Today’s feast celebrates the rarest of coincidences: a Christian saint with a secular cult. Thousands of letters and cards and emails circulate throughout the world as I type, all bearing a singular valediction: from your Valentine. How a third century martyr obtained a modern status as a by-word for romance is as obscure as Saint Valentine’s own biography. Or biographies: as many as three early martyrs shared that name.
One account tries to make sense of both. Saint Valentine, on death row, heals and converts the only child of his jailor. As he’s dragged off to be executed, the saint leaves behind a note addressed to the child, instructing them in the faith for which he’s about to perish. It’s an invitation to share in the life of Christ, a life and a freedom that finds perfect fulfilment in imprisonment and death. It’s signed like this: from your Valentine.
Witnessing the syrupy morass we’ve since made of his feast is enough to make anyone cynical. Saint and celebration seem so far removed that their relation feels like parody, not tribute. Romantic pair-bonds moved Coleridge to dithyrambic ecstasies: they left Jesus Christ unmoved. Whatever religious content Valentine’s day retains is attenuated to the point of invisibility. Martyr’s blood paled long-since to a dilute, greeting-card pink.
All of that is true enough. But it’s not the whole truth. And leaving the saint and his feast in antagonism is, in an important way, to sell Christianity short. You can deny God; you can’t avoid Him. All those thousands of letters and cards and emails carry a meaning that – at least in outline – is identical with Valentine’s own, the sense of which is the whole message of the Gospel, the word of God. That’s what the Good News is: someone telling you they love you.
For most of us, it’s a message we spend our whole lives trying to hear. But we can catch echoes of it everywhere. In the people we love; in the beauty of the world around us; in poetry, music, words. And, like Valentine, we discover in the liturgy of the Church, in prayer and in thanksgiving, a returning sound: a response, renewed with the seasons, undiminished by the years.
Joining in that response; giving it shape and form with word and gesture; repeating it in the pattern of our days: that’s the life Valentine, so long dead, invites us to join him in. We love because He first loved us. We pray and give thanks; we write letters, send cards. We hear and we reply. That’s what the Christian life is: someone saying I love you too.