Valentine’s Day Is For The Birds!

On February 14th, love will be in the air. It’s Valentine’s Day. A flurry of activity will take place in schools, offices, restaurants, theaters and homes across the globe. Valentine cards will be exchanged.  Flowers will be delivered; chocolates and candies will be given.  Couples will share romantic candlelit dinners, glide across dance floors, share romantic evenings at the movies or take in a special Valentine’s Day concert. A young man may kneel before his sweetheart, present her with a ring and ask the question, “Will you marry me?”  Why all this activity on this day?  Why are love and marriage linked with the middle day of the second month of every year? These verses from poem by John Donne (1571-1632) provide a clue:

Hail Bishop Valentine! whose day this is;
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marryest ever year
The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove;
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomarcher;
Celebrations
Thous mak'st the blackbird speed as soon,
As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon . . .
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine!

These lines from Donne’s poem express a belief held by Europeans that birds begin to choose their mates on February 14th. This belief is traced back to medieval times.  Male birds from each species would begin to engage in courtship rituals aimed at wooing a mate. Some males perch themselves on the tallest tree and sing their birdsongs with wanton abandon. They hope their lyric melody will fall on the ears of a mate. Other males attract their female counterpart with displays of colored feathers and acrobatic flight. They hope that the eyes of their mate will catch this grand display. Each winged suitor takes a risk when he steps out in the name of love and sings his song or engages in a display. He may be rejected by his lady, no matter how beautifully he executes his courtship display. He may catch the ear or the eye of a predator and shorten his little life. Yet deep within each species of male bird, God has planted a desire for a counterpart, a little wife, together with a specific ritual aimed at attracting his female counterpart.  Within each female of the same species, God has planted a desire for a male counterpart and the ability to receive and respond to the courtship ritual displayed by her male suitor. God gave the pair the ability to come together in love and reproduce themselves with young. The desires God planted in these little creatures transcend all their fears and inclinations toward self preservation. The mated couple builds a nest. The female lays her eggs and incubates them. The young are fed and nurtured. One day the parents urge their young out of the nest so that a new cycle of life can begin again in the bird kingdom.             

Donne’s poem paints a beautiful word picture. The birds of the air are described as members of a congregation, a parish, who worship God by obeying his command to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. (Genesis 1:22). This parish includes members of a choir who sing praises to God. Each year, when a new cycle of life begins and the birds mate, their unions are blessed and sealed by God’s representative, their pastor, reverend and priest, one known as St. Valentine. This is no accident. Valentine was a saint of the Church, a bishop. It is believed that Valentine dared to defy the wishes of the Roman Emperor Claudius II. ‘Claudius the Cruel’, as he was known, waged war in the far reaches of the empire. These wars required a steady stream of recruits.  When the stream of recruits petered out, Claudius issued an edict which banned all engagements and marriages, so that young men could not forge ties with young women that would keep them home. Valentine, a bishop, continued to marry young couples despite the Emperor’s ban. The Emperor had Valentine arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, his jailors used torture to force Valentine to worship the Roman gods, renounce his faith in the Christian God and to stop marrying young men and young women. Valentine refused to renounce his faith in God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, or to stop marrying couples.  He hung onto these words of Jesus: "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." (Mark 10:6-9). As God’s representative on earth, it was Valentine’s calling to marry couples in God’s name and to invoke God’s blessing on their unions.  Valentine believed it was God’s most passionate desire to unite couples as husband and wife in a lifelong process beginning with the rite of marriage and continuing thereafter as long as they both live.  The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes provides a visual image of God’s binding action in the life of a couple: “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). The three stranded cord evokes an image of the husband and wife as two strands of the cord, held together by the third cord, faith. Faith and trust that God brought the couple together for the purpose of becoming one; faith and trust in God’s Word, the Holy Bible - a light that guides the couple on their journey through life; faith in the work of the Father and the Son in the couples’ redemption: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  (John 3:16); faith that the couple can emulate and embody Christ’s sacrifice for the world, as the couple sacrifice for one another and their children; faith that, through the work of God the Holy Spirit in the couple’s lives, they can be different, that is, transformed; and faith that they can experience and share peace, joy, love, faithfulness, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self control. (Galatians 5:22-24)

Valentine believed with all his heart, soul and mind that the Roman state and its imperial powers and edicts could not change God’s will and God’s work in the world. He refused to be conformed to Rome’s ideas and understanding of the place of marriage and family in their society. In response, the Emperor had Valentine executed on February 14th 270 A.D.  Bishop Valentine went to be with his Maker that middle day of the second month of a new year. Valentine believed in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so death was not the end for him. What more fitting a calling for Valentine in his heavenly home than to bless the nuptials of God’s winged creation who worship their Heavenly Father by and through their partnerships, their passion and their struggles that give birth to a whole new generation? 

St. Valentine reminds us that, like the birds, we can show our love for God and worship Him through the gifts God has given us: ourselves, as men and women, together with the love and desire God placed in the hearts of men for women and women for men; our partnerships, expressed in the estate of marriage; our passion, expressed in committed physical and emotional unions; our struggle together to build lives that reflect God’s love; and the children our partnerships give birth to - the next generation. Come discover these gifts that God has given us and learn how we can use these gifts to God’s glory. Come worship God with us. Come learn how we too, can worship God every day.

In Christ’s love,
Pastor Ed Skutshek