Today the church celebrates the Trinity Sunday which is always held on the Sunday after Pentecost, the date of which is always changes because Easter is a movable feast based on the lunar calendar. Most clergy hate to preach on Trinity Sunday for fear that it might require them to explain what the Trinity actually means. As a result, many clergy avoid triune theology at all costs and focus on the more colorful scriptural readings for the day. Today, I am going to take the cowardly way out and will do neither. The Feast of the Trinity has, however, inspired strange and sometimes beautiful works of art throughout the millennia. The most bizarre images are those of a three-faced God, by painters who've interpreted triune theology too literally and in the process took facelifts to a whole new level. One example is a Three-faced Trinity, painted by that well-known painter named Anonymous in the 17th century.[1]
Three-faced Trinity, Anonymous, 17th century. Folklore Museum Hellbrunn Palace, Salzburg, Austria. One of my favorite images of the Trinity can be found at the Abba Pentalewon Monastery northwest of Axum, inTigray, Ethiopia. The monastery was founded by Abba Pentalewon about 487. Pantalewon arrived in Axum, the first great capital city of Ethiopia, with nine other “saints” from different parts of the Rome Empire in 480. Pentalewon lived at his monastery located on the top of Mai Qoho Hill until his death in 522. The Ethiopian murals in this church and many other Ethiopian churches are quite dazzling.
The Holy Trinity from Abuna Pantaleon. Axum, Tigray, Ethiopia, c. 524
Today is also the feast day of the Venerable Bede (673/4 – 735), that great Northumbrian saint and doctor of the church who, along with my beloved St. Cuthbert, is buried in Durham Cathedral. He was a monk and priest at Jarrow, Northumbria, all his life. He wrote sixty books during his lifetime including the first history of the Anglo-Saxons ever written, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People which is still read today.
Ezra, Codex Amiatinus or Jarrow Folio, made by the Benedictine monks at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey, 700 AD Bede would have seen this if not helped to create it.
Bede finished dictating his last book on the day he died. After this, he asked to be laid out on the floor of his cell. Next, he gave away the few treasures he kept in little box to his fellow priests—the last of his cherished possessions: pepper, handkerchiefs, and incense. (I wonder, did he have all those handkerchiefs because of his inordinate love of pepper and incense?) A fellow monk, who later wrote an eye-witness account of Bede’s death, said that as Bede was dying, Bede sang a special song ending with the the Gloria: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit." Then he breathed his last. It was May 26, 735.[2]
Venerable Bede's Tomb, Durham Cathedral, Durham, England
Trinity Sunday in England is also the day when many local churches host a glorious Flower Festival. (I wish we did it here in the USA.) Ronald Blythe, who is one of my all-time favorite writers and who died last year at age 100, is regarded as the one of the best nature writers in English literature. He was also a Lay Reader at St. Andrews Anglican Church, Wormingford, Suffolk and was no stranger to Flower Festivals.[3]
For Trinity Sunday 1995, Blyth wrote: “The flower festival is upon us….Tantalizing weather blows cold then hot, teacups rattle on the tombs, cuckoos call from Arger Fen, rooks debate in Philip's new-mown hay, commanding women cry 'Oasis! Stepladder! Leaves, more leaves'. Husbands are in need of special prayers. There are charming tents under the trees, garlanded perpendicular, an alabaster St. Alban under a pergola, artful drifts of roses, our de-wormed Victorian hearse burdened with lilies, our font a pool of infant buds. The carboy is full of pounds (thank Heaven); and Harold's honey-bees, weighed down with loot, hum against the sanctuary window (1866) in which Mary, with a halo, listens, and Martha, without a halo, carries a huge pile of washing-up. There is intensive child labour – 'Fetch me some more water and see that you don't spill it' – and then comes the immortal moment, the flinging open to the world of our south door, the oohs and ahs, the wonder. Did we ever see anything like it? Only once a year. Billy and Pat, whose last Festival this is, beam modestly. O prosper thou our handy-work. Amen say their obedient husbands, dreaming of whisky.”[4] Blythe, who died four months before last year’s Wormingford’s Flower Festival which was held the last Sunday of May in 2023, was never able to see it. Last year, the theme for the festival, in keeping with momentous events in British history, was the coronation. I grew up in a village of 500, so I’m always a sucker for all kinds of small village events – they had me at “tea, cakes, and bell ringing.” (This year the theme is the Paris Olympics.) So, never say that Wormingford doesn’t keep abreast of things!
