"Romance – The Divine Elixir"
Valentine’s Day comes this week, celebrated by a trip to a stationery or gift shop to select the right cards. Perhaps another trip to the candy or drugstore for heart-shaped sweets and an exchange of these, along with cards the children made at school, among family members and between romantic admirers.
The meaning of the day can be much more than this, but it's practically lost today to all but the young-in-love.
Well, where did it begin?
It began with religion. And religion began with the responses of human beings to a world they found mysterious, awe-inspiring, bewildering in its erotic powers: past understanding.
It was rooted in fear and ecstasy in the unquenchable power of passion, in magical acts for survival, and the necessary encouragement of fertility.
In ancient Rome a god, named Lupercus, lord of herds and fruitfulness and identified with Pan, was honored on the sacred festival day, February 15th, and he thereof was the father of Valentine’s Day one day later.
The rites of Lupercus took place in a cave in the Palestine Hill of Rome called the Lupercal. Two priests, the Luperci, sacrificed at the alter there a goat and a dog.
They touched their foreheads with the bloody knives and wiped the blood off the wool dipped in milk and then it was required of the two young men that they should laugh.
Having sacrificed the animals, they cut the skins into strips of lashes.
The Luperci would trace a magic circle around a settlement to keep off harm from wolves. In addition, they were filled with the power of fertility and would run through the settlement striking any women they saw with the lashes.
This was said to insure fertility and to cure sterility in women.
Until nearly 500 A.D. this strange festival continued in the Christian community, at which time it was changed to a purification feast.
The Lupercalian festival spread to old England and Scotland, February 15, the day, it was said, when the birds first chose their mates.
Some scholars do believe Lupercalian was the forerunner of Valentine’s Day on February 14th.
No one seems to know for certain the origins of our days of love tokens and Valentine cards, but St. Valentine appears to be the name given to various saints and martyrs of the Christian church.
Two festivals on the 14th were in honor of two priests, one a priest of Rome and the other the bishop of Umbria.
It is thought that one or both went from house to house leaving food for the poor, this practice evolving to the gifts and tokens of love.
Also, the day falls toward spring and its anticipation, linking that season of rebirth to the love theme.
Finally, out of the fog of antiquity, comes the tradition noted by Rockwood Museum in their Valentine invitations this year, that one of Sts. Valentine, a priest, on February 14, 269 A.D. was to be executed “for performing marriages in defiance of imperial order.” Whereupon, he "finished a letter to a young woman who had befriended him during his imprisonment," signing it "From Your Valentine.”
Now that is a romance, a story of adventure, of selfless devotion, a tale to whet the tragic imagination.
Not until the end of the 18th century, however, did what we think of as paper Valentines begin to appear. At first they were elaborately hand-written and might be presented in the form of a bill. Presented to Miss So & So, the bill asked for payment for such services as:
Paying sundry visits and attentions cost 75
Advice on courtship and matrimony with practical illustrations 180
Sighs and tender smiles 50
Compensation for doctor’s bills: palpitation of the heart, giddiness, and so on 300
These and other services, all totaling, perhaps, a bill for 1,000
1,000 Kisses
One such Valentine bill ended with the notice: “Payment having been long delayed, it is tenderly requested that settlement may be made at St. Bride’s Church by special license as speedily as possible, so do not send a cheque.”
Interestingly, in that strange age of public repression of sexuality, the Victorian Age, the Valentine card business reached its height.
The writers of one history of the period I have read believe that an increasing number of vulgar and satirical cards on the market and the growing popularity of Christmas cards killed the Valentines by the beginning of the 20th century, and we have seen them come back only as part of the general nostalgia craze for things past.
I don’t know about that. Growing up in an admittedly sentimental home, we found chocolate hearts under our overturned plates at the breakfast table every February 14th, and sending the cards was an annual happening where we lived.
Well, so what to all of this? What is significant enough about the syrupy business to bring its history into a modern church?
I suppose we might ask the same of Christmas, as it too has been thoroughly romanticized.
But I suppose romance is again in the American air, and I suggest that we might recognize it. And that we might recognize that the ways human beings have looked upon love have evolved through history. And that we can learn from what has happened. On top of this, we might also recognize that modern religion has been swinging back and forth between skepticism and a new romanticism, and aspects of both are not all bad – not all good either – but not all bad.
