Cyber Sermon February 2004 2004-02-14

"From Your Valentine"

�The soul that can speak through the eyes can also kiss with a gaze.� -- Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

�Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love, you will find that you are left holding only yourself.� -- Leo Buscaglia

�Reason and love are enemies.� -- Corneille

Valentine�s Day. A day of love and romance for some, a day of bitterness and jealousy for others. I�m not sure I understand this day, really. People seem to have this urgent need to have someone to lavish their affections towards on this day; and those who don�t either wonder what�s wrong with them that they don�t have somebody, or resolve to get drunk and wallow in being alone that day.
Where did all this come from? What happened to make this day, out of any other day in the year, stand out as a day when everyone feels like they should love somebody besides themselves for a while?

The history of Valentine�s Day

Today�s Catholic Church recognizes three different saints named Valentine, or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred, making it difficult which St. Valentine the day was actually named for, by Pope Gelasius around 498 AD.
One story is of a priest named Valentine who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than married men with families, he outlawed marriage for young men below a certain age. One crop of soldiers, coming right up.
Disgusted by the injustice of the law, Valentine defied the emperor and married young lovers in secret. When his actions were discovered, Emperor Claudius ordered his death.

Although the actual truth behind the stories of St. Valentine is murky, the legends themselves make him an appealing, romantic figure. One such legend says that while in prison, Valentine fell in love with a young girl � the daughter of the jailor � who visited him during his imprisonment. Before his death, he allegedly wrote her a letter, signing it �From your Valentine,� thus creating a phrase that would eventually make Hallmark lots of money 1800 years later.

While the origin of Valentine�s Day was to commemorate the death or burial of Valentine, we do not celebrate on the 14th of February to commemorate the anniversary of his death.
The church, in another attempt to establish authority over the people it ruled, chose February 14th in order to �christianize� the celebration of the pagan Lupercalia festival.
In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year.
Later in the day all the young women in the city would place a love letter in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a letter out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage, and marked the beginning of the tradition of giving �valentines� to a loved one.
When Pope Gelasius declared February 14th as St. Valentine�s Day, this Roman �lottery� was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. In it�s place, he established Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, though the tradition of a �lottery� never really fell out of practice until the 18th century.

Fortunately, during the Middle Ages, it was believed that the middle of February marked the beginning of birds� mating season, helping to keep fast the idea that the middle of February � marked by Valentine�s Day � should be a day for romance.
By the 1800�s, celebrating February 14th as a day for romance, marked by giving your loved one a �valentine� had caught on throughout Europe and America.
In 1840 Esther Howland struck a goldmine by producing the first commercial American valentines. Today, nearly one billion valentine cards are sent in this country, making it the second largest card giving season every year (Christmas being the first).

Commercial aspects of the day aside, there might be something to the idea that love is a season, that nature can affect, to some extent, how we feel towards people. Hell, maybe we just need the excuse. We certainly treat each other like shit most of the time, maybe a day set aside for love is just what we need.
Maybe we need more days set aside.

I�m not sure how to make a point out of all this. Make sure you tell someone how much you love them, I guess. But then, there�s no reason why we can�t do that everyday, now is there?

�If equal affection cannot be, then let the more loving be me.� -- W.H. Auden

�Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives it ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.� �- William Blake

�Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.� -- Erich Fromm