Whether you go to the grocery for milk or to the pharmacy for a prescription, you won’t be able to avoid Valentine’s Day merchandise in the form of balloons, candy hearts, and cards. Ah, yes, a holiday devoted to idealized romantic love. What could be more heartwarming?
Yet, as wonderful as romantic love may be it is only one form of love – and an often fragile and volatile one at that. To be fully realized, romantic love depends on the one we love loving us in return. If that doesn’t happen, you may find yourself tolerating or enduring Valentine’s Day rather than celebrating it.
The unconditional love of God spoken of in the Bible is something quite different. God’s love is the most stable of loves. We cannot earn it, buy it, or lose it. God loves everyone. Those who are humble and honest enough with themselves to accept their need for God’s love can experience it in the core of their being as they come to know the presence of God/Christ/Holy Spirit within them. Before he died Jesus prayed:
… The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
(John 17: 20-23)
Once we have encountered God and accepted (really accept in our hearts, as well as our heads) the truth that God loves us unconditionally, we are free to accept and love ourselves in the same way. Such love also propels us beyond ourselves and compels us to love others without conditions.
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4: 8-10)
The experience of God’s unconditional love and sharing of that love is the essence of Moravian Bishop Zinzendorf’s “Religion of the Heart.” This vibrant, powerful, life-giving faith fueled the explosive growth of the 18th century Moravian Church and is reflected in the lyrics of the church’s traditional hymns.
Long before the time of the Renewed Moravian Church, such love motivated a priest to give his life for the sake of his sisters and brothers in Christ. His “crime” was officiating at Christian marriages, celebrating Holy Communion and otherwise serving his congregation.
According to tradition, St. Valentine was killed by Roman authorities on February 14th. Certainly, as he went to his death he would have recalled Christ’s words “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”