Do you have a date for February 14? Ah, the liturgical calendar says it’s the feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, but I suspect if you ask most Catholics, they would surely assume February 14th is first and foremost the feast of St. Valentine! Yet he has been relegated to a lesser place on this day. Perhaps the Church would have done well to call this the Feast of God, since God IS Love.
And the most difficult of all is love. Love is what Jesus meant when he said: “This is my Body.” “This is my Blood.” That is the cost of loving. It is in evidence whenever a parent gets up through the night to feed the baby or a parish extends welcome for newly arrived refugees from Afghanistan or El Salvador. It is manifest when we accept the person at work whose political ideas differ greatly from our own and we learn to dialog with respect rather than debate with anger.
And, yes, love is joyfully expressed through the many ways we show affection to one another. I hope you receive at least one Valentine’s Day card!
Perhaps the most challenging part of following the Gospel is looking at every woman, man and child as my sister and brother. Yet if enough of us did so, the world would look more like the Reign of God or like St. Valentine’s Day all year round!
And the greatest of these is love.
