Needless to say the stores have been full of Valentine's Day merchandise, and the media have snippets of Valentine's Day stories squashed between the latest Republican and Democratic debates. The Washington Post has a piece on the secrets of marriage longevity, with interviews of couples who have been married fifty-eight years, sixty-five years, and other numbers that make our marriage seem relatively young. The Guardian has ramblings on being single and the joy of not being with the wrong person, on the better sex one has if married (written pseudonymously, and so I, too, take the Fifth on this one), and on the over-expectations, hype and let-downs of of February 14. NPR has a piece on the shady origins of the day in some Roman festival of beating young girls with animals skins to make them fertile. Who'd have guessed it!
Valentine's Day is big business. Americans alone will spend $1.76bn this holiday. But not a cent comes from me. The truth is Jane and I have never celebrated Valentine's Day. When we were kids, St. Valentine's Day—as it was then known—was about sending an anonymous card to someone you had a crush on. When you got fixed up with someone, there was no longer a need to send the anonymous card. We've been fixed up for a long time, so we have never sent cards. I suppose we have been bemused bystanders to the holiday.
It's not that I'm against romance. Far from it! It's just that the transformation of a childhood bit of fun into a capitalistic love fest passed me by.
The first book that Jane and I wrote together, The Kiss of Intimacy, was about the romance of the soul with the divine. Mystics in a long tradition have often likened the search for God as a romance, with all the ups and downs and ins and outs of romantic tryst. We followed suit, taken by the lovely Jewish poem The Song of Songs. Doubtless, twenty-one years later we would write the book somewhat differently. Yet it still helps some folk. We hear from time to time of study groups using our little book, and there follows a brief run of them on Amazon. I dare say, since then our love has matured, just as our understanding of the divine romance has nuanced and shifted. Yet the theme—love at the heart and the goal of all that is—remains for me just as strong, probably stronger.
Iris Murdoch, in her many novels, gives a hint that romantic love, at its most intense, makes the lovers see the world differently. The sky is more blue, the grass more green, the world more alive, ordinary people more lovely and lovable. Eros is transformative for good, and therefore profoundly moral—contra to Immanuel Kant, who thought eros pathological, and contra to Anders Nygren who thought eros mean and animalistic, far from the divine. For Murdoch, eros opens the veil to the possibilities of utter goodness; and utter goodness is divine.
Amid the relentlessness of the political season here in the USA, Valentine's Day has reminded us that "love is the answer." A romantic delusion? A cynical way to further capitalism? A glimpse of transformative possibilities? You choose.
+Ab. Andy