St Valentine: Love Hurts

Who was St Valentine?

The truth is that no one knows for certain. It seems that there were several early Christian martyrs who bore the name. The best known and the one who the legend is probably built around was a third century physician priest, who conducted weddings for soldiers in Emperor Claudius II army. The Emperor had outlawed marriage for his conscripts, believing that it made them poor soldiers. Many defied these orders and secretly married, Valentine was one of the priests who conducted the ceremonies. He was eventually discovered and imprisoned for this. While in prison, awaiting execution, he fell in love with the jailers blind daughter who it is said he restored to sight. Shortly after his execution a love letter was found addressed to her, it read “love from your Valentine”. The date was 14^th February 269. Two centuries later Pope Gelasius declared 14^th February to be Saint Valentine’s day, and Valentine became the patron saint of lovers.

Charles, Duke of Orleans, who was taken prisoner at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and held in captivity for twenty-five years, was the author of the earliest known written Valentines. He left about sixty of these love poems for his wife.

One of his Valentines reads as follows:

Wilt thou be mine? 
Dear Love, reply.
Sweetly consent or else deny. 
Whisper softly, 
none shall know, 
Wilt thou be mine, Love?
Aye or no?

"Spite of Fortune, 
we may be Happy by one word from thee. 
Life flies swiftly 
- ere it go 
Wilt thou be mine, Love? 
- aye or no?"

The first commercial Valentines card was manufactured in the mid nineteenth century by Esther A Howland and today Valentine’s day is celebrated all over the world. It has become a huge commercial enterprise and like Christmas it appears to have lost much of its true meaning. We can though still discover some of it's magic, if we look beneath the ribbons.

I have a Valentine in my family, My nephew is called Johnny Valentine Budby. He is named after two members of the rock band Electric 6. His older brother is called Joey Ramone Budby. He is named after Joey Ramone, from the punk band The Ramones. Joey and Johnny’s dad Rick has been a drummer in bands for years, he’s an old mate of mine from my past, when I was in bands too. He’s a great dad, although I do wonder about the stick that might come the way of these boys later in life. That said if either become famous, they’ve already got names that belong "up in lights."

On Valentine’s Day we are supposed to express our love for those who we feel passionately about. We are meant to do this publically, but we are also meant to express the love we dare not reveal, our secret love. The love we dare not name. I’m sure everyone has, at one time or another, either sent or received a secret Valentine’s card.

There seems to be something very painful in all of this. Valentine’s day is really not about flowers and bunny rabbits it would seem. Is Valentine really about the love between two people or is it more about unrequited love? Is it about the light of love, or shadow side of love? Certainly its history, its mythology, is bathed in sadness and pain and loss.

Does Love, as Roy Orbison once sang, hurt?

In Greek Mythology passionate love begins when we are wounded by Eros’s Arrow. This suggests that we must first be pierced by it before we can experience its joy; that we must be opened up to hurt before we can begin to experience love. This message appears to be shared by many of the faith traditions. In Christianity God’s love is expressed through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The classic example in Judaism is Hosea’s continued faithfulness to his cheating wife, a metaphor of God’s faithfulness to his unfaithful people. Examples are found in Hinduism, which depicts Krishna continually returning to fight evil and in Buddhism where the Bodhisattva refrains from entering Nirvana in order to save others. All these positive, beautiful expressions of love are grounded in pain. It would appear that the faith traditions are suggesting that in order to experience the joy of love we must first know its pain..Cupid’s arrow must first pierce our skin before it can penetrate our hearts.

I recently attended the annual interfaith dinner at Altrincham Boys Grammar School. It was a fascinating and joy filled evening, it was great to see people of many faiths mixing and enjoying each other’s company. During the evening I had a conversation with Alan Morris, the Deacon at Holy Angels Church in Hale Barns. He asked me why I’d entered into the ministry? This is one of those questions I never like to answer, mainly because it begins with sadness. As I have expressed before my journey really began as I came to terms with Ethan’s death and witnessed the incredible compassionate love shown by the whole community to his family, in their time of need. The love I experienced through his short life and even through his death is why I entered into the ministry. His life and death changed me. If I had not felt that pain, would I have entered into the ministry? God knows. As I have said before, we do do not get to choose our pain, only our response to it.

I agree with Roy Orbison “love hurts”, however it manifests itself.

The Song of Songs reads:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
   as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
   passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
   a raging flame. 

Can love be as strong as death? Well I believe so. It is love that gives life meaning and purpose, even in its pain. Real love can survive and overcome just about anything, any hurt any pain. When we love someone deeply, we create an eternal bond. This is a spiritual connection in which personal anxiety and pain is dispelled through our relationship to one to another.

Victor Franklin in “Man’s Search For Meaning” wrote about his life as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps. He remembered that those who had no connection to people, or hopes or dreams or to God gave up very quickly and died. This he said was because they had nothing to believe in but their own bodies, which were imprisoned; where as those who communed in their thoughts, dreams or prayers with someone or something they loved survived much longer.

Frankl recalls

... We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...."

Frankl later reflected that even if he had know that his wife was dead, their relationship would have been as strong in that moment because the reality that their love created was stronger than death. It was a flame that neither water nor flood nor human frailty could quench. It was a power that could overcome any suffering and sustain him in in what was perhaps the darkest period in human history.

Love, however it may manifest itself, is what gives life meaning. Be it for wife or partner, family, friends, community, life, nature or God, it is the expression of this love that gives life its bliss, even in the darkest of hours.


