A Peculiar Tradition

11 Feb 2010

February 14 is a marketer’s dream, a single person’s nightmare, a florist’s pay day, and ultimately, when you stop and think about it, a peculiar tradition.

For what are we actually celebrating on Valentine’s Day? And what are we looking to discover? Sure, ‘romance’ is the obvious answer, but what exactly is romance?

A recent blog on stuff.co.nz asked its readers this same question. The responses (all 104 of them) made for some intriguing reading. There were a couple of the conventional descriptions of romance: giving flowers, surprises of chocolates or jewellery, love notes and poems, and mystery weekends away. Yet by far the overwhelming majority of responses appealed to the little things in life as being the most romantic.

These responses included:

• ‘Warming up my side of the bed on a cold winter’s night’
• ‘The smile that spreads across my partner’s face when I get home’
• ‘Making me laugh every day’
• ‘Cleaning out the shower drain’
• ‘A cup of tea first thing in the morning’

And the list went on.

The small, everyday acts

Although all agreed that displaying ‘X loves Y’ behind an aeroplane is certainly a romantic action, respondents declared that the real fire of romantic love is sparked and kept alive through the small, everyday acts of selfless affection—the same acts that are so very easy to overlook. And the reason they are easy to overlook is that they require a shift in our day-to-day mentality. They’re not just one-off events that are simply switched on and switched off; they require a life geared towards lovingly serving the other person.

Jesus hinted at this description of romance when talking of love in general: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). And, as Jesus himself demonstrated, this laying down of your life could be in significant one-off events (for Jesus, this was dying on the cross) or, more often than not, in day-to-day expressions of one’s love for another (examples: Jesus washed feet, provided lunch and was always there to talk).

The three Valentines

Back to the peculiarity of Valentine’s Day; it’s an interesting fact that scholars have little idea who Saint Valentine was. They’ve pinned him down to three possibilities: all called Valentine, all martyred between 100 and 400 AD, and all found in the Catholic Church’s martyrology on February 14.

Little is known about these three Valentines—we don’t even know if they had wives—yet we do know they each died as Christian martyrs and therefore each epitomised this principle of love, that it’s about laying your life down for another (for them, it was for love of Jesus Christ).

So this Valentine’s Day let’s follow the three Valentines’ examples and love, not just according to the one-off, conventional methods of romance, but by laying down our lives, moment-by-moment for the ones we love—in the small things and the big. 

By Hayden Shearman (from War Cry magazine)