When the
Roses Wither: St. Valentine’s Day When the Roses
Wither: St. Valentine’s Day When the Roses
Wither: St. Valentine’s Day

When the Roses Wither: St. Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, so I did a little video about it this week and sent it to the Mentor Groups as our Tuesday whole-school Celebration of the Word (our usual venue of Saint Mary and Saint Peter’s Church was unavailable as it was being used for photographs).  Gratitude to Caroline (Heaven) who reminded me on Monday that Valentine’s Day was coming at the end of the week, and to Ed Sheeran who sang for us! As with one or two of the less well-known saints of the early Church, the biographical details we have for Valentine are a bit sketchy, which is the main reason why Valentinus (which means worthy, strong or powerful) was removed from the Church’s General (i.e. worldwide) Calendar of Saints in 1969.  He is still celebrated, however, in local churches that have a devotion to him - places like Terni and Rome in Italy, Malta and Dublin.

A major tradition surrounding Valentine developed from texts in the 8th century. He was a priest or bishop from Terni, which is in southern Umbria, near the border with Lazio and about 50 miles north-east of Rome.  Ministering in Rome in the third century CE, Valentine died a martyr’s death under Emperor Claudius II, who was known as Gothicus after defeating the Gothic invaders in the Balkans in 269.  More ominously, he was also known as Claudius the Cruel because of the tyranny under which his people lived and his lust for power and land.  He got Rome into so many wars that he couldn't recruit enough soldiers to fight them!  The Cruel One (he must have been bad to get this epithet because it is not as if any of the Emperors were particularly nice!) believed that unmarried soldiers, without ties to wife and kids, would probably be more willing to fight harder and sacrifice their lives for the Emperor than would married troops.  Claudius, therefore, passed a law prohibiting the betrothal or marriage of young men who wanted to enter the military.  Valentine thought this extremely unjust and strategically unwise long-term and so, in courageous contradiction of the Emperor, he performed clandestine marriage ceremonies for soldiers and their beloveds before the men went off to war.  (I think there's something a tad ironic about the Roman Church in the past standing up for a man’s right to be both married and the possessor of a life’s vocation…!)  Anyway, this may be how Valentine became the patron saint of young lovers. He was caught, sent to prison for defying Claudius and sentenced to death. The story has it that while in prison, he fell in love with the gaoler’s daughter and just before his 14th February execution (the Cruel One had him clubbed to death!), he sent her a final note signed “from your Valentine”.

Within a few generations of Valentine’s martyrdom, the Catholic Church was putting together its calendar of saints and stuck him down for the 14th of February.  No one really knows for sure why that date was chosen.  Some say it was the date he was executed and some that this date was already a day of celebration, due to the ancient belief that birds (owls and doves, but especially lovebirds) began to mate on that date.  A more pragmatic and credible rationale may be that it was an attempt to “baptise” (i.e. make Christian) the pagan feast of Lupercalia that had previously been celebrated on that date.  This particular day of festivities had been a day of celebration and prayer when the city petitioned the Roman divinities for health and fertility throughout the Empire.  Their prayers were accompanied by purification rites known as the Februa.  The 14th February was, to all intents and purposes, a massively popular, city-wide and full-on orgy!  Anyway, as I have already said, in 1969, when the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were taking place, Valentine was removed from the calendar of saints due to a paucity of reliable biographical information. In its own way, then, the secular world still remembers tomorrow a feast tangentially associated with the ancient Christian witness to the notion of self-sacrificial and committed love that will always find a way.

Romance is, it goes without saying, a fantastic experience to be enjoyed when possible.  But what happens when the roses wither? As our OCR A-level students know, the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison cell in 1943 to a young couple getting married: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”  Anyone who has been married, or a priest, or a teacher, or committed to anything for more than five minutes knows that we need something deeper than feelings to sustain promises.  Positive emotions and the feel-good factor don’t last forever in anything that is long-term!  It’s one thing to go on honeymoon with someone; it’s something else to be with them decades later!  It’s one thing to work in a soup kitchen once a year or to put a few quid in the poor box and quite another thing to be Dorothy Day (our sixth formers know who she is) for nearly half a century.

On any given day, our feelings say we don’t want to be nice to the poor, or our other half, or work colleagues!  This is where little habits come in, which we can call rituals.  Couples who stay together for more than five minutes have to have little rituals that sustain them in their relationship when the feelings aren’t supporting that connection. “Good night!” before bed or “Good morning!” in the morning; a little perfunctory peck on the cheek as one leaves for or comes home from work; “How was your day?” These are ritual gestures that say, “I love you!” when the emotions are silently screaming obscenities at them in our heads!  Some might call this empty ritualism, even hypocrisy, because it is so devoid of feeling.  Well, yes, it may be sometimes, but I suspect we think this because we live in a culture addicted to feelings: “If I’m not feeling it, I don’t have to do it!”  But if we lived by that maxim consistently, we would never achieve anything in life - never pass an exam, never train for a sport, or learn our lines for the play, or write a book or build a committed relationship.  We achieve things often in the face of feelings.  Yes, there is such a thing as empty, meaningless, hypocritical ritualism - in religion, in long-term relationships and in the way we act at work, to name just three areas - but most of the time we depend on these little rituals, the small gestures that get us through the bitter, angry, desert times in life, until the good feelings return.  Any long-distance runner knows that it ain’t good feelings that get you through the pain barrier in the middle or at the end of the race.  You need years of rehearsed training strategies for that!

On this saint’s day, we should raise a glass to and celebrate the warm, fuzzy feelings of romantic love - and also remember that Valentine teaches us that love is much more than that.  Love is sticking at it in self-gift for the other. Many non-religious and religious people are living out these heroically virtuous (i.e. saintly) qualities of Valentinus in everyday commitments! Happy Valentine’s Day to them and to all, and have a great half-term!