VALENTINE

anniversary of his or her birth. In fact, an overwhelming number of these dates are not known. Rather, it is the day the person “shuffles off this mortal coil” (to quote a Catholic playwright) that the Faithful will remember.

Saints who lives were recognized as being holy in service to God and others, became remembered as the “day” of that month. Sort of similar to those roaming Romans of the time calling their days the Ides of June, the Calends of August, or the Nones of May.

Think, by way of example, of the Feast of All Soul’s Day, called ‘Hallowe’en,’ in our culture (by way of Ireland and England). Think of Christmas, from ‘Christ’s Mass,’ the Catholic rite on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. Think of getting that green beer on Saint Patrick’s Feast Day, or Easter, or Ash Wednesday or Good Friday: these are the days’ Western culture inculcated into our lives.

But don’t think of how Japan has syncretized our Holiday into young girls in short, flouncy costumes of red trimmed with white, hawking buckets of the Colonel’s fingerlickin’ good fixins’! It’s cultural appropriation!! Call the PC squad!!

So this day, for reasons that will unfold, became known as the

Feast Day of Saint Valentine in the Catholic world by way of the Catholic calendar.

But the thing to know, the thing to understand is simple: this whole Valentine schmaltz is for the birds. Well, because of the birds. You see, those crazy French and English evidently believed that around the midpoint of the second month of the year, birds began mating and started appearing as pairs. Ah, and the poets, like Chaucer in his ‘Parliament of Fowls,’ started spreading the news:

“For this was sent on Saint Valentine’s Day When every fowl comes there to choose his mate.”

And then John Gower, another poet of the Middle Ages, got into it too. French poets. Italian poets. Poets of the Iberian Peninsula too. Hey, what’s love got to do with it? Pious tales started sprouting up around the good Bishop. He married soldiers and their amicae contra to the fiat of the Emperor. He voted Republican (hey, just checking to see if you’re paying attention!).

But we do have the Paston Letters! The Pastons were landed gentry of Norfolk, England, who wrote about everything to everyone and kept copies. It is the largest extant collection of correspondence from the 15th century. In one of the letters, Dame Elizabeth Brews is writing to her cousin about things matrimonial:

“And cousin mine, upon Monday is Saint Valentine’s Day and every bird chooses himself a mate . . . I trust to God that you shall speak to my husband and I pray that we may bring the matter to a conclusion.”

The conclusion, of course, being the match of her cousin to her daughter.

So the day is Saint Valentine’s Day. And on that day a folk tradition began that birds begin to pair. And there is proof incontrovertible

(from Poets, of course, solid citizens and honest all) that many in those times and societies knew the tradition and day associated with the proclamation of love.

You may be ‘spiritual’ and not ‘religious’ (excuse the sarcasm) and posit some notion in your cranium that Love is a thing to be honored or adored or recognized. Fine. And Libras are homebodies who are privy to the secrets of Feng Shui and power Crystals.

So, how does an increasingly secular society syncretize its religious past? Simple; make it an industry.

Now add good old American know-how and the Almighty Dollar. This is why we are inundated with the Red and White on ‘Love Day.’

All of us are born into a culture that has accreted traditions, customs and expected behaviors. It is the nature we nurture, and because we want to belong (look at the sales of Tampa Bay Buccaneer merchandise, as a recent example) we tend to believe things that fit the mass narrative.

No one can avoid the tsunami of ‘Love Prepackaged:’ the long stemmed, hothouse red roses, sugared chocolate “truffles” in red cordate boxes, sentiments preprinted (so as to prevent one from having to think “WHY it is I love her”, Heaven forfend!) and stuffed teddy bears with embroidered hearts inscribed “Wuv You!” on their carcinogenic stuffed chests.

Holy Guacamole! This is ‘love’?

Well, why not try something different this year?

Let us surprise one another every other day with time well spent, not money ill spent. Learn to bake her favorite dessert; learn to cook her favorite dinner. Plant and care for a rose garden for him or her for the whole year. Send a note of appreciation, that’s a kind of love, folks, to those you interact with at work or who serve others during these crazy times.

Or better yet, read this poem out loud (you may alternate stanzas) and contemplate its message: Love is in serving one another without recompense, without boasting. Love is being “the better nature your nature is prone” (I love quoting myself, it adds spice to the article).

Oh, and about that ‘matchmaker’ from the 15th century:

Shortly after her mother’s letter, the young ingénue wrote to her husband-to-be, addressing her missive “unto my rightwell beloved Valentine, John Paston Esquire.”

We all would do “rightwell” to act kinder and more loving to one another.

The Feast of Saint Valentine

This gentle cam, our centric part, atrophies with neglect.

To accord it impulse to stop and start we swear falsehood does it bisect, we swear falsely, yet cross our heart.

So common for the cordial sort, its fated purple clings to high strung throbs who pull the strings

upon their sleeves when out they sport:

it’s so emotive when it bleeds in court.

A murmur immemorial bespeaks a spoken spark, hazardly held in hands pictorial, it signifies shunning the dark, signifies love sensorial.

It envelops to a lovingkind amid the rush about, cut from lace, or silk, or pen and ink lined, its emblematic of the route from hand to heart, from soul to mind.

So on this day refine your view in someone else’s eyes: spurn the self, and batter what it belies, to gather the letting go in you – to know Love’s not gesture but tried, found true.