The world celebrates St Valentines Day on February 14th. It is a day set aside to honor the gift of love and the loves in our lives. The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately 190 million valentines are sent each year in the US. When the valentine-exchange cards made in school activities are included the figure goes up to 1 billion. In the United States Valentine’s Day is a major source of economic activity, with total expenditure topping $18.2 billion in 2017. The world loves the gift of love. Does St Valentine’s Day fit in with the season of Lent which begins in the West shortly after on February 18th this year?
Lent is a season of solemn Christian religious observance in the liturgical year in preparation for Easter. Lent is observed by many of the Christian religions. It echoes the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan. The relevance of the number forty is seen many places thoughout the Bible:
Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai with God. Recognized as the time Moses fasted while receiving the Ten Commandments.
- Elijah spent 40 days and nights walking to Mount Horeb, sustained by divine food.
- God sent 40 days and nights of rain in the great flood of Noah to cleanse the earth.
- The Hebrew people wandered 40 years in the desert while traveling to the Promised Land as a time of trial and testing.
- Jonah’s prophecy of judgment gave 40 days to the city of Nineveh in which to repent or be destroyed which they did through fasting.
- Jesus retreated into the wilderness, where He fasted for 40 days, and was tempted by the devil.
- It is the traditional belief that Jesus lay for 40 hours in the tomb.
The number 40 holds profound spiritual significance in the Catholic tradition, symbolizing a period of testing, purification, and preparation. The three pillars of Lent are:
- Prayer
- Fasting
- Almsgiving
Prayer can be looked on as focusing our love on God through sacrificing our time to pray and talk with God. Fasting as focusiong our love on self in a way that recognizes that true love of self involves dieing to our inordinate devotion to our desires and comforts above all else. Almsgiving as focusing our love on others recognizing all are children of God and deserve our help and assistance however is needed and that we can provide.
This is where Lent ties in with St Valentine’s Day. True love involves sacrifice. Mohandas Ghandi included in his list of “The Seven Social Sins” the one of Worship without sacrifice. Jesus’ whole earthly life was one of sacrifice culimnated with His greates sacrifice of his body and life thru His Passion and Crucifixion. As Jesus said recorded in the Gospel of John – ” No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Here is a poem that illustrates this idea of love and sacrifice intimately joined – Love Is Sacrifice Poem at Poemhunter.com.
Jesus expounded on this direction of love and sacrifice as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?
For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay everyone according to his conduct.
Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
This plays out daily in our world through the grace of God. People sacrifice the multiple possibilities and freedoms of their life to marry a single person and dedicate their life to them. Parents sacrifice their time, money and energies for their children. Religious sacrifice their entire lives to bring about the kingdom of God. Single people sacrifice their time and money for careers and charities to build up the society into the kingdom of God. People sacrifice their time to pray and worship God.
In Lent we are gaining so much more than what we “give up”. Our sacrifices and penances can be offered as united with Christ’s Passion as a gift to the Father. In the Mass Eucharistic Prayer the priest says:
May he make of us
an eternal offering to you,
so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect,
especially with the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,
with blessed Joseph, her Spouse,
with your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs
(with Saint N.: the Saint of the day or Patron Saint)
and with all the Saints,
on whose constant intercession in your presence
we rely for unfailing help.
This Lent may we make ourselves an offering to God the Father. In It’s a Wonderful Life, the line “He says it’s the chance of a lifetime” is spoken by Mary Hatch to George Bailey during the phone scene with Sam Wainwright. It had implications for George to sacrifice his dreams to marry Mary. The same can be said of this Lenten season. It is the “chance of a lifetime” to dive fully into the meaning of the season and fill it with acts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving united with Christ as gift for the Father.
A common practice in Lent is to do the Stations of the Cross, following Jesus’ journey on the walk to Golgotha. The Fifth Station of the Cross is “Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry his cross”. This fact is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Imagine Simon’s joy when he realizes that he helped Jesus to carry the cross. That joy can be ours when we help Jesus by carrying our Lenten crosses for the Body of Christ and the salvation of the world.
