Dear Friends,
As we prepare for Trinity Sunday we suggest that during this Thursday’s Quiet Time we might use as a resource the Rublev Icon and Rowan Williams’ poem about the icon. (see below).
The icon, painted by the Russian Rublev in the fourteenth century, is probably the best known example of Russian icon painting and has been understood as a representation of the Trinity. It is also known as ‘The Hospitality of Abraham’, because of the story in Genesis 18, 1-16 of how Abraham - in giving hospitality to three strangers - received God’s promise that a child would be born to him and Sarah. The Rowan Williams poem is a meditation on the icon.
All good things,
Margaret Beetham
As we prepare for Trinity Sunday we suggest that during this Thursday’s Quiet Time we might use as a resource the Rublev Icon and Rowan Williams’ poem about the icon. (see below).
The icon, painted by the Russian Rublev in the fourteenth century, is probably the best known example of Russian icon painting and has been understood as a representation of the Trinity. It is also known as ‘The Hospitality of Abraham’, because of the story in Genesis 18, 1-16 of how Abraham - in giving hospitality to three strangers - received God’s promise that a child would be born to him and Sarah. The Rowan Williams poem is a meditation on the icon.
All good things,
Margaret Beetham
Rublev
One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.
I said Here is the blood of all our people,
These are their bruises, blue and purple,
Gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.
These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth
For ever. I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beech mast, never let you forth
to the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
The table, share one food, one earth.
Rowan Williams
One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.
I said Here is the blood of all our people,
These are their bruises, blue and purple,
Gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.
These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth
For ever. I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beech mast, never let you forth
to the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
The table, share one food, one earth.
Rowan Williams