I believe in doing what I can<\/i>
\nCrying when I must, laughing when I choose<\/i>
\nHi, ho, if love were all<\/i>
\nI would be lonely . . .<\/i>
\n~ Noel Coward, \u201cIf Love Were All\u201d<\/p>\n
Happy (Demoted) Feast of (One of Several Possible) St Valentine(s)!<\/p>\n
Today Americans take a break from vilifying the medieval anti-love Catholic Church to celebrate love with a medieval Catholic custom. The saint for whom this day and the mushy cards, candy hearts, and chocolate diamond necklaces so central to it is named is lost in the mists of obscurity. There were a number of men named Valentinus (from the Latin word for courageous\u2013itself rooted in the word for heart) listed in the Church\u2019s early martyrologies, but we don\u2019t really know anything about them, other than that this date was assigned to commemorate at least one martyred Valentine. The feast itself was removed from the Roman calendar in the 1960s, along with those of other popular saints (Christopher, Philomena, Barbara) for whom the historical record is sparse or confused.<\/p>\n
The association of this day with love is actually of medieval origin, when Valentine\u2019s Day was literally for the birds. Popular custom marked this as the day when birds chose their mates (not a bad guess, from the increase in the pre-dawn chirping of baby birds the northern hemisphere will experience in a few weeks). Geoffrey Chaucer wrote \u201cThe Parliament of Fowls,\u201d a long poem about the romantic cavorting of the gods on St Valentine\u2019s Day, and that dragged the little winged boy with the arrows into it. Chaucer\u2019s inspiration was his own inability to deal with the mystery of love, as he admits in his prologue:<\/p>\n
The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly\u2013by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep. For albeit I know not love myself.<\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
With Chaucer\u2019s avian prompting, February 14 became the day when lovers of all species chose their true loves. Shakespeare has Theseus, encountering the bewitched lovers of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i> asleep in a heap on the ground, make a chiding reference to this custom:<\/p>\n
Good morrow, friends! St Valentine is past;<\/i>
\nBegin these wood-birds but to couple now?<\/i><\/p>\nReading back into legend, medieval Catholics assigned St Valentine the patronage of lovers. An invented hagiography makes him a bishop imprisoned for defying the law by marrying Christians. Because the whole quagmire of the Church\u2019s teaching about marriage and who and what it\u2019s for is still a place I can\u2019t go without much more prayer and fasting than my life allows for now, I will just nod gently in the general direction of that<\/i> irony: The Church used to be in the business of marrying people the law said weren\u2019t marriageable. Huh. (Probably the Roman empire thought allowing monogamous lifelong Christian marriage between two people who loved each other would be an insult to the proper Kardashian-length, free, open, loose, cynical unions favored in society. Oh, wait . . .)<\/p>\n
Poor Valentine, whoever he was, lost his head for love (that\u2019s his flower-crowned skull in the reliquary shown at the top of this post), and now we\u2019re supposed to do the same every year. This makes it very hard on those of us who never quite got the hang of it. We Charlie and Charlene Browns, whose doily-covered shoeboxes remained empty on our desks on this day. We Noel Cowards, poet laureates of the wry and witty lonelyhearts<\/a>. We Elphabas, who know the wisdom of not wishing<\/a>, because we\u2019re not and will never be That Girl.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not whining. I\u2019ve loved and been loved far more than I deserved to in my life, and I\u2019ve come to terms with the fact that, as far as relationships go, it\u2019s my vocation to be the transitional object\u2013to help people move on from disastrous relationships to soulmates, without ever being either. I\u2019m the baton passer in this relay, and I\u2019m just thankful I keep it moving in the right direction. It\u2019s nice work if you can get it, but it\u2019s not the stuff of which Valentines are made.<\/p>\n
Which is why this day made it so easy for me to be a Gnostic for a while. There\u2019s a Gnostic Valentine, too, one with a much better-documented history than the marrying bishop, even if the documenting was mostly done by his enemies. Valentinus was the Gnostic Christian bishop\u2013a runner-up for pope, even\u2013who formulated the best-known worldview of those who rejected this world as the delusional playground of a demiurge, a false creator. Christ, the Logos (Word) of God, came into the world to enlighten people. According to Valentinian Gnosticism, much influenced by Plato, what we experience of life and truth and love in this world are but false and distorted shadows of the reality knowable only by a few\u2013the bliss of mystical union with the God beyond all knowing, which Valentinus called the sacrament of the Bride-Chamber. No valentines here? No problem. Transcend this tinseltown and you\u2019ll experience real ecstasy. Gnosticism, like monastic life and standup comedy, is a big draw for those who are disappointed in love.<\/p>\n
Now that I\u2019m back in the fold, I can see that there\u2019s a deep strain of Valentinian thought running through the writings of the more orthodox Christian mystics as well. The tradition of using the language of human love to attempt to capture the unspeakable joys of God\u2019s love can be found in Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila (Bernini makes her mystical ecstasy an X-rated valentine, with that Cupid of an angel and his golden arrow), John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux\u2013and indeed, goes back to the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. That\u2019s because it\u2019s true that The Greatest Love of All is not any of our Valentines, be they lifelong partners or quick baton-passers, and why the best of this world\u2019s Valentine\u2019s Day gifts will fade. We are meant for the One who is<\/i> Love, and if we are lucky the loving we do here will prepare us and those we love to bear the bliss of that Bride-Chamber, the marriage made in heaven for each of us.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, I leave you with a Gnostic-tinged valentine from my favorite poet, and wish you a love that\u2019s not Time\u2019s fool, borne out to and beyond the edge of doom.<\/p>\n
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
\nAdmit impediments. Love is not love
\nWhich alters when it alteration finds,
\nOr bends with the remover to remove:
\nO no! it is an ever-fixed mark
\nThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;
\nIt is the star to every wandering bark,
\nWhose worth\u2019s unknown, although his height be taken.
\nLove\u2019s not Time\u2019s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
\nWithin his bending sickle\u2019s compass come:
\nLove alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
\nBut bears it out even to the edge of doom.
\nIf this be error and upon me proved,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nI never writ, nor no man ever loved. \u00a0<\/i>\n~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I believe in doing what I can Crying when I must, laughing when I choose Hi, ho, if love were all I would be lonely . . . ~ Noel Coward, \u201cIf Love Were All\u201d Happy (Demoted) Feast of (One of Several Possible) St Valentine(s)! Today Americans take a break from vilifying the medieval anti-love […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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