It is just fascinating how much of our society, our worldview, and our customs stem from faith in the triune God. Take today, for example: it's all about flowers, candy hearts, red, love, etc. Right? Well, as the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus once said: "In the absence of truth, power is the only game in town." We are not empowered by such things today, rather we are held captive to them by the lack of truth in understanding our own history.
You see, Valentine is really not a love story, nor is it particularly appealing. It was not a holiday created by the greeting card companies, (though in the absence of truth it has certainly been perverted by them), nor is it a holiday at all, really. It is a commemoration of the gruesome death of one of the church's saints. Valentine (the real Valentine - now a Saint of the Christian church) lived his life during rather tumultuous times. What little we actually know of his life is often supplemented with legend, but there is enough to know to point us to a basic picture of the man, apart from legend.
So who was Valentine? He was a priest and physician in Rome, during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. Rome was still very much a pagan empire, and polygamy, polyamory, and all manner of sexual expression abounded. Valentinus the priest advocated for Christian couples to A: Get married in the church; B: only marry one person, in accord with the instructions of sacred Scripture; and C: Remain faithful within that marriage, thus going against the societal norms. The church has believed and taught since the time of Christ that marriage was to be between one man and one woman only. The emperor was neither Christian nor held to Valentine's views of marriage.
So when several bloody battles were fought, and the emperor found it hard to find and recruit new young men who would leave their wives and families to fight, he ordered that all weddings be cancelled. Valentine, as a Christian and a priest, could not obey this order because of faith and conscience. Yet because marriage was now illegal, they were conducted secretly. Eventually, of course, Valentine was arrested, and while in prison was tortured extensively. Many legends surround him during his imprisonment. Eventually, however, he was sentenced to a 3 part execution of first being beaten, then being stoned, and finally being beheaded, which was carried out on February 14 269 AD. His remains exist today at the church of St. Praxedes in Rome, where they were purportedly transferred centuries ago.
Much of what else is believed about Valentine is more in the realm of legend than fact, including how this Saint's day morphed into its' generic and (dare I say it?) pagan meaning today. This would also include a purported letter to his sister shortly before his death, in which he signed it "with love, your Valentine." And from this legend, and his defense of Christian marriage comes a generic nondescript holiday today that is all about "love," candies, flowers, and the like.
I for one would "love" to see it return to it's origins, because at the heart of it all is Christ. And if we truly want to talk of love today, all of our imperfect love, and all of our misconceptions on it are completely overshadowed by the perfect love of God in Christ Jesus. If we want to celebrate love, and if we want to tout it as an extreme virtue that, as a recent campaign slogan said "trumps hate," then this would be the perfect place to start. It was Jesus, after all, who said "But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you..." So yes: Love one another, not in some generic sense but as we have first been loved by God. Happy Saint Valentine's day.
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