Roses, chocolates, and...ashes?

February 15, 2024

Roses, chocolates, and … ashes? Perhaps I wasn’t the only person experiencing cognitive dissonance yesterday, as the calendar threw together Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. Despite a murky history of St. Valentine, the day marks a long tradition of celebrating romantic love by writing love letters, even if in our consumer society, many are more inclined to head to store to express our love (last year Americans spent about $26 billion on Valentine’s Day).
 
Long ago St. Augustine observed, “We become what we love.” The objects of our attention and desire shape our perceptions, personality, and priorities. I imagine many of us work at a university because we love to learn and to be surrounded with others who share our love of learning. While Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love, Lent is a season of 40 days set aside to practice prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as a way to be freed from what gets in the way of love for God, self, and others.
 
Each spring, I teach an upper-level course on marriage and family. I start by asking my students what “love” means to them. This is no small task because love is kind of like the junk drawer in the kitchen, a catch-all word that we can use to describe how we feel about people, pets, places, food, beverages, music, art, and a range of inanimate objects. The way we talk about love is strange. It can be the only thing we need or something we fall in or out of. bell hooks suggests the problem is that we think of love too much like a feeling that is fickle or one choice among others. hooks proposes it’s better to think of love as an action: “love is as love does.”
 
This is what St. Paul had in mind when he described love as patient, kind, unselfish, honest, and able to “endure all things” (1 Cor. 13:1-13). While this is a popular reading at weddings, Paul was not thinking of romantic love. He was interested in the kind of love that sets people free and builds robust and diverse communities of co-equals.
 
Whatever your feelings about Valentine’s Day or Lent, maybe this season can serve as a time to be freed from what keeps you from loving well and being loved well, or what gets in the way of meaningfully connecting with others. Lent has often been framed as a time for individual spiritual practices like making more time for the Examen, to reflect on the consolation and desolation of our day and set an intention for tomorrow. But adopting love-as-action as our lens, perhaps we can practice an Examen that considers how others are faring, or how we can better reach out to—or be reached by—those in our life. Love isn’t mere action; it is the power to be both transformed and transformative, bringing hope and healing to those who share it. As I see it, that’s even better than flowers or chocolate.

Dr. Marcus Mescher
Associate Professor, Theology Department