By: Fr. David Ducote (TEC New Orleans)
Ahhh! Love is in the air. At least, that is what all the flowers and cards and chocolates are supposed to be about. Today is Valentine’s Day, which in our world is a celebration of that love the Greeks called eros, or “romantic love.” While there is nothing inherently wrong with this type of love (which has been given to us by God so as to draw man and woman together in that holy bond of marriage and fulfill his first command for man to “be fruitful and multiply”), it is really another type of love that we should be celebrating today.
Valentine’s Day is actually the day we commemorate a saint, St. Valentine. Not much is known about St. Valentine, and the stories we have about him may actually be about two different people. But based on tradition, Valentine was a priest in Rome during the 3rd century. He was eventually arrested for his Christian faith during a period of persecution and put on trial, but after healing the judge’s blind daughter, he was released. The judge and his whole family converted and were baptized. (One version of this story says that he left the little girl a note that he signed “Your Valentine.”) Soon after, he was arrested again and this time was not so lucky. But rather than renounce his faith, he professed his love for Jesus and was beheaded on February 14, 269.
This form of love, the love that compels a person to lay down their life for someone else, is what is known as agape, and this is the characteristic form of Christian love. It is the love we see Jesus himself demonstrate by laying down his life for us on the cross, and it is this form of love that Jesus asks all of us to show when he says, “No greater love is there than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It is this love we see demonstrated in the martyrdom of St. Valentine.
It is also this love that we enter into on each TEC retreat. On TEC, we reflect on the Paschal Mystery, which is the mystery of Jesus’ suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. TEC retreatants enter into this mystery for themselves as these events are broken up into Die Day, Rise Day, and Go Day. I recently went on my first TEC retreat this past January, and one of the most meaningful parts of the retreat for me was the Covenant Rite. We don’t normally think about covenants too much today, but they were very important in ancient times. Covenants are kind of like contracts, but rather than being an exchange of goods, covenants are an exchange of people. We see covenants between people and their king where the king promises to protect and take care of his subjects and the people promise to be loyal to him.
God does this too when he enters into covenant with us, saying, “You will be my people and I will be your God” (see Jeremiah 31:33). And it was by dying on the cross that Jesus entered into his final definitive covenant with us. But another form of covenant that we are more familiar with is marriage. As a result, covenants are also declarations of love: the romantic love of a man and woman, but also the agape of a husband and wife who lay down their lives for each other just as Jesus did for us. Thus we could say that agape is covenant love. We renew this covenant and profess our agape for Jesus at every Mass.
So while the rest of the world may be focused on romantic love today, let us take some time to focus on that love demonstrated by St. Valentine by renewing our covenant love, our agape, for Jesus.
