VALENTINE; The Scary Side ~ How Much Can You Give?
“Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men” ~ Matin Luther King.,Jr.
Text: “I have compassion on the multitude because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat” ~ Mk.8:2
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How would you have felt realizing that the secret behind Valentine’s Day celebration has some scary side? Of a truth, the underlying secrets behind Valentine’s Day are actually dark and muddled anyway.
As much as there are lots of clues as to what actually brought about the ‘Val’ thing, its origin and what it really means, a very close range at which we could observe its trending is the Ancient Rome. It’s said that, there used to be a special festival celebrated by the Romans then, from Feb. 13 to 15, called the Feast of Lupercalia. Men sacrificed a goat and a dog, and whipped women with the hides of the animals slain. In fact, it’s always a really bloody festival indeed! One of the touching thing about this festival is that, “the men have to be drunk, and naked”…I mean, these are gross signs that could even make you understand how so disapproving the festival was, as opposed to anything called ‘normal’ in life – it’s awful!
This inhumane scene fete also include matchmaking lottery in which young men had to pick the names of women from a jar. The matched male and female would now have to be together, and couple up through out the duration of the festival, and even longer, if the match was perfect with both. What a festival!!! Similar to same festival periods, Emperor Claudius II executed two men named ‘Valentine’ on Feb. 14th in the Third century. It’s this martydorm that birthed the celebration of Saint Valentine’s Day by the Catholic Church.
Overtime, Late Pope Gelasius I, now refined things in the fifth century by combining St. Valentine’s Day with Lupercalia in the quest to expel the pagan rituals. However, the festival was more of a theatrical interpretation of what it was initially known for. Noel Lenski; a Religious Studies Professor at Yale University said, and I quote: “It’s a little more of a drunken revel, but the Christians put clothes back on it. That didn’t stop it from being a day of fertility and love.” [ https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day ]
LESSONS TO PICK
Sometimes, we try to portray what seems good to the world, but we do that sometime from a wrong perspective. Eventhough ‘Love’ is good, but do you actually know how to define it and present it to the world just exactly the way God sees it? Most probably, the ancient Romans would have had a very different view, opposing a subjective impression that negates ‘normal’, all by themselves and to them alone. Because on a normal ground, how could men and women go out naked in broad-day light, pick some random names for match-making and then sleep with that partner for a stretch of season and then…whatever, all in the name of some funny creepy little festival…Hello! The quest here is, do you actually know what Love means, just as God meant it? Are you truly walking in the light of this said Love? If you cant interpret it the way God sees it, then you are most probably going down the dark side too. That’s disaster.
God had been speaking before now, and He hasn’t stopped speaking to us about the things that are right inside His mind. This leads us to the words of our Lord Jesus Christ in the above text (Mk.8:2). Jesus had compassion on the multitude and He decided to take them out of their famished, dry and longing situation, so He improvised a strategy, out of ‘nothing’ to feed them all; a total of 4,000 people, with just two fishes and five loaves of bread. Isn’t that wonderful!
‘Empathy’ is the secret here; a simple inner feelings, borne out of strong desire, that gave way to a supernatural increase! It’s that simple.
We as humans, can turn the world around even from the unspeakable atrocious activities trending in our present world. Just as Late Pope Gelasius did, and we are now seeing the result in our time. Showing and teaching love in the best way that it actually means, and not the other way round where we slander, hate, gruesomely compete and condemn each other, all because we want to be seen better than the other person. Not that kind of love that throws and flaunt infidelity here and there as if there are no consequences to immorality before our creator and the Judge of all after we depart this wicked world.
How Do We Teach Love?
I remember my comment on a post over a controversial issue in a CCC Parish’s post, where a brother strongly condemned the Parish’s post, stating what the Bible says about giving (Mtt.6:1-2). The state of your heart is what God sees when you are showing love. It has nothing to do with how you are doing it. Meanwhile Christ knew the motive behind the Pharisees Alms-giving. He knew that they always blow trumpet, announcing to the people before hand, “Hey guys, come over and see what we want to do because God said we should do this. Now, come and see how good we are at doing God’s will o. Come, come and come now.” The quest is, does the content of your heart shows positivity when you are showing or teaching love? Look, before God could accept a man’s offering or whatever he does, He would’ve first accepted his heart; the content within cannot lie even as much as we try to cover it.
Showing love is good, as much as teaching love is good. I always love the later because it reminds me what I should constantly do even when so many stuffs try to distract me to show love because of the security risks in this present world we live now, especially in my country. I’ve watched videos of Social Experiments teaching Love in the most awesome ways, and of course am inspired, where single individuals give away liberally to homeless/ vagrants, destitute of hopes etc. Several cases where wealthy guys go out there on the streets of New York, Uk etc, even my locality here, to sit down and eat with the condemned, the basest and the most untouched. How much or to what extent can you give, or have you given to the people that are seriously in need and indeed? To what extent are you able to bear for the other person?
This is EMPATHY; the foundation of LOVE, just as Christ taught. Some people don’t know how to show love, but through practical teachings as such, they would develop the habit as they see others doing wonderful things to those who cannot even pay them back – then God is the rewarder.
CONCLUSION
Go out there today, and do something good and smiley to someone. Put a smile on someone’s face. It might be that all they need is just “I Love You” and they’d be fine. Remember to make this your starting point. Remain blessed always.
Spread The Love.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
