St. Valentine’s Day reflections

• I’m very sleepy as I write this. A sud­den snow­storm and tem­per­a­ture drop has absolutely forced me (oh darn!) to hole up in the den and turn the space-heater up to 90. The real­iza­tion that this is the last day to have any dairy prod­ucts before Lent meant I filled up on some fine cheesy pota­toes and thick creamy soups at cof­fee hour. And since it’s also Valentine’s Day, Greg and I each picked out a spe­cial sweet indul­gence to have. Mine was a slice of banana cream pie, and now all the caf­feine in my teapot can’t fight its way through the starch-and-sugar fuzzi­ness and fend off the strong impulse to nap.

  So it’s both­er­some that what I thought would be a quick lit­tle blog entry to do — check­ing up on the real saint whose day we’re cel­e­brat­ing — turned out to be complicated.

  For one thing, we don’t really know a lot about him. There was so lit­tle his­tor­i­cal data that the Catholic Church took him out of the Gen­eral Catholic Cal­en­dar in 1969, though they still acknowl­edge him to be a saint. In the East, we don’t com­mem­o­rate him until July 6, when he is named together with oth­ers who were mar­tyred under Emperor Claudius in about 260.

  But here’s a quick roundup of what I got from a lit­tle explor­ing on the Web:

  • Some of the accounts men­tion that St. Valen­tine would per­form Chris­t­ian mar­riages at a time when the Roman emperor had for­bid­den it. But there’s a lit­tle con­fu­sion there, since the Catholics rec­og­nize three dif­fer­ent saints named Valen­tine, one of whom is a priest, whereas the Ortho­dox saint is a presbyter.
  • In all the accounts, St. Valen­tine is said to have cured his jailer’s daugh­ter of blind­ness, which caused the jailer and 46 oth­ers to con­vert. In rage, the emperor had them all beheaded.
  • Some­how a story made it into the account that St. Valen­tine sent a card to the jailer’s daugh­ter and signed it “From your Valen­tine.” That led at least one source to assume that he had fallen in love with her, but that’s just a guess.
  • No one seems really sure how St. Valentine’s Day began to be asso­ci­ated with roman­tic love. One the­ory about why the day began to mean so much is that the Chris­tians were con­ve­niently using the feast day to sup­plant the pagan fes­ti­val of Luper­calia in mid-February, a time when cou­ples would be matched up for the year. Another idea is that it arose out of the idea that Feb­ru­ary 14 was the day that birds would begin mat­ing. But there’s no solid evi­dence for either one of these.
  • How­ever it hap­pened, the saint’s day went from being rel­a­tively unim­por­tant in the early cen­turies to mer­it­ing spe­cial men­tion in a Chaucer book in the 1300′s. And when courtly and roman­tic love began to become more pop­u­lar than arranged mar­riages and the like, the day assumed more impor­tance.
    From the His­tory Chan­nel write-up(**):

  • The old­est known valen­tine still in exis­tence today was a poem writ­ten by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was impris­oned in the Tower of Lon­don fol­low­ing his cap­ture at the Bat­tle of Agincourt.
• It seems as though the day didn’t start to be cel­e­brated in the ways we’re famil­iar with until the 1700′s, grow­ing in pop­u­lar­ity in the 1800′s and, of course, becom­ing greatly mar­keted and com­mer­cial­ized in the last two centuries.

But lest we lose sight of the name behind the day, I came across this point in a talk by Bp. Demetri (***) that puts things in per­spec­tive a little.

St. Valentine’s knew that he could be arrested for his belief and Chris­t­ian min­istry. He knew that refusal to rec­og­nize the Roman gods would result in impris­on­ment. And he knew that if he con­tin­ued to wit­ness to Christ in the prison he would make his cap­tors angry, and would prob­a­bly result in his death. But he con­tin­ued, because he loved the Lord and his fel­low humans. He was will­ing to risk his life in being an instru­ment in the heal­ing of the blind girl’s infir­mity, and in doing so spread the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who needed to hear it. …

In the Gospel accord­ing to John, we read: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13) St. Valen­tine demon­strated this love when he laid down his life for his friends. This is the kind of love that Valentine’s Day is really about.

For Chris­tians, Valentine’s Day is a day to cel­e­brate the love of God. That love was shown to us in the life and death of Our Lord and the life and death of mar­tyrs like St. Valen­tine. This is a love with a depth of com­mit­ment that goes deeper than any other love in that it sur­passes even the desire to sur­vive. It is the love of a God will­ing to suf­fer so that his crea­tures could know sal­va­tion. It is the love of a man will­ing to risk death so that oth­ers can know eter­nal life.

And that is some­thing I can con­tem­plate long after all the nice pink cards and candy hearts have left the scene. So Happy Valentine’s Day, every­one, and Happy Cheese­fare … and a blessed Lent to us all.

(Icon source: Come and See Icons)




Related posts:

1. St. Sophia with Faith, Hope and Love
3. An addi­tional Cross-word
4. Praise for the Creator
5. C. S. Lewis on the love of God