Valentine's Day

Dear People of Christ Church,

Today, I find myself thinking about Valentine's Day, coming up next week. Your parish leaders will spend the evening at vestry, so no candlelight dinners for us. The parish hall is currently decked out in red and pink-thank you to our faithful decorating elves!-so that will have to be enough.

Something about Valentine's Day makes me a little cranky-there's so much in our culture's glorification of romantic love to be critical about. Maintaining real, honest relationships is hard work; those early, heady days of romance give way to the different graces of constancy and faithfulness, but those aren't celebrated nearly as enthusiastically, precious as they are. Chocolate and flowers are not proof of dedication and affection, and their absence isn't indicative of much, either. And, of course, it's possible to life a fulfilling life as a single person, but the TV ads for flowers don't tell you that. It's another excuse to buy stuff.

Our church has not done a great job of countering this; St Paul's memorable formuation, "Better to marry than to burn" casts marriage as the lesser of two evils for someone unable to control their lust. Western culture tends toward dualism-man/woman, spirit/body, good/bad. Historically the Christian tradition has a terrible track record for celebrating the gifts of the embodied experience including, yes, the gift of our sexuality. The cultural conversation around the meaning of same sex marriage hasn't just unveiled a lot of homophobia, it's also reminded us how impoverished our thinking is about the meaning of heterosexual marriage. The liturgy for marriage talks about it as a lifelong covenant, the profundity of which is not decreased given the number of marriages that end in divorce. Companionship, raising children when the partners are called to it, and a whole host of other benefits also ensue-but what it means for society is more complicated, and a conversation we're just beginning to have. In December of last year, a study was released in which 40 percent of respondants found that marriage was becoming "obsolete:" a complicated question if ever there were one!

The Bible doesn't offer us much clear advice. In her new book, Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire, the Rev. Jennifer Wright Knust talks about how there's just no way to get a sexual ethic out of the Bible, its pronouncements and ideas all being too contradictory and too out of context to be useful. In a patriarchal culture, the ownership of women tended to dictate a lot more than the real discernment of God's desire for our flourishing. (See below for some links to articles and an upcoming lecture by Knust)

So where does that leave us, peering into another Valentine's Day? 3 years ago in this space, I talked about the origins of "St Valentine" vis a vis Saints Cyril and Methodius, whom our official church calendar give us for February 14 (read here).The question then, as now, of doing theology comes down to honest reflection about what life is like. Where is God revealed in our lives, in all their complicated, messy glory? When has a tragic divorce lead to new life? When has the love of God been revealed in friendship as well as romantic love, in fifty years of marriage as well as a new engagement, a single person's devotion to community and individual contemplation? Where does our faith call us to take a critical stance on our culture? When do we just enjoy the candy hearts? Thanks be to God that we are part of a community of conversation, as well as conviction.


Blessings,

Sara+