Celebrating Valentine's Day!

"Every human being is loved by God the Father. No one need feel forgotten, for every name is written in the Lord’s loving heart." (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)

Valentine’s Day can be an awkward feastday for many. Single people often feel isolated. People in relationships feel obliged to show their affection for their significant others in a way that may seem totally manufactured. Valentine’s Day is considered one of the most polarizing holidays in the year. You are either a complete believer in what Valentine’s Day has come to mean, a celebration of love, or else you are sick and tired of the marketing frenzy that surrounds the event.

Valentine’s  Day can also be a hard time for some people who feel alone or have been hurt because of relationships or are afraid to open their hearts to love and trust someone. But what is love at all!? Often we can romanticize love too much and yet the abrasions of love have inspired many a great writer. From Shakespeare to Jane Austen, writers have at some time or the other dwelt upon the anguish called love. The reality is love hurts! Remember St. Valentine was a martyr! Out of love for Christ whom he refused to deny, Valentine was beheaded.

Whilst we may be not be martyred for our faith, discipleship asks of us to die unto ourself and live for Another and for each. True love is selfless and unconditional, true love knows no boundaries, it is not judgmental, it is kind. It is enough to look at St. Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 to see the kind of love we are called to.

We all carry the deep desire to be loved. Those of you from my generation might remember the song from the Backstreet Boys:" I don't care who you are, where you're from, what you do, as long as you love me." Unconditional love only gives, but does not take or expect anything in return. Essentially, everything proceeds from Love and tends towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made known to us through the proclamation of the Gospel, through the sacraments, through each other. If we welcome these with faith, we receive the first and indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making us “fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it and we joyfully communicate it to others.

Love can be messy and involves risk-taking. We see this in today's Gospel where Jesus heals the leper, a man ostracized from society and religious practice because of his sickness. Jesus reaches out and touches the man- something very dangerous because of how contagious leprosy is. One can not help but think of the current parallels with COVID 19, our modern day 'leprosy'. Because of the immense gift of the healing love of Jesus, the man is restored to health in every way. If you get a chance, check out the scene of the healing of the leper in Episode 6 of 'The Chosen', truly heart-moving! 

But how can we ‘stay in love’? For me, one of the best Valentine gifts is the possibility to go for Adoration and sit with Jesus! It gives that quiet space to keep falling in love, to work through the difficulties, to be aware of how marred my human love can be, to cultivate the sense of being loved because this is something which we can easily forget. Like every relationship, our relationship with the Lord needs to be constantly nourished, worked at, dialogued through. In the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, we remember the young girl Liesel has difficulty in believing in love and more so, that she was loved. Interesting enough, the novel is narrated by Death who doesn’t do much to encourage her in believing the contrary. In fact we read, " no matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment." The devil can often try to convince us that we are not loveable or not it is not worth risking loving others. Don't let this voice suffocate the voice of God who continuously keeps saying to you: "You are my Beloved." 

It is true- often in life we cannot recognize when love begins but we definitely know when it ends. We focus on how we have been disappointed and we are unable to heal. We see how sin can warp innocent love and turn agape to eros. However forgiveness is an intrinsic part of unconditional love. When you love someone deeply, you find the heart to forgive. You can overlook the blemishes because your love overcomes the flaws. Martin Luther King Jr. beautifully put it in words when he said, "He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love."
Unconditional love never imposes because the more we try to twist them to fit our own image, the more we end up loving the reflection of ourselves we find in them. In reality, the only image we should see in them is that of Christ, even if the image is a work in progress, we respect the efforts and uphill struggle that each person makes in striving for holiness.

I know I have quoted this on other occasions but it never ceases to be old for me and it is fitting to end with this: “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,

what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.(Pedro Arrupe).

Happy Valentine's Day to you all...and be kind to yourself this day and remember you are loved!