Welcome Prelude Words to light the chalice by: Angela Herrera Don’t leave your broken heart at the door: Bring it to the altar of life. Don’t leave your anger behind It has high standards And the world needs vision. Bring them with you, and your joy and your passion Bring your loving and your courage and your conviction Bring your need for healing and your powers to heal There is work to do And all that we need to do it is here. So let us come in and then reach beyond the walls of this (congregation) Let us fill this sanctuary with love and then harness its power to stop oppression Let us join together in worship and together let us stand on the side of love. Unison words Not for Children Only Song #95 There Is More Love SomewhereValentine’s Day -- How Did We Get Here?
Today is a continuation of a year long series exploring holidays and holy days of various religious thought, practice, and beliefs. Why, you ask? Because as Unitarian Universalists we draw our own tradition partly from the wealth and wisdom of other traditions. Because respecting, learning about, and understanding the faith and customs of other peoples promotes peace. Because in them we can probably find nuggets of universal meaning and truth which we can take to heart and mind. So we explore. We look. Not to take those religious customs and holy days and use them for our own purposes or entertainment, but to seek to know them in their own context, as best we can accomplish that. Today is February 14 -- Valentine’s day. A religious holiday? Maybe.
It began with the Christian saint Valentine, whom the Catholic Encyclopedia, www.catholic.org, describes thusly. “The origin of St. Valentine, and how many St. Valentines there were, remains a mystery.” There may have been as many of three of them. He might have been a Roman Christian, martyred for refusing to give up his faith. The History channel (www.history.com) recounts that “One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.” Another legend says that, imprisoned and condemned to death, Valentine wrote a farewell note to the jailer's daughter, with whom he fell in love, signing it, ‘From your Valentine.’ Regardless of who he was, archaeologists have identified a catacomb and an ancient church dedicated to Saint Valentine in Rome. In 496 Pope Gelasius decreed February 14th as a day of celebration in honor of Valentine’s martyrdom. “He is the Patron Saint of affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travelers, young people. He is represented in pictures with birds and roses.” (www.catholic.org)
“While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial . . . others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Lupercus, the Roman god of fertility. An ancient celebration, Luperalia began as a purification of shepherds, and thus is also associated with the founders of the city of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a she-wolf, lupa.
Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season. (www.history.com) A 14th c poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, The "Parlement of Foules" is the first reference to the idea that St. Valentine's Day was a special day for lovers. The poem begins with a dream in which the narrator is guided up through the celestial spheres and then through Venus’ temple, with its friezes of doomed lovers out into the bright sunlight where Nature is convening a parliament at which the birds all choose their mates. (www.wikipedia.org) The oldest valentine that we have today is a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
“In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. . . . Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America. According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women.” (www.history.com) Although men spend more money on Valentine gifts. So from a Christian martyr to a chocolate heart, by way of mating birds, we have Valentine’s Day. At its root, it’s about the fertility of spring and about mating, from which romantic love is but a small step.
Joys and Sorrows Meditation OfferingValentine’s Day: How Did We Get Here?
This year the Unitarian Universalist Association, as part of the Standing on the Side of Love campaign, is asking us to re-imagine Valentine’s Day. To re-envision it, to enlarge it beyond a private celebration of love between two people and extend it to all people. What might that look like?
Let’s go back to fertility. Yesterday I went to the Buddhist monastery where they celebrated Tet, Asian New Year. It’s the year of the tiger. Anyway, about 3pm we went for a silent walking meditation in the woods. It was cold. Around forty people walked, single file, in the soft snow. We could see the tracks of the deer, and the rabbits. We could hear the shushing of our feet, an occasional call of a bird, and the tinkling of a stream. There really was quite a bit going on. I stopped in front of a tree and just looked at it. The bark seemed thick, as if the tree had put on its winter coat. All was still as I stood on the snow covered ground. And at the same time I knew. I knew that the sap had started to run in the trees, and new life had started to stir under the snow. The animals had begun to mate. Fertility had awakened.
The dictionary defines fertility as “capable of producing offspring; richness: the property of producing abundantly and sustaining vigorous and luxuriant growth (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn); the natural capability of giving life. Producing abundantly and sustaining luxuriant growth, giving life. In the broad sense of fertility, I am both a life giver and a sustainer of the fertility of others. So are you. Each of us is capable of sustaining and giving life to something, to someone. Fertility is about more than mating and giving birth. There’s a place for fertility in each of our lives. Perhaps as we re-imagine Valentine’s Day we can think of the ways in which we are life givers and sustainers. Think about it. How are you a life giver and sustainer?
Sometime in March-April each year I prepare the ground for planting. I turn over the soil, I might add some nutrients or compost or manure, I mulch. I help the soil to be as fertile as it can be in order to grow vegetables and flowers. We do the same for our children. We turn over the soil of their minds, we add the nutrients of knowledge, the compost of emotional IQ, the mulch of development. We help our children to become fertile adults, fertile in the sense of a luxuriant abundance of potential realized. Every adult who teaches in the religious education program of this congregation is a gardener, producing offspring in the form of Unitarian Universalist children. Our congregation is a hotbed of fertilization. Our elders offer us courageous, inspiring models for getting older and in so doing they fertilize, they sustain those of us who are younger. Our younger adults offer us courageous, inspiring models for a positive, effective engagement with the world and in so doing they fertilize, they sustain those of us who are older.
