Musings on our Blue Vestments in Advent
Beloved in Christ,
In my experience, Advent is typically a season when we wear purple vestments. Purple, a color which represents penitence. Purple, a color which represents majesty, too. How purple came to represent these colors, I know not (except that I think purple was historically reserved for royalty because it was a difficult pigment to create/find).
I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to vestments, liturgical garments, and liturgy in and of itself.
So imagine my delight when I saw that we have lovely blue vestments here at St. Andrew’s!
But where does blue come from for Advent?
Well, from the best that I can tell, people (historians, academics, and so forth) aren’t entirely sure. It seems that for the first few centuries of Christian history, the typical color worn during Eucharistic services was white. Over the years, however, the colors ballooned to a veritable menagerie of shades of the rainbow.
By the medieval era, at least within Western Christianity, it seems there was little generalized uniformity of liturgical colors. In the thirteenth century, a vast array of colors was used across churches in England.
“In Westminster Abbey at this time the color for Advent was “definitely ordered to be white,” while Wells Cathedral used blue, Exeter violet, and Pleshy College red.”*
The blue, though, seems to have been favored later on as the centuries passed as a fond remembrance of Sarum Blue.
Sarum comes from the name for Salisbury, a cathedral city in England. The Sarum Rite was a specific form for the Eucharist in the 1100s through the reformation at Salisbury, a prominent cathedral. The rite was similar to the Roman Canon, with pickings and choosing from some other locales (potentially French sources?)
It was here, at Salisbury, that they would use blue during Advent.
And the rite has come down us over the ages, now known as the “Sarum Rite.” (In fact, to make Holy Water, I use an English translation from the Sarum Rite, which is similar to the extraordinary form for making holy water within the Roman tradition (as opposed to the ordinary form which is slightly shorter)).
So in a way, our blue vestments, unique within the scope of the Episcopal Church, draw us to our tradition’s homeland - in England, nearly a thousand years ago. It’s really quite marvelous!
One of the things I treasure about Christianity is that in our rites, rituals, worship, prayers, motions and machinations, we are connected to the worshipping communities of the body of Christ across vast swaths of time and space.
And in so doing, we maintain a sweeping connection of the faithful departed who are gathered under Christ’s wings, awaiting the second coming (as we long for, especially in Advent).
Yours in Christ,
Alex
*https://praytellblog.com/index.php/2013/11/25/sarum-blue-the-great-untruth/