ART: new vestments and altar cloth for Advent!
Old made new
A few months back, I started talking to Kaylyn Kilkuskie about liturgical textiles. Kaylyn is a textile artist I had originally met over at the 45th Street Green Space, and I was curious to get her thoughts on the idea of unmaking and remaking some of the vestments that the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside has gratefully inherited from All Saints Episcopal Church here in Sunnyside, a parish which closed in early 2020 after 92 years of faithful ministry.
How could these textiles be a visual and tactile symbol of the “mission” of this new Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside? How could they themselves show that “things which have been cast down are being raised up, and things which have grown old are being made new"? What creative potential did Kaylyn see in these beautiful fabrics? How might they be “made new?”
We started talking about adaptive reuse. (I had been having parallel conversations with neighbors about how the garden next to the church could be a sign of new life, and adaptive reuse emerged as a principle there. Just one example of how our different experiments cross-pollinate…) Reuse is an important part of Kaylyn’s art practice, too. So I brought her some fabric to experiment with: some chasubles and altar cloths from other parishes in the Diocese that had closed, and a pink chasuble from All Saints which needed extensive repair. Kaylyn started experimenting.
Making signs of the “everyday sacred”
Traditional vestments often implicitly carry some hefty theological connotations. Things that are set apart as “holy”—like these fancy garments—have historically been made of very expensive materials, or with elaborate and time-consuming embroidery. Kaylyn pointed me to this excellent episode of the fashion podcast Articles of Interest, where Dr. Candida Moss points out that elaborate church vestments can play into the deeply ingrained idea that wealth is a marker of holiness. And that is just one especially pernicious instance of the broader presumption that spiritual reality is organized hierarchically—that God is way up at the top of a ladder, and that the people and things at the bottom are farther away from God’s love and care.
That was something that I wanted to push back on hard, and this became even more clear after Kaylyn and I decided on a commission for a set of Advent vestments. Because Advent is the season of waiting for God to be born in the midst of this world, and the stories tell us that God is not born in luxury and easy power, but among outcasts and refugees—in a drafty barn that stank. God isn’t born as a “special” person, but as a common person at the bottom of the ladder. And so God proclaims God’s infinite solidarity with the people on the underside of history in every time and place. In taking on human form in poverty and danger, God proclaims that God’s presence violates our ideas of high and low, rich and poor, good and bad. The Incarnation collapses our human hierarchies of power, status, or value.
Kaylyn and I were asking ourselves how these Advent vestments could honor the tradition of liturgical textiles while also redirecting their significance toward the absolute commonness of Jesus’ life among us—toward God’s solidarity with every one of God’s children.
After lots of back and forth, trial and error, we chose a blue poly silk for the primary fabric: blue is one of the liturgical colors of Advent, and we chose this hue for its echo of Mary’s shawl in traditional “Madonna and Child” paintings. For the “orphreys”—the decorative stripes, which are often where the fine embroidery in gold thread come in—we wanted something contrasting in both feel and in significance. We ultimately decided to use the flannel swaddle cloth in which every baby born in NYC hospitals is wrapped. Because we are expecting Jesus to be born here.
Kaylyn included these beautiful details in which the stripes are wrapped around each other, just as in a swaddle. And she incorporated the pink silk from the inherited vestments into a reversible inner layer. In some parishes, there are special rose or pink vestments for the Third Sunday in Advent (sometimes called “Gaudete” Sunday from the Latin “Rejoice”). I love the asymmetry in how these recycled silks are stitched together, and how the striped swaddle pattern interrupts them on one side. Kaylyn told me that she just didn’t have enough of the pink silk to make the chasuble and the altar cloth—so this was a choice born of necessity. But to me it’s also a sign of the way that God interrupts us, surprises us.
I am so grateful to Kaylyn Kilkuskie for bringing her skill and artistry and thoughtfulness to these vestments. May they be for us—and for future generations—a reminder that God is with us in our mess, and swaddles us in God’s unfailing mother-love.
