Here’s a funny story: last fall I was so excited for Advent and in my excitement, I made a small mess up. Although not the most abundant color, Ecclesiastical Sewing has some BEAUTIFUL blue fabrics. I began to promote all the blue fabrics, thinking blue was the color of Advent. I soon learned, however, that I was sorely mistaken.
If you look at a liturgical color chart that lists the vast majority of church bodies (I like the one from Vanderbilt, it is very complete!), there are two colors listed for Advent. Now, within each church body, there is also room for choice. I belong to a church body that leaves the choice up to the individual congregations. The church congregations I went to always used blue. This led to my mistake that blue was the color for Advent.
It seems that everyone at one time used purple or violet for Advent. Purple is the color of royalty. But it also has a penitential nature; it is humbling and promotes repentance & introspection on the part of believers.
Advent is the first season in the liturgical calendar and it is a season of preparation for celebrating Christ’s birth. It also reminds us to look ahead to the promised return of our Saviour. And as we look forward to this wonderful time, we also look inward at our own personal state, which leads to repentance. This is where the color of purple, perhaps a lovely violet shade, is most appropriate.
In more recent years, sometime in the 1900’s, some church bodies—or churches within these church bodies—began to use blue for the season of Advent. The blue is a beautiful, rich dark blue. Although this is also a color that royalty used, it is the color of a pre-dawn sky. This is the color of hope, the color of expectation. The heavenly skies teach us to wait patiently, just a little while longer for the Dawn, for Christ the King to return—whether for the birth at the Christmas season or waiting for His final return.
At Ecclesiastical Sewing, we have many projects up our sleeves. One of my jobs is to learn and write about certain things. This post, the second special July post, is addressing another Advent topic. Can you tell we have been thinking a lot about Advent lately? We have many fabrics in purple or “violet” as Carrie likes to call it and several liturgical weaves in blue. We are looking towards the future: #violetORblue. Be sure to check out Facebook, and thank you for reading along here!
~Nihil Sine Deo~
Filed under: Ecclesiastical Sewing
