This 12 months, Ash Wednesday, a Christian day of mourning, falls on February 14, Valentine’s Day. At first look, these two days couldn’t be extra totally different: One is a lighthearted celebration of affection and affection, the opposite a somber reminder of human mortality. However love and demise will not be strangers; they chase one another like childhood mates enjoying tag within the schoolyard. The coincidence of those two holidays occurring on the identical day feels providential, reminding us that demise lingers on the fringe of the sweetest romances, ready for its second to spoil the enjoyable.
As an Anglican priest and a husband, I’ve saved each days with my spouse. Ash Wednesday begins the 40-day penitential season of Lent within the lead-up to Easter, and it features a service the place a priest marks every congregant’s brow with ashes within the form of a cross. I’ve led these providers, standing earlier than my spouse and the assembled congregation, entreating them to collect on the altar. They stumble out of the pews, moms and dads wrestling unruly kids, older people shifting slowly, youngsters appearing irritated at having been delivered to church in the course of the week. {Couples} and singles, the fortunately married and the struggling. Ash Wednesday performs no favorites. Everybody will get the identical message.
I dip my finger into the small container, collect a little bit of mud, and draw the cross on their brow. Every imposition of ashes is accompanied with the chorus “Bear in mind that you’re mud and to mud you shall return.”
I stated these phrases to my spouse for the primary time within the early years of our marriage. It’s an odd factor to say to a brand new partner, with my reminiscences of how she regarded in her marriage ceremony gown and the perfection of her hair nonetheless so contemporary.
The girl I liked was going to die in the future. The love story that was unfolding between us—one that will develop to incorporate kids and miscarriages, pleasure and trauma—would know an ending as a result of “within the midst of life we are in demise.”
We celebrated our first Valentine’s Day our senior 12 months of school, when my efforts had been restricted by my meager scholar funds. Even nonetheless I wished to impress her, so I remodeled my dorm suite’s decor, taking down posters of my favourite athletes, musicians, and luminaries from the previous. Of their place I hung, on massive poster boards, a listing of 10 issues that I liked about her. My handwriting has at all times been a catastrophe, so I enlisted a feminine buddy with wonderful penmanship.
My future spouse bore with my sentimentality that night time, however in fact she’s a pragmatist who finds Valentine’s Day pointless. Through the years, our celebrations have grow to be a lot much less showy. A dinner and a few chocolate often suffice. I’ve come round to her method of seeing issues. It’s potential to be in love so lengthy that extravagant presents and gestures can now not articulate the which means of your story.
My spouse and I’ve been married for practically 20 years. We met in our early 20s and now discover ourselves in our early 40s, with 4 children, a canine, and a mortgage. We have now lived by way of the summer season of life till the early fall. If God is merciful, we hope to be collectively within the winter years, that cute previous couple with dated garments who sit on the porch and watch our grandchildren play.
Nonetheless, this story could have an ending. Humanity’s nice enemy can’t be delay eternally. Loss of life will intrude into our narrative, taking one from the opposite. After we are at our frailest and most in want of companionship, demise will separate lifelong mates. Then the depth of affection might be revealed within the abyss of grief. Valentine’s Day might be swallowed up by Ash Wednesday.
What can we do with this actuality? We keep in mind that love is a surprise; in its first flush, it’s intoxicating, and feels prefer it encompasses the world. However that feeling has at all times been one thing of a lie.
We will need to have which means outdoors our romantic relationships. To anticipate them to supply all our objective is just too heavy a burden. My spouse and I are a very good case research on this, as we each have vocations that encourage us aside from marriage. I don’t write as a result of I like my spouse. I write as a result of phrases are unruly issues that meander across the web page. The joys of wrestling magnificence out of them, forcing them to obey my directions, makes me joyful. My spouse is a pediatrician at a clinic whose sufferers are underinsured and underserved. She enjoys unraveling the puzzles of human sickness, offering counsel to folks and kids. She works in that exact clinic as a result of she loves another person and one thing else: God and medication. She has a happiness and a calling that exist aside from me. I’m a witness to them, however I didn’t create them.
Loss of life reminds us of the bounds of romantic love, but it surely additionally units romantic love free. It permits like to take its place alongside different items, some that final and others which might be fleeting. Loss of life brings a sure readability. We are able to train and weight loss plan, use trendy science to repair our our bodies, however they are going to put on out. They’ll return to mud. Due to this fact, the fun we’re given needs to be cherished, and the time now we have not wasted.
Each Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day current visions of the which means of life. However Ash Wednesday provides the extra radical hope. Because it appears to be like towards Jesus’s demise and resurrection, it dares to counsel that there’s a divine love not restricted by mortality, and that though we’re sprinting to our graves, we would in the future rise from them and face an affection that defies description.
The hope of Ash Wednesday can virtually really feel too far-fetched, unsophisticated, a relic of premodern time. Ash Wednesday doesn’t merely inform us that we would die. It means that by way of the facility of God, demise may not have the ultimate phrase. It’s daring sufficient to take care of that each one our temporal affections are echoes and hints of a divine love that may bear the burden romantic love can not.
Within the Anglican custom, Ash Wednesday takes priority over another vacation that happens on that day, together with Valentine’s Day. This isn’t some all-important decree; no priest goes to hunt by way of eating places for lax believers who select to have their candlelit meals anyway. And but, I see knowledge in placing Ash Wednesday first. This 12 months, my spouse and I’ll delay our Valentine’s Day celebration a day or two. Then we’ll do what we do yearly: share a dinner collectively pondering love and its limitations.
