For me, nothing sets the mood for Valentine’s Day like this sentence by Charles Panati: “The Catholic Church’s attempt to paper over a popular pagan fertility rite with the clubbing death and decapitation of one of its own martyrs is the origin of this lovers’ holiday.” What a great sentence. I love it.
Okay, lest you think there was a saint who used to bop around from nightclub to nightclub (you know, ‘clubbing’) and died dancing through a low-clearance doorway, here’s the history:
Valentine was a bishop who lived in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Claudius II (c. 270 A.D.). This emperor, Claudius, was a bit ‘off’, and at one point he issued an edict forbidding marriage. The empire was having trouble finding soldiers, so Claudius apparently decided this was caused by marriage, what with soldiers not wanting to leave their wives and kids. (Personally, I wonder if the short life expectancy had anything to do with the recruiting problems.) And Claudius forbid marriage. Bad idea.
Valentine, for his part, objected. He invited young lovers to come to him in secret, where he joined them together in marriage. Claudius, of course, found out about this “friend of lovers,” and he had the bishop brought to the palace. Claudius attempted to convert Valentine to the Roman gods, but Valentine refused and attempted, himself, to convert Claudius. It didn’t work. On February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed (hit on the head), stoned (with rocks), and then beheaded. Ouch. He died as a result. Anyhow…
According to tradition, there is another story linked with Valentine. While he was in prison awaiting execution, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. (Ah, sooo romantic!) And through his unswerving faith and love, he miraculously restored her sight. (I wonder how she felt about him after she saw him. Tradition doesn’t say.) He signed his farewell message to her “From Your Valentine,” a phrase that would live long after its author died.
Well, that buries St. Valentine, but not the holiday. The Roman Catholic Church, many years later, attempting to tone down the pagan elements of a popular holiday named Lupercus, resurrected the story of St. Valentine and superimposed his story on the holiday. The Lupercian festival, held annually in mid-February, was devoted to the god Lupercus and included a lottery to assign young women to young men for mutual entertainment. (Yep, entertainment.) This festival had been going on a long time and was extremely popular with the masses. (Gee, I wonder why?) But there were problems. The festival tended to be immoral. (Go figure.) So the church in A.D. 496, led by a stern (and some thought prudish) Pope Gelasius, outlawed the Lupercian festival.
But Gelasius was not an idiot. He knew the people loved both the festival and the games of chance. So he substituted a new tradition for the old. Into the boxes that had once held the names of available and willing single women, he placed the names of saints. Both men and women extracted slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn. And the spiritual overseer of the entire affair? Its patron saint, of course, Valentine.
And so, with reluctance, and the sigh of many a young person, the Romans relinquished their pagan festival and replaced it with the Church’s holy day.
Okay, that’s fun and a little weird. But what can we learn from all this?
I think we can observe, first of all, that Gelasius’s intentions were good. He was attempting to influence his society for Christ by replacing the pagan practices with godly ones. We can and should applaud his attempt. Second, we can observe that he approached the matter wisely. He saw that it was unlikely folks would completely abandon a festival they had enjoyed for years. Rather, he examined that tradition and sought out the amoral elements that could be perpetuated (i.e. the games, the mid-February timing), and replaced the immoral with the moral. Third, he sought to transform a custom from a negative to a positive. He replaced the practice without merely rejecting it.
As we live our Christian lives ‘in the world, but not of it,’ we can use a similar strategy. We can observe the worldly practices of our society and seek to transform them. One way we can do this is by identifying the enjoyable amoral elements of those practices and being careful to reject the immoral without unnecessarily rejecting the amoral. And, then, if we want lasting change or influence to take root, we can seek to replace the immoral practices. Not merelyreject, but replace.
If we do these things, I suspect we will be showing both love for God and love for our neighbors, and that would be a great way to observe Valentine’s Day this year, wouldn’t it?
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