The Cross and the Heart
Photo by Emmanuel Phaeton on Unsplash
In a funny kind of way, it’s appropriate that Lent is starting on Valentine’s day this year. I’m dropping the “St” before “Valentine” quite consciously, by the way, because I know almost no one who marks the day for spiritual reasons these days. Instead, it’s become a celebration of human love, which is, at its best, very beautiful but very finite. But that’s actually why it strikes me as fitting that the two days are coming together this time, because Ash Wednesday is a day when we remember that all human things have an endpoint, a built-in expiry date. “Remember thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return,” the priests say when they put ashes on our foreheads. Or, to put it another way, remember that we’re going to die, because paradoxically, this is the only way to really live.
Given how much our culture idolises romantic love, it’s ironic that relationships these days are a byword for impermanence. The idea of being together forever, living faithfulness until death, never enters the picture. A woman I overheard chatting to a friend on a city street recently summed it up perfectly: “All my relationships break up around the two-year mark,” she was saying. “I just get bored easily and I find there’s no one who can keep being new after that time, you know?” She was deadly serious; I don’t think she realised that she sounded almost like a parody of the social media age, where constant pursuit of novelty deals a death blow to commitment – and also to happiness.
Of course, from a certain perspective, she is right: the first initial flush of romantic passion can never last, so if your definition of love is limited to that hot rush of glowing feeling, it’s true that no relationship is ever going to make it past a couple of years. If we treat relationships the way we treat our TikTok feeds, swiping quickly on for the next dopamine hit, we will only ever skim over the surface of our friends and partners. We will never reach the intimate connections where we see the other and are truly seen ourselves, and achieve something a bit deeper than that first and very finite spark. However, getting there is not comfortable: as any old married couple will tell you, true love requires true grit and a certain amount of hanging on for dear life in the tough times. In fact, it requires sacrifice.
Here we come back to that paradox I mentioned, the backwards logic that God is so fond of. To be happy in love, we have to be able to bear pain sometimes, and joyfully, without resentment. We have to be willing to suffer for the other, to see them as more than just a source of emotional highs. As St Josémaria Escriva would put it, “True love demands getting out of oneself, giving oneself. Genuine love brings joy in its wake, a joy that has its roots in the shape of the Cross.” St Valentine, a martyr for the Christian faith himself, would hardly be likely to disagree. This is why Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s day belong together, because love and suffering are always interlinked.
All this means that if our human love is to be more than just a fleeting fling, it needs reorientation. Our attitude to relationships must switch from randomised pleasure-seeking to purposeful joy-seeking, to seeing human romance as something that must be sanctified as part of our great journey through life towards God. Sanctifying human love means accepting God’s will in our relationships and sticking to our commitments even when we encounter the flawed elements of the other’s personality. In this context, Lent could be viewed as something of a school of love and commitment: it is a season that invites us to shift our focus away from quick highs, to commit to practising some small penance with constancy, to give ourselves to others and to God with a little more generosity. It invites us to live and to love not as people that have no hope, but people with a destination in mind – Easter and the glory of the resurrection.