Katrick: The deeper meaning of green and St. Patrick

One of the many things I’ve learned during my 40 years as an ordained minister, is to allow more than enough time to get ready for church. Besides getting the right contact lens in your right eye and the left contact in your left eye, what takes the longest amount of time is selecting and color coordinating your clothing.

For example, you wouldn’t want to wear a green tie with a red stole. You’d light up like an out-of-season Christmas tree.

So what’s a minister to do on or around St. Patrick’s Day, when the wearing of green is almost mandatory? Since the prescribed liturgical color for Sunday, March 17, was violet, it didn’t seem to clash. During a Google search, I discovered that green and purple actually go well together.

Some of the other descriptions I found for this combo online included, “vibrant and welcoming” and “in perfect harmony!” It makes me wonder what St. Patrick would think of all this mussing and fussing. The kind of clothing he wore was probably basic and functional, and had neutral colors.

With all the evangelizing he was engaged in, how things looked on him was probably the least of his concerns. The only green that Patrick was concerned with was the emerald in the three leaf clover, that depicted the Holy Trinity.

As a matter of fact, he was more than likely not wearing green at all. On the smithsonianmag.com website, Shaylyn Esposito writes: ‘The earliest depictions of St. Patrick show him clothed in blue garments, and that when George III created a new order of chivalry for the Kingdom of Ireland, the Order of St. Patrick, its official color was a sky blue.”

Just for the record, my favorite color has been and will always be green, like my Elyria Catholic class ring and jacket. And it’s not just because I’m 25% Irish on my mother’s side.

It’s because green represents life in all its richness and fullness, that was generously given us by God, our Creator and the eternal life that was sacrificially gifted to us by God, our Savior. The only reasons the deep, dark reds of Christ’s blood ever got mixed in was because of our weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and sins.

And that was the core message that St. Patrick was trying to get through. No matter who we are, where we’re from, what we’ve done, left undone, or the colors we wear- what’s most important can be found in Patrick’s own words.

For it is the, “Christ with us, Christ before us, Christ behind us, Christ in us, Christ beneath us, Christ above us, Christ on our right, Christ on our left, Christ when we lie down, Christ when we sit down, and Christ when we arise,” who will not only forgive and free us from our sins, but change and transform us into the best people we can possibly be.

Mark Katrick is a pastor and spiritual director.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Katrick: Gone green