Celebrating a pseudo-holiday

"Eros need not forever be on his knees to Agape; he has a right to his delights; they are part of the Way. The division is not between the Eros of the flesh and the Agape of the soul; it is between the moment of love which sinks into hell and the moment of love which rises to the in-Godding." -Charles Williams

I don't believe in Valentine's Day.

It's not because I don't have a Valentine, either. I could care less about that. It's because the whole deal is a pile of shit, and a major loss for the culture as a whole. Andrew Sullivan, with whom I disagree 99.9% of the time, published this little gem a few years back, in which he lays bare the undesired (in our culture, at least) truth about romantic love.

But thanks to the civic religion of romance, we constantly expect more and quit what we have in search of more. For the essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit. It's all promise with the delivery of the postal service... More important, in a culture in which sex is increasingly divorced from procreation, it gives copulation a new kind of purpose, apart from pleasure. It sacralizes it, dignifies it, elevates it. Love, we're told, conquers all. The trouble is, of course, it doesn't. The love celebrated on Valentine's Day conquers nothing. It contains neither the friendship nor civility that makes marriage successful. It fulfills the way a drug fulfills -- requiring new infusions to sustain the high.

Now, I would never say that romantic love doesn't exist, or that it is a negative thing. In fact, it is good. However, when it is practiced or sought after as an ends in itself, and not as a means to or a beginning of something deeper (ultimately, caritas), it loses all its inherent value.

Isolated, romantic love has nowhere to go but down. The eros must be synthesized with the agape, lest we return to an empty pagan deification of desire, and miss out on one of the most profound mysteries known to man: the love of God. For that is what romantic love, in the correct context, gives us but the dimmest glimpse of, and a headstart to experiencing.

Being in love is like putting your eye up to a crack in the wall, and seeing a crack in the opposite wall, and squinting your eye to look through THAT crack at another in the NEXT wall, and so on. On the other side of a thousand or a million or a billion walls is the most brilliant light you will never be able to imagine. All you feel of it is the faintest sliver of it warmth - it is unbelievable that even that much is able to reach you through so many countless barriers.

Even so, the warmth and joy it gives you is the most beautiful feeling you have ever experienced. You can only imagine that being in the presence of the light itself would be the greatest feeling in the universe. You and your beloved will work with all your being to ensure that the other experiences it, and along the way you will empty yourselves into each other to accomplish just that. That is the direction in which romantic love points us - toward perfect charity.

Sadly, that is the direction that is totally lost on Valentine's Day.

Today's recommended reading: Deus Caritas Est. It's short and sweet.