Happy Valentine's Day. May you know the love that is present in life.

Mr Pain & Man's search for Meaning

It still amazes me how I am constantly discovering meaning, seemingly from nothing.

A few months ago Rev Jane Barraclough asked me to lead the Wednesday lunchtime service at Cross Street Chapel. I was delighted to be asked to do this and duly agreed to do so. Seemingly no meaning there and then last weekend it dawned on me that it was exactly seven years ago to the day that I had first entered Cross street chapel on a cold Wednesday lunchtime. Just a beautiful bit of synchronicity, or at least I saw it that way.

It was a wonderful and wonder filled day that seemed so rich in meaning. I loved listening to the little conversations on the tram on my way to Manchester. I enjoyed my walk around the city, watching all the people going about their business. I felt so connected, so in harmony with what was going on. Every snippet of conversation I overheard seemed to be addressed directly to me.

After the service I met a friend for coffee and shared what I’d been experiencing. I told her how I felt so excited and alive and that I seemed to be seeing meaning in everything. She looked at me and said “really, I see little meaning in anything; I’m pretty much sceptical about everything.” It made me pause and it also reminded me of the man I was not long before I began my Unitarian adventure. I could find no meaning in anything; I was pretty much sceptical about everything.

The conversation has been on my mind ever since. I saw no meaning because I was asleep to meaning it would seem. I was suffering from a kind of colour blindness and tone deafness. Something inside was locked in and therefore I could not experience all that I can today and as a result I denied the possibility that there could be a deeper richer meaning. My rational reflection on my experiences back then revealed nothingness and yet my rational reflection, on my current experiences, reveal a life that is rich in meaning. I hear music where I could not before; I see a myriad of colour that in the past was only grey; I experience that under lying meaning that was just an empty void in the past.

But what is meaning? And can it be discovered in what many see as the emptiness of life?

When I think of meaning and our search for it, Viktor Frankl immediately springs to mind.

In “Man’s Search For Meaning” Frankl gives an account of his struggle to  find meaning when held as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps of the second world war. He lost most of his family and friends in the camps and yet he never lost hope in humanity.

Frankl was the founder of what has often been referred to as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” Freud founded the first which was based on the central role of the libido or pleasure principle in human psychology. Alfred Adler founded the second which emphasised the importance of the will to power and the significance of the superiority/inferiority complex in human behaviour. In contrast to these two schools Frankl’s psychology is based on the will to meaning which he saw as the primary motivating force in human life. He named it “Logotherapy” taken from the Greek term logos, which means “word”, “reason”, or “meaning”. Think of the opening words from John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The word here of course is “Logos”. There is an implication here that meaning has a transcendent origin.

Frankl saw a spiritual dimension beyond the biological and psychological. He saw the suppression of this as the root cause of our human malady. Therefore the task of “Logotherapy” was “to remind patients of their unconscious religiousness” and to uncover the spiritual dimensions of their lives and enable them to recover the capacity to choose those values which give our lives worth and meaning.

Now this meaning is of course different for everyone. As Frankl said himself:

“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

Frankl claimed that meaning is discovered through creative and worthwhile activites, by creating something beautiful or doing good – I believe that one of the greatest sadness’s of our age is the fact that the phrase “do-gooder” has become a term of mockery, that it is somehow seen as wrong and suspicious to do good - Meaning can be found through experiencing and sharing in the beauty of art or nature or through loving or ethical encounters with others.

Even in the most horrific and terrifyingly hopeless situations we still have the capacity to choose our attitude towards whatever circumstances we are faced with. It is our response to life’s events that shapes our souls. Remember Frankl developed his theory during the utter despair and horror of the Nazi death camps. As Frankl himself said “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

I witnessed a wonderful example of this on Sunday night. I went to see the performance poet “Rodney Chris Paradox” he really is worth checking out. During the night he delivered a song poem entitled “Mr Pain”, which is essentially about him dealing with the suffering he experienced while losing a limb. Before he began he explained that he’d been on a journey throughout the world in search of meaning, his life had become empty. The journey ended in Mexico where he had an accident which led to him having half a leg amputated. From this grew the story “Mr Pain”.

The poem describes how he had developed immunity to pain killers. He is assigned a “pain team” who try every form of western medicine to fight off the excruciating agony, every attempt failed. He then called upon all he had learnt from all the eastern traditions, which again failed. Finally he screams out to God and enters the emptiness. Here in this place of nothingness he surrenders to the pain and accepts his lot and from here the pain no longer seems to matter. By surrendering to it, it lost its power.

Everyone suffers pain in their lives and often there seems no justifiable reason for it. It just seems so unfair. I believe the mistake that we make is that we look for reasons in the past instead of making reasons out of what has happened. You see by remaining locked in the past we isolate ourselves, we say look this is my suffering and pain and we seek out someone to blame. What we ought to doing is understanding that we all share pain in life, it’s a part of existence and seeing what we can give back to life from our shared experience. I have discovered by doing so meaning begins to burst out of the seeming nothingness.

None of us gets to choose our pain and suffering and none of us can avoid it. That said we can choose how we respond to it and pass those lessons on to one another. No one can take that away from us. It is perhaps our one and only true freedom. How we respond to life’s circumstances.

I discovered that the real meaning in life emerges by trying to help others find meaning in their lives. Do you know what ever since this discovery life has become so rich in meaning. These days I see meaning in everything.

Remember “there’s no turning back because we are in this together all the way."