Back in May of 2016, after hearing about the #WearOrange movement, which supports reasonable gun sales and gun ownership regulation, I got the idea to wear an orange stole at worship as a witness against gun violence. The idea caught on and spread. Recently, my friend Rosalind Hughes, who made my orange stole and a hundred others, asked me to sum up what I thought might achieved by the importing the #WearOrange movement into the liturgy of the church. This is what I wrote for her:
Several years ago, while serving in a parish in Kansas with a limited budget and little money for more than a few stoles, I made several full sets of vestments and, at that time, did some research on liturgical colors. One of the things I learned was that although orange is not now considered one of the standard colors of the liturgical spectrum, it was once considered an alternative to green for the Sundays of “ordinary time.” I also learned that it is an accepted color for vestments in the Russian Orthodox Church where, for some reason, it is considered appropriate to the Feast of Sts. Peter & Paul.
