Keiskamma Altarpiece interior
How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
This week there is news that an African woman has been cured of the disease, AIDS, which has killed millions around the world with perhaps the heaviest impact in Africa. AIDS has become increasingly manageable since is was identified as what seemed to be an incurable, deadly plague in the 1980's, but this person is only the third to experience a cure. This development may eventually have huge implications for that continent and around the planet.
This news took me back years to an indelible moment in a place of Christian worship in Toronto. In August of 2006 a solemn and beautiful art installation called the Keiskamma Altarpiece was unveiled at St. James Cathedral. It was and is huge,measuring 6.5 meters wide by 4 meters high. The labour of love and lament was created by over 120 women and men from the Eastern Cape of South Africa - one of the areas of Africa hardest hit by HIV/AIDS - a three part, beaded, quilted, and photographic homage to those they they have lost to the disease.
In Africa tens of thousands of children were orphaned by AIDS and often ended up in the care of grandparents. The Stephen Lewis Foundation brought the altarpiece and scores of the grandmothers to Canada. We visited St. James one day while the altarpiece was on display and there was the sense of being in an art gallery or museum with a work that had great spiritual power.
Then the experience became much more intense. Three Black women were ushered into the sanctuary and when they walked up to the altarpiece they began to wail, holding their heads and rocking back and forth. The rest of us WASP folk were stunned by this outburst of emotion until we realized that two of them were African grandmothers. When they looked at the altarpiece it was their lives they saw, with all its pain. Then the third woman began to pray in a loud and heavily accented voice – it was so un-Anglican, or United Church for that matter! She prayed about the sorrow they had endured, and which was almost too much to bear. But then her prayer took a hopeful turn and she expressed confidence that Jesus would bring about a new day when the suffering and sorrow would be over.
With this recent announcement we can remember those whose deaths will never be forgotten by those who loved them. We can receive it as an answer to prayer and as a reminder that the scourge of HIV/AIDS is still real.
In 2006 I recounted the moving experience at St. James on the Sunday of Hope in the Advent season, not long after we had seen the altarpiece.The passage from Thessalonians was a lectionary reading that Sunday. We can still seek a return to joy and hope.
Can developers in the Big Smoke be part of the vision for a new heaven and a new earth? My Groundling blog today. groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-dr
Keisamma Altarpiece closed
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