Valentines Day. The day for the loved-up and the loving. The day when hope and longing coalesce in an inescapable, incandescent burst of desire. The loveliest, sappiest, soppiest, most intolerable day of the year.
On Valentine’s Day we talk about true love but half the time we don’t know whether it’s true or not – and feelings, let’s face it, are hard things to trust.
So on Valentine’s Day we fall back on what we are told is romantic and we go out and buy it, sterilized, homogenised, tied up, sealed and packaged, with all the life and love in it crushed and made tawdry.
I’ll admit that’s a pretty jaundiced view, but bear with me….
I reckon the problem is that, on the day when romance reigns, many of us are tired, grumpy, busy and just not feeling it.
Weirdly, for me, it’s not unlike the experience of church. Some weeks, I really don’t want to be there. Sometimes I get there and I feel as if there’s no-one listening when I pray. Sometimes, I’m just not feeling it.
But then, as the service starts, something happens. I fall into its familiar rhythms and the responsibility for me to be feeling anything at all is lifted and I find myself simply pulled along in the flow of it.
That greatest of all contemporary Christian thinkers, Sister Monica Joan from Call the Midwife, said a wise and true thing in this regard:
“In chapel, we need not choose our thoughts. The words are aligned like a rope for us to cling to.” Sometimes it really is the words and not the thinking that I need.
And words are at the heart of Valentine’s Day, because even when it’s said out of habit, to be told ‘I love you’ is enough to make the most jaded heart soar and cause the most sluggish pulse to race. And to say, ‘I love you’ is a gift.
So this Valentine’s Day, even if you’re tired, even if your mind is elsewhere: say the words. Even if you’re busy, if you’re irritated and annoyed: say the words. Even if you’re holding out for someone to say them to you first: say the words. Say ‘I love you’. Say it. Give someone you love a rope to cling to. And perhaps you can cling to it as well.
The image is a detail of two amorini on the frieze of a wedding casket of wood and bone made in the Embriachi workshop, Northern Italy, c.1400. A similar casket is in the V&A.