Dear believing, doubting and non-believing friends,

     Hearts, hearts and more hearts are everywhere you look these days, so if you got ashes today don’t let them float down and blind your eyes to Valentine’s Day, only days away. Valentine’s Feast of Lovers and Friends is an ideal companion to Ash Wednesday’s annual launching of Lent’s season of reform. But why do I need to be reformed? “I go to church every Sunday, leaving an offering of 10% of my income; I pray before meals and twice daily, read scripture every morning and am a volunteer at the soup kitchen—and I keep all the commandments!

     Really, you keep “all” the commandments? For Jews and for Jesus, the Great Commandment isn’t one of the famous Ten, rather “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength.” (Deut: 6, 5; Matt. 22:37) To test if we keep that commandment you and I need the Italian Dr. Santorio’s 1602 invention of the thermoscope, what we call a thermometer. We each need a heart-thermometer to give us the degree of our love’s fervor for our Beloved Creator and to measure the degree of the heat of our love for those dearest to us. If your thermometer numbers feel off a degree or two, you’re fortunate that the annual season of reform that begins today provides you with 40 days to rekindle and stoke up the fires of your love.

     After recovering from falling in love we all tend to love moderately within limits, not with great passion. We do so logically to insure our beloved’s death will not drive us mad. Marriage with its routine and sameness also lessens the once explosive fires of love and causes a lack of frequent gratitude and loving gestures and expressions. Marriage vows are necessary since we physically quickly change, and our once passionate love over time cools down until it is as lukewarm as today’s ashes. In the case of seniors, their once fascinating youthful love over the decades matures into an infallible ironclad companionship. Older lovers of God, after years of intimacy, experience that same confident calm love of companionship with their Beloved Lord.

     Unfortunately, believers deceive themselves that fidelity to the laws of God and the church, along with Sunday worship, suffices for love. Non-believers and halfhearted ones don’t hate God but experience the opposite of love which isn’t hate, but apathy. When it comes to Divine matters they are indifferent, uninterested and, when forced to attend church, are bored. The temperature of their relationship with God is lukewarm. Also in failing marriages and love affairs any love left is likewise lukewarm.
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     If fifty percent of American marriages end up dead in divorce, one wonders what percentage of God-human love relationships end up the same way? The Good News is if your heart thermometer measures your love of God as tepid, even if you are a doubter it can be re-enkindled. Surprisingly, enkindled love is conducive to enkindling belief, which is really Good News since it is healthy to deny the existence of some Gods we were taught existed.

     One answer to how God looks upon the degree of your love is found in the book of Revelation 3: 15: “I know that you are neither cold nor hot…So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Those are the acidic hateful words of a god of whom you should be an atheist! It is healthy and holy to be a non-believer of that Revelation spokesperson, like several other false gods who are found in the “Good Book”…but who don’t really exist!

     For half-hearted or devout believers, here are some suggestions. Begin to say aloud frequently throughout the day, “I love you, God.” When you experience a love gift from the Divine One like escaping some accident or finding some forgotten hidden money, say, “Thank you. I love you, God.” As you drift off to sleep as a final prayer of the day, “I love you, God…or Lord…or my Beloved.” Review your life and your talents, personal gifts you’ve been given, or a marriage partner or children, and see them all as individual love gifts to you from your Beloved God.

     Regardless what you may hear from the pulpit or read in the Bible, God believes in you, even if you don’t believe in him/her. God’s love for you is always unconditional, more passionate than any human love; no matter if your love is nonexistent or only lukewarm.

                   Happy romancing your Valentine lover and your Divine Beloved!

Forever is a holy word
     I've stolen from God's vocabulary
     that I dare to utter
     when speaking of my love for you.

From the ten thousand names of God,
     with lips trembling in fear,
     I have chosen Forever
     to sing of my love for you.

Idolatry — to make human love divine
     and put it on par with God.
No, not idolatry, but identity,
     for love and God are one
     when love longs to be Forever.

O You who never created love,
     but are Love, and Love-Forever,
     gift me with Your sacred heart
                                                            to love You, and my beloved,
                                                                     Forever, Forever.
                        
                                                          
     From the beginning, God wedded human love and God-love together as one and the same — even when human loving falls short of forever. Gratefully, human love is awakened to its Godhood whenever such love struggles to be forever.

     The tree of love can withstand all storms, droughts and disasters when its roots are entwined around the God-Stone at the center of the Earth. Love's zero gravity is made stable by being thus grounded in Ground Zero. Each time "Forever" is whispered in the darkness, it sends the roots of love racing to encircle more tightly the Sacred Stone.

     So anchored in Love, our loves can withstand the dry desert winds of routine, the twisting tornadoes of emotional differences, infidelity and workaday chaos.

     Forever — let us say it slowly, say it full of meaning, say it as one of the holy names of God.

Dear old and new friends,

    The King of Valentine’s Day is Cupid, the Roman god of love, depicted as a chubby naked child with a bow and arrows. So perilous are his arrows it was believed anyone pierced by one would fall in love with the first person they encountered! The Greek god of love was also a youth or child called Eros from which came the name for sexual love.  

    Valentine’s Day is a Fiesta of friends and lovers of all ages—and of all kinds of love. The hub of God’s message to us is love, and outward from it radiates our duties: care of the poor, being a promoter of justice and a peace maker, personal prayer and treating any stranger as your neighbor. Since duties of loving come from God, we would be wrong to presume they call for spiritual love. We are not angelic spirits; we are humans in whose bodies God has implanted natural urges such as Eros, physical sexual love. Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware says, “Eros, understood as physical, sexual love, is an important aspect of Christian love….”

    (I’ve interrupted this quotation so you can pause to ponder that last powerful sentence           by slowly rereading it. Now, this master of Eastern Orthodox spirituality continues….)

    “We shouldn’t make a sharp contrast between Eros, meaning sexual love, and agape, meaning Christian love,” says Bishop Ware. “Eros and agape are two aspects of a single reality.”

    Unfortunately, over the centuries Christianity has condemned erotic love as evil and sinful except in marriage. Our humanity suffers grave damage attempting to suffocate our divinely implanted sexual drive undergirding all our love. Those with religious promises of chastity, or those of advanced age, should never repress their erotic sexuality, but transform it. The exotic in our loving of one another, family and friends is wholesomely transformed into affectionate “doing” in myriad ways. As says the old wedding text, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” So rejoice in Eros and Agape’s holy union.

    Scripture professor and pastor, Father Roger Karban has gifted us with a truly refreshing meaning of “holy.” He says scripturally holy doesn’t mean pious or sanctimonious, but other or different! A holy person isn’t one who is always praying but rather constantly acting differently than the rest of the crowd. A holy lover is one who loves unconventionally, and the gods Cupid and Eros are excellent examples of unique loving since they often are shown blindfolded!

    The Teacher implies we should be blindfolded lovers who ignore another’s church/religion or politics and who love regardless of the other’s beauty or repulsive face and body. Blindness gives a heightened sense of hearing, so self-blinded lovers hear the inaudible, excruciating wailing of those longing to be loved…and respond.

    Pretend on Valentine’s Day, and in the days thereafter, to be blindfolded so you can stumble around sightlessly as an undiscriminating, erotically saintly lover.