The color purple; 20 percent of the year

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

Second in a series

Happy New Year!

This weekend, we enter the season of Advent, the beginning of the church's liturgical year. It is also one of two "purple" times of the year. The other is Lent.

	A d v e n t Time of Preparation

In these two seasons - which together make up 20 percent of the church calendar - the vestments, auxiliary altar cloths and various church banners and decorations are purple.

Why do two, so very different times of the year, both use the color purple (more correctly called violet)?

There are a couple of reasons:

• both are times of preparation to remember, and relive, a major event in salvation history;
  
  
• and both are traditional seasons of penance.

Perhaps, just as we are exploring the cycle of the church year as a circle of seasons, marked by certain colors, we should look at the circle of the day to explain the use of purple in liturgical celebrations.

During the day, there are two times when purple covers the sky - just before sunrise and just after sunset.

Advent and Lent are twilight times, when a hush is upon us as we wait for the coming of the sun, the Son of God, both in history, in our own lives, and at the end of time. During these seasons, the church prepares itself. Interestingly, we omit the Gloria during both seasons, in part because we will more joyfully sing them at Christmas and Easter.

In the history of the church, both Lent and Advent began because Christians wished to prepare themselves for these two great feasts.

Lent developed first. For early Christians, Easter was the time when new members of the church were baptized and welcomed into the church. And before they underwent the sacraments, catechumens undertook a time of initiation and instruction. (Much the same as the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults - RCIA, - process in our parishes today.)

As time went on, other Christians wished to join the catechumens in the time of preparation and purification, and the penitential season of Lent gradually developed. In this way, all Christians were able to enter more meaningfully into the celebration of the great feast of Easter, reminding themselves of their destiny to join in the Lord's eternal glory.

Advent also developed as a time of preparation for Christmas. When Christians began to mark an Advent season around the fifth century (it was not really formalized for the whole church for several more centuries), they looked at it as an adventus. In imperial Rome, an adventus was a time of preparation for an imperial visit. So the Christian Advent became a time of preparing for a major royal arrival: that of Christ. During Advent, Christians attended Mass more frequently, fasted and offered penance. It is much the same today as we too get our spiritual lives in order for Christ's coming at Christmas (Christ Mass).

In the Middle Ages, when the use of liturgical colors developed, purple was the color of kings. The dye was rare, and quite expensive. Purple was also, for heraldic purposes, considered to have the same hue value as blue, grey and black. Grey (sackcloth and ashes) and black were both colors of penance and sorrow. So the color of purple - connoting a pairing of both penance and royalty - was a natural color to choose for these seasons. (It also served to distinguish these seasons' vestments from funeral vestments - which were black until the liturgical reforms of the 1960s.)

Even though both Lent and Advent use purple - they use two different types of purple, as approved by the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy.

Purples with red tones are the colors of Lent, and are seen as more penitential in nature. It is correctly termed "Roman purple" and refers to the imperial colors. The red tones also remind us of the color of blood. Interestingly, the purple worn by bishops and archbishops is called "amaranth red" which is a blend of red-purple and scarlet and serve to remind us of the bishops' charge to protect their flocks "even to the shedding of their own blood" as Christ did.

The blue-purples are reserved for Advent. Blue, however, is not an accepted liturgical color. For those desiring to use blue, perhaps to honor the Virgin Mary's role in Advent, it is possible to introduce blue into other areas of the church not specifically related to the liturgical celebration, such as the gathering area.

Purple, whatever its shade, is a mix of red and blue. Just as at twilight, the blue sky and red sunlight mingle overhead as the earth prepares for night or day, the liturgical color of purple tells us that we are making preparations for a major event. And both events have to do with the Son.

Next: Seeing red