didn’t have the money to do official clinical studies. It was an immune booster, this medication, so people organized, and there were clinics in New York and San Francisco and Houston and Boston. And in our house at Bethany, we participated in that and I participated as a nurse. Once a month, patients would come and they would get infused through the IV with this medication.

About a third of the patients who received it had a very, very good response. A third were stable and about a third, it didn’t work for them. So, this was a very radical thing to do because the doctors and nurses that were starting the IVs and participating in this clinical experiment, we could have lost our licenses very easily because we weren’t officially following the law.

So that was one treatment and there were other treatments. People turned to herbal treatments, people turned to homeopathic treatments, people turned to lots of different treatments if they could afford it. The clinical studies for Compound Q that Bethany House and I as a nurse participated in, that drug was very expensive.

So, when the organizers of these clinics asked me to participate, I said, yes, I’ll be willing to do that as long as you allow two or three people who can’t afford it that they be allowed to receive the treatment. And they agreed to that. It was really wonderful that there were a couple of people who were able to get the treatment.

Julia Sommerfield: And so you were giving people treatment and helping out. What did you take after you left Bethany House? What did you take out of that? And then Bethany House, does it continue to run under doing something else or still what it started as?

Michael Harank: No, I was very deeply moved and grateful for the opportunity to create a healing space for people to truly live before they died. And the most dramatic example of that was a 29-year-old African-American man who was deaf and mute. His name was Damon.

And he came to the house in a wheelchair bent over and his face hidden by a hoodie. And I didn’t know whether or not I could care for him because I didn’t know sign language. And he was in very bad shape.

I didn’t expect him to live very long at all. But the first week that he was at the house, we were eating lunch in the kitchenette and I had hummingbird feeders at the window and a hummingbird came to the window. And previous to that, we were writing out everything because I didn’t know sign language.

And suddenly he looked at one of the hummingbirds that came to the feeder and all of a sudden he said, hummingbird. And I went, “Oh my God! You can talk!” And he said, “Yeah.”

And it was like a miracle. And I said, “How come you haven’t talked before, haven’t talked with me?” And he said, “Because people make fun of me and the way I talk,” the way in which deaf people have, when they vocalize. And I was like, wow. He was reading my lips at the time.

And I said, “Damon, nobody will make fun of you ever again here in this house. And if they do, you speak to me and we’ll take care of it.” Well, after that moment, he didn’t shut up.

He was just talking constantly, but he would only speak in the house. And after about a week, he would get daily massages because his skin was flaking off and he was losing weight….

He lived for three months. And during that three months, he gained 30 pounds and was walking around, going to the video store with us to get videos. We got him hearing aids, and he just resurrected.

He completely resurrected. I used to ask people what they wanted to do, if there was some wish they had before they died. And Damon said that he wanted to ride the rollercoaster and Santa Cruz and the boardwalk.

And believe it or not, his father, who he had been alienated from, came down from Washington state where he had just graduated with a degree in counseling, addiction counseling. And he came down and he went with Damon down to Santa Cruz. He rode the rollercoaster.

They used the house car because his father was poor and didn’t have any money. And he came back and he told me all about riding the rollercoaster. And his father, we took his father to the airport on Sunday because they went for the weekend, and I came into the room on Monday morning and Damon was dying. And he said, “I am dying and I want to die in this house.” And within six hours, he had the most peaceful death I had ever seen, and I had watched many people die. It was just one breath out, and one breath in, and one breath out. And then he died.

That was amazing. The gift! He resurrected himself. He found strength within himself.

And that’s what Jesus did for people who were sick. He called out the Spirit in them, the healing spirit within them, and they began to live and be healed. And that’s what happened with Damon.

Julia Sommerfield: A really pretty story and a really pretty thing to kind of wrap up this interview with. Do you have like just one final word to say about Bethany House or just for people to listen to and be inspired? A lot of young people are going to be hearing this interview, this is a school radio station.

Michael Harank: Yeah, my counsel is don’t be afraid to be an agent, to be a vehicle, to be an instrument of change, to create a better world where it’s easier for people to be good. Seize whatever opportunities you have daily to be kind, to be generous, to work for peace, to work for justice. Do what you can.

Julia Sommerfield: Thank you so, so much for doing this interview. I’m like really going to talk to you and I feel so inspired. Like I think you have such an incredible story.

And I know you’ve done so much more than just this. So it was very amazing to like hear at least one piece of the differences you’ve made.

Michael Harank: Well, thank you, Julia, for the opportunity. Yes, I really enjoyed it.