I have read in that harbinger of new truth by the week, Time Magazine, an essay saying that “the cool-hip chic that has held sway since the 1960’s with its scorn of sentiment and its do-your-own-thing code, is giving way gradually to something suspiciously like a new romanticism.” And I've heard a child- and family-study psychologist at Syracuse say, “Americans no longer want to be cool, they want to be hot.”
And that heat will require some faith, faith in romance. Falling in love does require faith, faith in ourselves because we create the love out of our own validity.
One writer for a family magazine abjures cynicism with the confident assertion that “we need romance in our lives as much as we need good food, warm beds, books, and music, for romance is the divine elixir that keeps us from despair.”
Is it so? I think not quite. Not entirely. Romantic love is relatively new on the human scene, and there were most certainly divine elixirs in human experience before it came along. But I do believe, as much as we snicker about it, heap the scorn of our sophistication upon it, and draw-up our shoulders into our frowns at the warm treacle of it, that we are still its beneficiaries as well as its victims and most of us do not want it, the memory of it, or the suggestion of it to go away.
Primitive peoples and the ancients, though they built rules around the dos and don’ts of human sexuality, did not think of it as we do today of human love.
It might have been magical, but it was rarely sentimental. It could be brutalized, or it could the wholesome and natural.
If we can accept the Bible as representing the attitudes of Jesus or reflecting the attitudes of those who wrote the gospels, they or Jesus had a wholesome attitude toward women and woman, taken then to be the center of sexual interest.
As a Jew he would probably have looked upon sex as a natural function, necessarily circumscribed by some customs and taboos against incest and appropriately regulated, as by marriage. But he would have seen sex as natural, god-given, and, in his eyes, birth would have been surrounded by a “halo of mystic sanctity” that it conveys to wholesome men and women.
So, in the scriptures we see him accepting children, as many about him did not, praising women who showed him kindness, as some of his own followers did not, and forgiving sexual excesses, as other would not.
Either these attitudes were held by a real Jesus or by real 15th century biographers of the man and the legend or by both. The important thing is that they were held, and they were held to be religious attitudes.
It was Paul who was bothered by the burning, by the power of sex, by women, by the flesh, by earthiness, and who transferred the locus of the highest love to the sky, to another world. Perhaps it was a corrective needed in the Greco-Roman world which schooled and variously repulsed the saint, after his conversion. For, in that world, while sex could be a simple pleasure, it could also be degrading and degraded, as today.
For example, Ovid, in 1st century Rome, said that an excellent time to arouse passion in a woman was while watching gladiators disembowel one another in the arena. Makes one wonder about some of our modern sports spectacles!
You have often heard that opposites attract. There is evidence in psychology and in history that often a feeling, a situation, a custom creates its opposite or seeming opposite. At a time in western society when women, by law and custom, were disposed of at the will of fathers and husbands, where a man was viewed as unmanly if he did not rape unprotected lower class females, where the church demanded subjugation of women to men, the strange phenomenon of courtly love arose.
It was not love at all but idolatry, an unconscious bringing back of the Great Mother cult, an abject humility and an unconsummated attraction to THE UNATTAINABLE MISTRESS, a faceless, history-less goddess – remote, cruel, and desirable. History, if we read it, tells us that old rituals can persist, disguised, long after the death of the phenomena that gave rise to them.
Old fertility symbols like wedding rings and the palms of Palm Sunday are with us still, their sexual connections largely forgotten. And women in some churches, who feel they must wear hats to church because that is the tradition, do not know that it goes back to covering the head to prevent seductions through the head by certain of the evil gods.
Likewise, at least sometimes, we still see men rise when women enter a room and certain of the men bombard the women in their lives with constant flattery or continuously run errands or perform menial tasks for them: remnants of courtly love, their origins unrecognized. When they are recognized, when some beliefs and practices are revealed as having arisen from some irrational practice of the past, people drop them. When they do, they often go too far, drop too much.
Science, skepticism, and the psychological revaluation brought us to the edge of the abyss, of loss of love and loss of religion.
Men and women were split between bold reality and the sentiments that made it livable.
So, on the bold side, you can read a Valentine message today full of cynicism about the love it pretends to desire:
The furtive sigh,
The blackened eye,
The words, “I’ll love you till the day I die,”
The self-deception that believes the lie,
I wish I were in love again.
