If you’ve ever spent any time in an Anglican church, you may well have noticed the colours that are used in the building change throughout the year. Sometimes there is purple. This is used during the weeks leading up to Christmas and also in Lent, those weeks before Easter. There is white at Easter itself and also at Christmas. Red is only seen occasionally, at Pentecost and perhaps on Good Friday or Palm Sunday. The most common colour though is green. For the vast majority of the year, green is the colour that you’ll find adorning various parts of a church building.

This is known as ‘ordinary time’, and marks the passing days and weeks between the most important dates in the Christian calendar.

Calling it ‘ordinary time’ does it something of a disservice. ‘Ordinary’ can infer boring or dull. Routine or humdrum. Something to be gotten through before returning to excitement and adventure.

Certainly for some people, they spend much of their time looking forward to future events rather than enjoying the present. Gifts at Christmas or chocolate at Easter, anticipation of an upcoming anniversary or significant birthday. On the 25th of January every year, a friend of mine in Kent would gleefully whisper in my year “11 months until Christmas!” But waiting for the next big thing is not what marking the changing of the seasons of the church year is intended to do.

The colours in the church are also reflected in some of the clothes that a priest wears when they are leading a service of Holy Communion. The scarf or stole that they wear will mirror the colour in the church. Of my various stoles, most of them are fairly plain, predominately white or purple or red, but with a simple motif of a cross or a dove on either end, depending on the colour. My green stole though has painted on it trees with fruit, a Heron(!) and running from side to side a stream of bubbling water. There is something joyful about both the image, and the time that it marks.

There is always extraordinary to be found in the ordinary – we just need to stop and look around at the world God has given us to live in.

(May 2015)