There is something desperately dull about the prospect of week after week of green vestments stretching into the future. But then, all human life is like that. After the party, or the holiday, or the exam success, we come back in the end to the old routine of putting out the rubbish and making sure there will be milk for breakfast tomorrow. Ordinary Time is repetitive for a purpose and the green vestments signify something immensely important to us. The colour green symbolises hope, just as the burning fire of love is symbolised by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like all that grows, is always new and always fresh.
Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time because it is the season in which we are being neither especially penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white). Instead, the Spirit, having come down on us, is now living in us and acting through us. This offers a different kind of excitement from that of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – not so much one of bustling about arranging celebrations, but quiet and thoughtful actions to grow our faith and allow the Spirit’s presence within us to give us a sense of God’s enduring love for us. It is a time too to look around and take time to savour the wonders and beauties of creation, now when Spring becomes Summer and the countryside flourishes in all its God-made glory.
As Gerald Manley Hopkins put it in Pied Beauty:
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-
fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Also it is an opportunity to reflect that:
Now joy-filled Easter
and Pentecost are done,
we hear, question and once more
learn who truly is this Son,
remembered, made real, honoured
through the unvarying rite
of Ordinary Time, whose
constancy shapes, guides our sight
towards Advent, Nativity and
Lenten eager expectation.
This plain Time’s virtue lies not
in tedious repetition:
its rituals reveal threefold God’s
eternal dance of loving care
through which we, ordinary folk,
everlasting joy may share.
From ‘Ordinary Time’ • Tom Caple 2018