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 pals taking part in 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 stored 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 companies, 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 performing aggravated at having been dropped at 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 recollections of how she appeared in her wedding ceremony costume and the perfection of her hair nonetheless so contemporary.
The lady I beloved was going to die sooner or later. 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 pupil funds. Even nonetheless I needed to impress her, so I reworked my dorm suite’s decor, taking down posters of my favourite athletes, musicians, and luminaries from the previous. Of their place I hung, on giant poster boards, a listing of 10 issues that I beloved about her. My handwriting has at all times been a catastrophe, so I enlisted a feminine good friend 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. Over time, our celebrations have change into a lot much less showy. A dinner and a few chocolate normally suffice. I’ve come round to her approach of seeing issues. It’s potential to be in love so lengthy that extravagant presents and gestures can not articulate the that 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. Now we have 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 outdated couple with dated garments who sit on the porch and watch our grandchildren play.
Nonetheless, this story can have an ending. Humanity’s nice enemy can’t be postpone perpetually. Loss of life will intrude into our narrative, taking one from the opposite. Once we are at our frailest and most in want of companionship, demise will separate lifelong pals. Then the depth of affection shall be revealed within the abyss of grief. Valentine’s Day shall be swallowed up by Ash Wednesday.
What can we do with this actuality? We do not forget 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 that means outdoors our romantic relationships. To anticipate them to offer all our goal is just too heavy a burden. My spouse and I are a great case research on this, as we each have vocations that encourage us aside from marriage. I don’t write as a result of I really like my spouse. I write as a result of phrases are unruly issues that meander across the web page. The fun 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 oldsters and youngsters. She works in that specific clinic as a result of she loves another person and one thing else: God and drugs. 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 boundaries 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 can be fleeting. Loss of life brings a sure readability. We are able to train and food plan, use trendy science to repair our our bodies, however they’ll put on out. They may return to mud. Due to this fact, the fun we’re given ought to be cherished, and the time we’ve not wasted.
Each Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day current visions of the that means of life. However Ash Wednesday gives the extra radical hope. Because it seems 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’d sooner or later 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’d die. It means that by way of the ability of God, demise may not have the ultimate phrase. It’s daring sufficient to keep up that every 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 some other 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.