The world is full of stories of God’s grace providing us with the ability to show this sacrificial love. Here is one that I recently came across.
Princess Alice (25 April 1843 – 14 December 1878) was a daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of the United Kingdom. The royal family believed in strong family values. Alice and her siblings wore simple clothes and slept in plain bedrooms. Alice was curious about the world outside the royal court. She enjoyed visiting people who lived and worked on the estate. Once, she even sat in a public pew at Windsor Castle to see how ordinary people worshipped. In 1854, during the Crimean War, eleven-year-old Alice visited London hospitals. She saw wounded soldiers with her mother and older sister. Alice was very sensitive and cared deeply about other people’s problems.
On July 1, 1862 Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse. After the birth of their two children and pregnant with their third, a war broke out between Austria and Prussia. Hesse sided with Austria and Alice’s husband, Louis, went to command to Hessian cavalry. Despite being pregnant, Alice took on royal duties. She made bandages for soldiers and prepared hospitals. An armistice was signed and Louis returned home. He and Alice visited the wounded together. Alice spent much time helping the sick and injured. Alice was a friend of Florence Nightingale, who was able to collect and send money from England, and Alice used Nightingale’s advice as to cleanliness and ventilation in hospitals.
In November 1878 the household fell ill with diptheria : a disease which Alice knew, from her nursing experience, to be highly infectious and potentially deadly. The disease spread to Alice’s children Alix, Marie, Irene and Earnest. Then to her husband Louis. Husband and four children between life and death,’ Alice wrote to her mother… ‘May God protect them and teach us to say, Thy Will Be Done.’
Alice’s child Marie became progressively worse and died from the disease. Alice was devastated. She kept Marie’s death a secret from her other children for weeks. But it became her lot to break to her son, quite a youth, the death of his youngest sister, to whom he was devotedly attached. The boy was so overcome with misery. He was inconsolable. Devastated, Alice broke her own strict quarantine rules to hug and kiss him to comfort him. She shortly thereafter became seriously ill with the diphtheria caught from her son. Alice died on December 14, 1878 at the age of 35 from diptheria. A life lived with care and concern for the sick that was cut short with the outpouring of a mother’s love for her child.
The week starts out with St Valentine’s Day as a reminder of love often associated with romantic love. As the week progresses to Ash Wednesday and Lent we are called to an even deeper, more meaningful love. That of sacrificial love — a selfless, freely chosen act of willing the good of another over oneself, perfectly modeled by Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. It requires giving without expecting return, mirroring Christ’s unconditional love through service, suffering, and the gift of self.
Returning to “It’s a Wonderful Life”, the angel Clarence shows George how meaningful and beneficial his seemingly inconsequential life trully was. Likewise our sacrifices and penances this Lent have meaning and benefits way beyond the seemingly hidden and personal significance. Every act of goodness works to build up the Body of Christ and bring about the Kingdom of God. May we take advantage of this chance of a lifetime and in our suffering draw closer to Christ by asking for His strength, perserverance and forgiveness. Have a Blessed Lent – the season of Love!
Postscriptum: In the movie “Its a Wonderful Life” in the bar scene when George Bailey prays to God, it was not scripted that Jimmy Stewart cry during that scene. However here is what Jimmy Stewart had to say in an interview years afterwards.
Stewart explained that he followed the script, pleading, “God…God…dear Father in heaven…I’m at the end of my rope. Show me the way.” And as he said this, Stewart said he “felt the loneliness of people who had nowhere to turn,” and his “eyes filled with tears.”
“I broke down sobbing,” he said. “This was not planned at all, but the power of that prayer, the realization that our Father in Heaven is there to help the hopeless, had reduced me to tears.”
Feature image: Chopanito, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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