It is a happy accident that the photo that accompanies this reflection features a refreshments trolley quite prominently!  The photo was taken after Mass at Trinity School in Lewisham, south London.  Having got to know its headmaster, Fr Richard Peers through the medium of Twitter, and having explored the possibility of one of our Diocesan school chaplains spending part of a sabbatical at the school, Fr Richard invited me to preside and preach at the school’s Mass for the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul while I was in the UK visiting whanau.  I was delighted to accept this invitation.  Our Anglican schools have been, and continue to be, a priority in my episcopal ministry, and the opportunity to experience Anglican special character articulated in another Province of the Communion was a welcome one.

Trinity school tells a rather remarkable story.  A Church of England failing school, it was decanted temporarily to another site, and has experienced an inspiring rebirth.  The local community did not want the school back, and so Fr Richard faced a patient uphill process to birth something new and different in its place.  Lewisham is a borough of London with a mixed socio-economic demographic.  The majority of children at the school are of Afro-Caribbean background.  While this reflects the borough, it does not reflect the immediate neighbourhood of the school.  It is fair to say that many white British families opt to send their children elsewhere to school.  One of the things that Fr Richard did quite early on in the process of developing the new school, was to show different groups: parents, governors, children and staff, Rublev’s icon of the Trinity.  If you are not familiar with it, you can see it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(Andrei_Rublev)

He showed them the icon and asked them what they thought it told us about God?  The answers given were both thoughtful and inspiring, and they became the Trinity values.  Indeed, when it came to choosing a new name for the new school, Trinity seemed like the inspired choice.

I can only say that walking into the school, and spending time there, felt like I was immersed in the life of this icon, and that was a truly remarkable experience.  The new build enabled some particular and intentional decisions to be made about the design of the building.  Space was limited, so height became important.  With the idea in mind that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, the school reflects this: a light-filled atrium becomes the ‘village green’, the hall is used as a worship space (the village 'church'); classrooms and corridors become 'streets' and 'homes', places of nurture and learning.  But the most remarkable thing is the way in which the senses are drawn into the mystery of the icon.  The colours used throughout the school reflect the colours used by Rublev; everywhere the smell of incense creates a sacredness (apart from the rather delicious aroma of the spaghetti bolognaise being cooked by a food technology class where a pupil greeted me with ‘the Lord be with you’!).  The worship was Anglo-Catholic in tone, the children, respectful and gracious (even coping with a pupil taking ill with measured calm), joyous and filled with life.

What does all this say?  One of the comments made to Fr Richard about the icon was the profound yet simple observation that Rublev’s Trinity was all about offering ‘a place at the table.’  This is beautifully depicted in Trinity Primary school’s corridor display where the icon is placed at a cloth-coloured table with gold plates reflecting the image of the one who looks into them.

On my visit, I was offered ‘a place at the table’.  My thought is then, how can we offer a place at our tables: in our churches, homes and communities, to all people, with no questions asked or conditions laid down?  As ++Rowan Williams writes in his poem entitled 'Rublev', which is about the Trinity icon:

To the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.

Thanks be to God for all our Anglican schools, and what they can teach us about the image and identity of God, yesterday, today and forever.

+Helen-Ann Waikato.