I am writing a short article and wish to not miss any concepts. Can some one define for lent:
Liturgical color Purple:
A little history lesson. At first, there was really no concept of ‘liturgical colors’: the clergy simply wore whatever vestment they had (which could really be of any color). If there was a ‘default’ color, it would be white.
By the Middle Ages, though, certain colors came to be associated with certain seasons and feasts or fasts. (In reality however, since not every church could afford a full set of vestments, many priests and ministers simply wore whatever they had in hand - irrespective of color - like in the old days, reserving the best vestments for the more solemn occasions.) But at that time, the Church hadn’t yet mandated a universal rule about what color to wear during when, so you practically had different color conventions in different regions, different dioceses even.
In many places such as Rome, Lent came to be associated with the color purple or violet or something close to it. Other places had different color schemes: blue, black, grey/ash. (In the Ambrosian Rite in Milan, the color for weekdays in Lent is black, while the color for Sundays is
morello, a dark sort of violet - different from the Roman purple.) In medieval England, ‘Lenten array’ was made of unbleached and undyed linen, and thus this kind of off-white/beige color.
You would notice a common trend between these colors: they are all either ‘dark’ or ‘drab’ colors, which would quite fit with the somber, penitential mood of Lent.
