What are the guidelines for the use of liturgical colors?
Liturgical colors can orient us to the season of the church year and help to engage the sense of sight in worship. White and gold symbolize days and seasons of joy and mark pivotal events in the life of Christ. Red symbolizes the work of the Holy Spirit and the sacrifices of martyrs. Purple (and sometimes blue, in Advent) designates a season of penitence and preparation, such as Lent. This was not always the case. For the first thousand years of the church’s history, little thought was given to liturgical color. White vestments were most common, with more elaborate garments and paraments (of whatever color) reserved for important festivals. The 12th through 16th centuries brought localized experiments with liturgical color, but no standard practices prevailed until 1570, when the Roman Catholic Church established a normative sequence of colors to accompany the church calendar. Calvinists in the sixteenth century eschewed these rubrics, however, preferring black vestments. The past two
