St. Valentine’s legacy was as priest, martyr, rebel, and protector of forbidden love
By George Valadie
Hoping you have a happy Valentine’s Day! Or that at least you don’t mess it up. I’ve done that on occasion.
You’d think since it originated somewhere in the 14th century, we’d have figured out how to do this day really well by now. It’s not like it sneaked up on us.
Still, I won’t lie, it’s a lot of pressure. Nancy’s much better at it than I. She has a knack for finding the perfect little gift that says she knows me and loves me. Like the year she sent me a dozen long-stemmed Krystal hamburgers in a vase.
See what I mean. And as another sign of her love, I think she’s mostly tolerated my “nice try” efforts.
This particular holiday never fails to take me back to my grade-school days. I wasn’t very good at it then either.
I have unusually vivid memories of spending the night before at our dining-room table, decorating a homemade Valentine’s shoebox with aluminum foil, cutting out red construction paper hearts, and trying to make it all look as eye-catching as possible without any excess globs of Elmer’s glue.
I can recall devoting equal time to engineering some cool method to attach it to or hang it from my desk so classmates could be casually subtle while each took a turn wandering the room and dropping in their cards.
Kindness—minus any emotion or eye contact—would have been the preference of my day.
But I did indeed have emotion.
Mom would buy those packets of 25 cards, and my sisters and I would spend hours deciphering the hidden meanings behind “be mine” and “you’re the best” and “you’re sweet” in hopes of giving just the right card to just the right classmate.
And I’d make sure the one card in the group that mentioned the word “LOVE” would go to that perfect girl—whom I most likely admired from afar and to whom it was even more likely I’d never actually spoken.
Probably still haven’t.
It’s 60 years later. Finley is 10 years old and our fifth-grade granddaughter. And she’s sorta going through the same thing with a young male classmate—let’s call him Murphy—with whom she shares some mutual interest.
It’s both cute—and hilarious.
I say “sorta going through the same thing” because whereas I likely communicated with my dream girl with nothing more than the occasional awkward smile (from which I hoped she correctly interpreted the depth of my unspoken love and not anything weird), these two get to text. A lot—a whole lot.
Thankfully it’s nothing bad. Her mom has set up her iPad so she can read every word (or so she hopes). But all looks good for now.
You can tell Murphy is head over heels. There’s a mutual attraction for sure. But they seldom—practically never—actually speak to each other.
A few months ago, he texted a request asking if they might be boyfriend and girlfriend. She replied, “I like you. But maybe we should wait until we talk to each other some.” I hear her science grade is a struggle, but on this topic Finley earned an A-plus.
Her mom also shared this recent story: “Finley got up early so she could go watch her friend play basketball. She wanted to stay so she could also watch Murphy play in his game.
“Our schedule couldn’t make it work, but Murphy and a couple of his friends did come early to watch the girls game. I said, “Oh, that’s fun. Did y’all get to talk?”
“And she looked at me like I had 13 eyeballs for asking such a dumb question like that.”
So, some things haven’t changed.
Murphy’s apparently a good kid. He’s polite and thoughtful. We know because Finley’s mom is Meg—our middle daughter—and she shares all of their back-and-forth with her sisters and her mom and me in our own daily text chain.
He told Finley he was a little sad that she spent so much time at dance because it was less time they could chat. “But I would never want you to give up something you love so much.”
The boy is 10 … and killing it!
As a dad of three grown-up girls, experience tells me the occasion will someday come, however, when Finley will echo what girls for generations have cried into their pillows: “Why are boys so stupid?!”
But until then, if I took a vote right now—the females in our family are hoping these two get married someday. How much fun is young love!
Even when it springs to life in forbidden circumstances.
There’s a tradition that says Valentine, a third century priest and martyr, defied a ban from the Emperor Claudius forbidding soldiers getting married. Valentine rebelled by performing weddings for Christians, thus preventing their husbands being sent off to war.
A second tradition says Valentine helped Christians escape Roman prisons and while doing so fell in love with the jailer’s daughter. He signed a letter to her “from your Valentine.”
And so it began.
I doubt I am the only one who has felt “unspoken love.” And fourth grade certainly wasn’t my last time. But we’d all agree that such cannot be true love. Probably can’t be called love at all. Not really.
You’ve got to at least talk to the person, right?
And so it is with God. We gotta talk to Him. We gotta tell Him how we feel and what we like and the dreams we harbor. We have to tell Him our struggles, our temptations, our fears. We have to cry with Him and laugh with Him and share the secrets no one else knows.
I’m betting the Creator has some good stuff to say, too. We should listen.
Because none of us want to reach the Pearly Gates and hear “maybe we should wait to have a relationship until we talk to each other some.”
Dear God—So many don’t feel loved. Or even thought about. By you or us. Sorry, a lot of that’s on us. Please inspire us to love the unloved. Amen.
George Valadie is a parishioner at St. Stephen Church in Chattanooga and author of the newly released book “We Lost Our Fifth Fork … and other moments when we need some perspective.”