When love congeals
It soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
The double crossing of a pair of heels
I wish I were in love again.
Now the pendulum swings away from the cynical view to the warmth of love, which again includes mystery and tenderness as a reaction against the crass and the cool. People are beginning to reject the steamier, seamier stuff once more. Much cinema and much of television comedy has been just plain gross. Not that smut is shocking: now its only bad art and runs to piddling, childish innuendo.
The body is now, again, becoming sacred.
In reaction, in another swing of the pendulum, surgeon Richard Selzer writes a book about surgery and it becomes a holy book. Not a book of romance but a book about love as compassion, emerging from the grisly details of illness and death.
He knows that “medical school cadavers are stored in huge underground vats, slung on racks like so many rumpled overcoats in a closet.”
He also knows that matter and the sublime are linked, that the soul is flesh, that “it is the marred and scarred and faulty that are subject to grace.”
One believes that Dr. Selzer is a kind of secular mystic, regarding his own compassion as “hard-won from years of bending over wounded flesh.”
And so he writes of compassion: “It gathers, rises from the streaming flesh until, at last, it is a pure calling, an exclusive sound, like the cry of certain solitary birds, telling that out of the resonance between the sick man and the one who tends him, there may spring that profound courtesy that the religious call love.”
It has always been love that has humanized life and religion, kept it alive.
It is another physician, James J. Lynch, author of *Broken Heart*, who tells us people die of the lack of love. Tells us we need – must have – dialogue, that essential element in every real social interaction: something he called the “elixir of life” itself.
And he reminds us, like a modern day prophet-of-love that what we have best to give each other is ourselves, through dialogue, a dialogue that must be based on trust.
Surely, in the highest religions, love has been central, love of human beings for each other and for their God.
Perhaps you do or do not use God language. If you sometimes do, maybe you can identify with this very human religious expression:
I
Love.
Love
Loves in me.
God is love.
God loves
In me.
I will worship God.
How?
By loving.
One does not abandon science or reject reason to feel this way. It is a case of “both and” or “yes, and there is more,” as when the scientist Schrodinger did not abandon physics when he said, “… however, that gleam in a child’s eyes involves more than light quanta.”
The universe made love. Attraction and repulsion are at its heart. Human beings have experienced its love as adoration, as caring, trust, compassion, dialogue, sacrifice, and romantic love.
Some sage has observed that “when anyone says, ‘I am beyond that,' you may be sure it is beyond him. Not because it must be beyond him, but because if he were beyond it, he would not say it.”
Sometime ago a member of our Community Church of New York lost his wife to cancer after nearly 29 years of marriage. He published a book as a tribute to his wife, a book of meaning and inspiration and full of romantic love for his wife and her memory. In it he published the Valentine messages he had written and sent to Louise over the years and this dedication:
“This book is dedicated to Louise Walker Joseph, wife, mistress, mother, and homemaker for almost three decades; my inspiration, strength, and my solace, who never stopped growing.”
Is it romantic? Plainly so.
Are such sentiments we express to the living heavy on the sweets? Yes. And that is good. Don’t we want to keep romantic feelings when we have them, and rekindle romance through all our years. We would be poorer without the best in romantic love. Some of our gloom, when it comes, can be dispelled by old notes, songs, poems, and memories of love.
We witnessed, for a time, the near obsolescence of sentiment, the harshest skepticism with regard to romance, the disappearance of courtship, the “stillness” before the final tremble of love.
But one wonders: did we drive out too much on our way to total and open frankness, open love, open marriage, open dormitories, open doors, open bedrooms, open heads – did we drive too much?
So much openness, everything fell out and left our very eyes cold from the lack of warmth inside our heads?
Love heals, motivates, softens criticism, covers wounds, helps us survive it all. It may not conquer all, but what is conquered can have the feel of a terrible emptiness without it.
God of our being and becoming:
Inner light of compassion, trust, and love;
One thing let us pray to forget;
To put out that light.
Amen.
jake wrote
I think the second half of this is significantly more compelling than the first. Anyone else think we might want to consider breaking the history off the top and leaving it behind? Or does the seond half only work well because of the first half?
Posted on Thu, Jul 10, 2008