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.
