This year’s celebration of Ash Wednesday is remarkable because it coincides with Valentine’s Day. One is to commemorate the approach of Christ’s passion and death and the other is the day of romance named after St. Valentines, a Christian martyr, dating back to the fifth century.
Originally, both celebrations have profound spiritual underpinnings. Ash Wednesday is an important feast in the Christian calendar because it marks the first day of fasting, repentance, prayer and self-control that will be the main theme of Lent. It is a stark reminder of man’s mortality; that everything is fleeting and transient. At the end of the day power, fame, education and wealth are inconsequential before the throne of the Supreme Judge. Everyone will be judged in accordance to how well he live the Gospel or if one is a nonbeliever, how well he abided by his own conscience and his innate understanding of natural laws. It opens up the Lenten Season which culminates in the resurrection of Christ known as the Easter Sunday. On Ash Wednesday ashes are blessed during Mass, after the homily and then “imposed” on the faithful as a sign of conversion, penance, fasting and reminder of human fragility and mortality.
On the other hand, Valentine’s Day commemorates (at least during the early days of its celebration) the martyrdom of the Christian martyr St. Valentinus. While originally heavily laden with spiritual overtones, Valentine’s Day has evolved into a purely secular celebration, now mainly focusing on the exchanging flowers, chocolates, dating and other romantic expressions.
Yet for all the differences in how we celebrate these two feasts, they are in essence complementary as they both share a common thread—love. In this sense, the two celebrations are closely related. Archbishop Soc Villegas reflects that Ash Wednesday falling on Valentine’s Day gives us a good occasion to dig more deeply into the meaning of love as much as to correct kindly our wrong notions of love. Christ remains the central figure in these two celebrations. Shorn of its secular trappings, Valentine’s Day is as much a day for love as Ash Wednesday. As Archbishop Villegas said, the real symbol of love is not Cupid with shooting arrow but Christ hanging on the cross declaring in that action at Calvary that “There is not greater love than to die for your beloved. The real day of love is Good Friday when evil attempted to kill Goodness Himself but instead received the vengeance of forgiveness and mercy. The vengeance of God is mercy. The law is no longer retaliation but compassion.”
Even acts of suffering and self-denial that we are required to undertake during Ash Wednesday are not empty symbols but are acts of love in themselves. Archbishop Soc explains: “The food we do not eat or the meat we abstain from must be given to those who practically fast everyday due to extreme poverty, enduring inhuman hunger. Fasting and abstinence are not exercises of will power. We eat less so the hungry can have more. We enjoy less so those who suffer may receive some comfort.”
Love is best expressed through suffering with your loved one or suffering instead of your loved one just as what Christ did on the cross—the supreme expression of love. To illustrate: St. Maximillian Kolbe was imprisoned in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp during WWII. Towards the last days of his life, men were chosen to face death by starvation to warn against escapes. St. Kolbe was not chosen but he volunteered to take the place of a man with a family. As a result of his selfless act, St. Kolbe was subjected to extreme forms of torture, starvation and finally injected with poison which caused his immediate death. By offering his life, he had shown that self-denial and suffering can also be expressions of love. The world teaches us to repudiate suffering and self-denial at every opportunity; to avoid the cross whenever we are presented with one. Yet, there can be no salvation without the cross. It is in continuously loving our family and neighbors even when they prove to be difficult to go along with, in accepting our difficult situations that we best express our love for God, our neighbor and ourselves.
The ancient Greek had diverse notions of love, and two of which are eros and agape. Eros means “love, mostly of the sexual passion” while agape denotes the “love of God for man and of man for God or love for everyone. Sadly, nowadays there is overemphasis on sexual love and concupiscence so that even the meaning of Valentine’s Day is distorted and is now mainly associated with sexual passion. But the ancient Greeks found this form of love dangerous, fiery, and irrational form of love. The other form of love is agape which loosely translates love of everyone or selfless love. In Latin, it is translated as caritas or “charity.” In today’s secularized societies people have become less caring and empathetic. During his ministry, Jesus commanded his followers to love one another in the sacrificial way he loved them. This command was new to them, a radical concept in the context of his disciples’ cultural setting. Jesus’ followers were different from the others because of their mutual love, or agape. Perhaps, it is time to revive and reintroduce the concept of agape and unconditional love to our families and our communities —and this is only possible if we center our life on Jesus Christ.
Happy Valentine’s and a holy Ash Wednesday everyone!
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