On a larger scale, how do we support the fertility of this earth? What actions do we choose, as individuals and as a community, that promote the capacity of the earth to give life and to sustain life? How do we support the fertility of our country, our democracy? What actions do we take as citizens that allow our nation to give life to the luxuriant abundance of its potential? How importance is it to vote in every possible election? How important is it to keep ourselves responsibly and fairly informed of all sides of an issue? How important is it to communicate with elected officials? How important is it to become involved in our local communities and schools? How do we sustain the life giving capacity of the people who share this earth with us? What about a fair use of resources? What about a more equitable access to resources?
On a more personal scale, how do we sustain the fertility of our families and the people we love? Do we build each other up, do we prepare each other for healthy growth by adding the necessary nutrients, like kindness and respect and understanding? How do we sustain our own lives? Do we take care of our bodies, our minds, our spirits? Do we take them for granted and not pay them much attention? Do we abuse them? Fertility, the capacity for giving and sustaining life, the root of Valentine’s Day, exists on many levels and we all have something to contribute to the fertility of one another and of the whole. And just like with gardening or farming, tending to fertility requires our attention and our intention.
How do we nurture fertility? With love, that other hallmark of Valentine’s Day. Love is the catalyst for that life giving capacity, that abundant and luxurious growth that is fertility. Love is the catalyst. Where there is love, fertility, in its broadest applications, can abound. Why? Because, as theologian Carter Heyward has written, “Loving involves commitment.… Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.” Commit to connecting with other people. Show up for your family, for your friends. Show up for an event here. Commit to connecting with other people. Let yourself be known. Get to know others. Commit to giving something, to helping others in some way. Sometimes an effective way of lightening our own mood, our own load, is to offer help to somebody else. Love is not a consumer activity. It’s not primarily about what we can get. It is primarily about what we can give. In the giving, we receive. And we all have something to give. We do. This is love. This is life sustaining. Love is a catalyst for fertility.
Fear, on the other side, is an inhibitor of fertility. Where there is fear, fertility shrinks. Many of us know what this feels like. When we love, we feel an abundance. When we fear, we feel a scarcity. Love allows us to be present with others, to pay attention and be attentive. Fear tends to interfere with our ability to be present. Fear is a perception of immanent danger. And whether that perception is correct or incorrect, our fear leads us to want to protect and defend ourselves, not a fertilizing position. Yet we cannot just tell our fear to go away. We can, though, try to attend to it, be present with it. When we can be present with fear and not engage in all the things we do to avoid and/or fix fear, then, by our very presence, we come back round to love. We come back round to our capacity for life giving. To speak specifically, when I feel afraid I want to run away and pull the covers up over my head. Somewhere buried inside me must lie the belief that if I can hide, I won’t have anything to fear. I can make the feeling go away. Others of us, when we feel afraid, want to control everything, believing that if we can make things the way we want them to be, we will no longer be afraid. Still others of us, when we feel afraid, become very angry and look for someone to blame. We feel more powerful when we express anger and pin the blame on somebody else. So that also becomes a way of avoiding our fear. You see? There is the fear and there are the behaviors that we take on to manage it and make it go away. The ways we try to fix it. They don’t really work, of course, and everything kind of goes downhill from there.
But when we can stop and say I’m afraid, when we can attend to the feeling of fear itself , just admit it, I’m afraid, and not do all the things we do to fix it and put an end to it, then, by the very attention we pay to ourselves, we become present to ourselves and once more love, nurture, and fertilize ourselves. We grow ourselves and learn that we can have painful feelings, we can live through them and not run away from them. This attention, this presence, is love and this love fertilizes us and strengthens us.
So today is Valentine’s Day. Enjoy the chocolate; enjoy the flowers, the diamonds, the paper doilies. By all means. But know also that this day has deep roots in the cycles of nature and the fertility that is awakening at this time of year. Know that we are part of that process of awakening fertility. We have the capacity to give birth and sustain life. Will we dare to do so? With love as the catalyst, will we dare to spark each other’s fertility? Love, our willingness to participate in this life, on this planet, for goodness, for wholeness, for connection.
“Make channels,” therefore, “for the streams of love where they may broadly run for “love has overflowing streams to fill them everyone.” May it be so.
Song #199 Make Channels for the Streams of Love Closing words: Pablo Neruda Con ella (With Her) This time is difficult. Wait for me. We will live it out vividly. Give me your small hand: we will rise and suffer, we will feel, we will rejoice. We are once more the pair who lived in bristling places, in harsh nests in the rock. This time is difficult. Wait for me with a basket, with a shovel, with your shoes and your clothes. Now we need each other, not only for the carnations' sake, not only to look for honey-- we need our hands to wash with, to make fire. So let our difficult time stand up to infinity with four hands and four eyes.