A Seat at the Table

This Sunday is Trinity, celebrated every year the Sunday between Pentecost and the beginning of Ordinary Time.

 Christians have always understood the Trinity as a community of perfect love. Andrei Rublev’s 15th Century icon “The Hospitality of Abraham/The Holy Trinity” depicts this beautifully, seeing the three angels visitation to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 as paralleling and foreshadowing the Trinity we see in the New Testament.

 The most remarkable thing about the icon, though, isn’t what’s there. It’s what’s not there: an empty place among the Three.

 Rublev saw it as evoking an invitation…a seat at the table; a drawing into that loving and unselfish community.

 For Abraham and Sarah in its first sense, and for you and me in its second.