The Feast Day of Saint Valentine--AND the Feast of the Transfiguration--on a Sunday in a Pandemic Year

This isn't the first day that Valentine's Day falls on a Sunday. It is the first day for most of us that Valentine's Day falls on a Sunday where it isn't safe to assemble the way that we once did. It is also the Feast Day of the Transfiguration, which falls on the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Catholics celebrate the Transfiguration feast day on August 6, and we could spend lots of time analyzing whether or not Saint Valentine deserves to be a saint or deserves to have a feast day or whether or not this day that celebrates romantic love should be mentioned in church services, the church services that a lot of us won't be attending in person for reasons pertaining to disease or snow.

Once I would have written a blog post about how we hope our earthly relationships would transfigure us. In fact, I've written variations of that blog post over and over again. Once I would have written about all the ways we wish we could be transfigured--but do we want to do the work?

Today I'm thinking about this past pandemic year and all the ways it has changed us and our society profoundly. I'm also thinking about the dangerous message that so many of us hear about love, the messages beamed at us that tell us we are not worthy of love, that we must make profound changes so that we can find the love we crave.

I think about what God says about Jesus on the mountain: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” It reminds us of what happened at the baptism of Jesus, that declaration of love at the beginning, before Jesus has done a thing in terms of ministry. The good news of the Christian gospel is that God feels the same way about all of us.

Many of us (all of us?) crave this kind of complete love. Imagine: we don't have to transform ourselves or bend ourselves into pretzel shapes or become someone we're not to be worthy of this kind of love. We don't have to do a certain set of practices. We don't have to behave in a certain way, in ways that we know we can't sustain. We don't even need to say a formal acceptance. God just loves us this way.

Many of us spend our whole lives yearning to find this kind of love from our fellow humans, and occasionally, we find it for a bit--but most humans find this kind of love unsustainable, particularly when we're trying to love humans who aren't on their best behavior.In the past, I've worried about how Valentine's Day might make people feel excluded. I've thought the church should just ignore this holiday that is designed to make us feel like we must spend gobs and gobs of money to demonstrate our love. But maybe I've overlooked an essential message that preaches well.

Every day, ideally, should be Valentine's Day, a day in which we try to remind our loved ones how much we care--and not by buying flowers, dinners out, candy, and jewelry. We show that we love by our actions: our care, our putting our own needs in the backseat, our concern, our gentle touch, our loving remarks, our forgiveness over and over again.

And sustained by the love that sustains in our homes, we can go out to be a witness that glows with evidence of God's love to the dark corners of the world. Every week, we are reminded of the brokenness of the world, and some weeks the world feels more broken, unfixable. But we can kindle the fires that can transform the world.

On this Valentine's Day, let us go out into the world, living sacraments, to be Valentines to one another, to illuminate the wonders of God's love to a weary world .