Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Ashes Before Roses


      My religious background emphasizes the simplicity of the earliest church before it came to adopt traditions like today’s observance-- Ash Wednesday.  If my great grandparents were alive today, my Grandpa Archie would have bought candies for his valentine today.  But he would have been shocked if anyone tried to put ashes on his forehead.  Yet, we ought to think hard before we opt for flowers and candies over ashes today.
       Valentine’s Day, ironically, owes its character to another convergence of State and church holidays.  February 13-15 was the Roman Lupercalia, a kind of drunken fertility ritual.  The Emperor Claudius on two occasions put Christian martyrs named Valentine to death during the feast, so the church came to remember the dead martyrs on February 14, too.  Both the remembrance of the martyrs and the fertility celebration continued to coexist until the mating ritual basically took over the holiday.
      Today Valentine’s Day celebrates that mixture of fear, bio-chemical desire and psychic attraction, which people call “being in love.”  This intense but fleeting sense of attachment rules the way this culture thinks about relationships.   When my wife and I were in Mystic Bay, Connecticut celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary, an unmarried couple from New York City congratulated us on our big day.  They confessed that they had never been able to maintain feelings for anyone more than two or three years. 
     “What’s your secret?” they asked. 
      My wife and I looked at each other and giggled.  
     “We have no secret,” we told them.  Christian love doesn’t depend on feelings.  Sustainable feelings of romantic attachment are the result of partners training themselves to put the other first. 
      Ash Wednesday calls me back to that selfless love.  Often, that’s why I buy flowers.   I don’t receive ashes myself, but I do ritually remember that we mortals should be ruled by something more than momentary feelings.  The message of Ash Wednesday supports Valentine’s Day.  Without sacrificial love, amorous love usually ends up spreading heartache. In the end Christ’s love is more compelling than Cupid’s trance. That’s why we put crosses and not hearts atop church buildings.