Front door of St. Andrews Church, Wormingford, Suffolk, Flower Festival 2023
Coronation display, St. Andrews, Wormingford with a cardboard cutout of King Charles III, 2023
Blythe was born and raised in Acton, Suffolk, in 1923. After WWII, he worked as a reference librarian in Colchester, which he says “was the saving of him”. Though forced to leave school at age 14, he was always a voracious reader, and wolfed down as many books as he could find. After the war, Suffolk attracted many London writers and artists. Blythe soon found himself in the company of some of his heroes like the novelist E.M. Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, the tenor Peter Pears, Imogen Holst, and later, novelist Patricia Highsmith.
Blythe was especially close to the painter John Nash and his wife, fellow artist Christine Kühlenthal, who lived in an Elizabethan yeoman’s house close to Wormingford. John Nash left the house, called Bottengoms, to Blythe on his death in 1977. Blythe lived, if not in one place, certainly one county, all his life.
Ronald Blythe, 1950 Photographer unknown, from Blythe's private collection
Ronald Blythe, at Bottengoms, Wormingford, 2012 Writer, Grace Olmstead, has just written a new book called: Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind. Random house published these notes on their webpage for her book: “In the tiny farm town of Emmett, Idaho, there are two kinds of people: those who leave and those who stay. Those who leave go in search of greener pastures, better jobs, and college. Those who stay are left to contend with thinning communities, punishing government farm policy, and environmental decay. Grace Olmstead, now a journalist in Washington, DC, is one who left, and in Uprooted, she examines the heartbreaking consequences of uprooting—for Emmett, and for the greater heartland America. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Uprooted wrestles with the questions of what we owe the places we come from and what we are willing to sacrifice for profit and progress.”[5] Our uprootedness is poles apart from the way Abba Pentalewon at Tigray, the Venerable Bede at Jarrow, and even Ronald Blythe lived. When I lived for almost a year in a small hamlet outside of South Petherton, Somerset, in 1974, I was astonished to discover that the family next door to us had owned and farmed the same land for over 700 years. This is rather common in Europe but impossible in America, unless you happen of course to be Native American. Even families from my hometown of Deerfield, Massachusetts, which was founded in 1673, don’t go that far back. As a result it seems that we Americans have lost a deep sense of rootedness, which may help explain our current state of social isolation, alienation, and loneliness. The German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) once said, “God is near to us, but we are far from Him. God is within, we are without. God is at home; we are abroad.”[6] Or as the colloquial version on the web goes: “God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.” Up through the Middle Ages, it was commonly thought that God was the ground of our being. Everything revolved around God and being in right relationship with God, our self, and our neighbor. Since the Age of Reason, and the advent of modern psychology, the ego, our individuality, have replaced God. Each of us has become the center of our own universe with no way of connecting to each other except through love, which we are not very good at and usually botch things up. But as scripture says: “In God we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:18) God is the water, we are the fish. We can live no more apart from God as a fish can from the sea. Yet God is always within us calling us back to our true selves, to our deep roots, to our true home. To mix metaphors, God always waits up for us and leaves the light on. God doesn’t have any pride—God is forever lovesick over us. God constantly searches the horizon to see if we are on our way home and then runs out to meet us even when we are far off. God leaves signs and bread crumbs for us to find our way back. All we need to do is recognize them, turn around, and follow the trail back home to God, no matter how we define God theologically.
[1] Venerable Bede, trans. Leo Shirley-Price, introduction and notes by D.H. Farmer, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 359-360.
[2]Three-faced Trinity, Anonymous, 17th century. Folklore Museum at the Hellbrunn Palace, Salzburg, Austria.
[3] Ronald Blythe (November 6, 1922 – January 14, 2023) was a British writer, essayist, and editor, best known for his book and film Akenfield (1969). He wrote thirty books in sixty years, including his Word from Wormingford column for the Church Times which were turned into books.
[4] Ronald Blythe, Word from Wormingford: A Parish Year, (London: Viking Press, 1997) 133. To hear a podcast about Ronald Blythe go to the podcast Slightly Foxed: https://foxedquarterly.com/ronald-blythe-a-life-well-written-slightly-foxed-podcast-episode-45/
[5] Grace Olmstead Interview with the Forma Journal:
[6]Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, trans. Raymond b. Blakney (New York: Harper & Row Publishers),132.