Valentine's Column

On Facebook, a number of people have been posting that they don’t like Valentine’s Day. Some are reflecting being brokenhearted or yearning. Some, males, are feeling the pressure. I don’t know of many people who give a lot of thought to a Valentine’s present for males. Of course, in part, that is because as a rule we are so easy to buy presents for anyway, and often so easy to please. If a spouse gets new lingerie, and it’s red for the special day, then this was a most successful holiday.

Men are in real trouble on this holiday. If we get the requisite candy and flowers, we are not being creative. Lost as to what is a proper gift, we may hear something on the order of: “if I have to help you with what to get me, then it’s not as meaningful.” Possibly worse, we get told that a loved one does not want anything special for the holiday, and if we believe them, then we have hell to pay. I grasp that women often want to see that some thought has been put into a present. They may we even want it to reflect some time and effort tot tailor it to their specific preferences. Too often, it can be a test for listening. If something was casually mentioned as being desirable, then men are expected to have filed it away for just this purpose.

Of course, the main disquiet on Valentine’s Day comes from those who wish to be in a relationship and are not. On the 14th it may well seem that the whole world is in love, with very few exceptions. It heightens loneliness. It is a shot across the bow for those who have recently lost a love to death. Few days are such a shocking reminder of the radical change in one’s life.

The church is not a big help to folks on dealing with romantic holidays, or romance in general. For instance, the Song of Songs has been used to get at the intimacy of God and the people of god. At its basic level, it is a love poem. I read parts of it at a renewal of vows ceremony and the groom blurted out: “that stuff is in the Bible?”

The Church is correct that romantic love is playing with dynamite. The church is so afraid that the unmarried will play with that dynamite that it has laden romantic love with too many hazards, too many negatives. We keep love a safe abstraction, or we try to wall it off from the realm of romance. We do well to recall that some stories that surround St. Valentine would be ones where he delivered notes of love. Other stories say that he married people in love, even though soldiers were not permitted to marry. Some say that he signed letter, from your Valentine. Others link it to a Roman festival around his feast day when young ladies would deposit their wishes for love in a large urn and males would court them when they drew their note form the urn.

Yet, the Church invites and invokes the dynamic, dangerous presence of the Holy One in worship and indeed in our own frail selves all of the time. With all of the talk of celebrating life in the church, we can celebrate the glories of romantic love in its intrinsic terms. Also, Scripture uses the intimacy of romance to try to build a bridge to the love God has for us and we for God, at least at our best. Zelda Fitzgerald said that “no one, not even poets, can measure the love a heart can hold.” As Valentine’s Day approaches, that is a worthy aspiration for the church, to explore the capacious human heart.