The Keiskamma Altarpiece: Re-membering Creation

The Rev. Anthony Turney has worked to bring a great gift to the Diocese of California for Easter and the Easter Season. The Keiskamma Altarpiece is coming to Grace Cathedral during that time, from its latest stop in the Diocese of Los Angeles.

The Keiskamma Altarpiece is the soulful work of a group of women and a few men, the last people left surviving the AIDS pandemic in Hamburg, a town in South Africa. The Keiskamma Altarpiece is made in layers, each one folding back to reveal another part of the reality of our incorporation of the the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ in our individual and community lives. It is patterned on the Isenheim Altarpiece, which is in Colmar, France.

I see the work of these 120 or so people in Hamburg as forwarding the truth of what Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel of John: “If I be lifted up, I will draw all things, all people to myself.” As the Keiskamma Altarpiece makes its way from cathedral to cathedral in the Episcopal Church, we are drawn into communion with these people who have been diabolically isolated by disease, poverty, and inhumanity. The nature of evil is to shatter the integrity of creation; the nature of godly creation is to redeem and re-member that which has been broken. These women and men are working with and within the energy of the Trinity to bring us into the harmony of the new creation.

Thinking about the Keiskamma Altarpiece brought to mind the Isenheim Altarpiece, a point of inspiration for the Hamburg artists. One scene on the second layer of the Isenheim Altarpiece has fired my imagination for years. Flanking the Annunciation is an Angel Concert for the Mother and Child. In the angel choir is a startling figure, a wild, rough creature, wholly unlike anything else in the scene.

In my view this wild creature, playing with the rest of the angel choir, rapt in adoration of the Mother and Child, is an illustration of what Jesus was proclaiming; that all those seen as living on the margins of the world, are, in Christ, being brought into relationship with all else, as they are related to Christ.

I used to say the marginal was being brought into the center, but I no longer think this. The threshold, the margin, is where God’s subversive, creative energy works, where we find our potential manifesting. So, it would be more accurate to say that we who imagined ourselves to inhabit a center, of privilege, are being drawn into the creative tension of the margins. But in the startling world of Christ-centeredness, the distinctions between margin and center disappear.

Our Presiding Bishop is on her way to Tanzania, to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates of the Anglican Communion. A woman primate who has supported the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people is apparently a de-centering experience for some. It is worth remembering, for me, the story of Nathaniel having to reconsider his preconceptions about the Messiah, who he is, whence he would come, upon his meeting with Jesus (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”). This God we worship, embodied in Jesus the Christ, reproduced in people who follow Jesus, seems to be in the habit of meeting us where we least expect, in the lives of those to whom we have not paid attention.

In March, a group of us from the Diocese of California, joining the Pilgrimage for Peace, will travel to South Africa to be part of the TEAM Conference. There we will focus on the AIDS pandemic, especially as it is being experienced in Africa, and on the relief of global suffering through the Millennium Development Goals, and we will do some work for HOPE Africa. The forty youth, young adults, and adults who will comprise the 2007 Pilgrimage for Peace at the TEAM Conference will be taking their part in Christ’s drawing of the world into communion.

I hope you will pray for Katharine and the Primates, for the Pilgrimage for Peace, and for the TEAM Conference. By praying for us, I wonder if you might think of supporting one of the young pilgrims from Alabama, Rhode Island, Olympia or California? I have learned that prayer is all we do when our intention is towards God. The pilgrims will be carrying you with them, and will be seeking to help us, when they return, connect to the whole, as the Keiskamma Altarpiece is doing even now.