For Catholics marking Ash Wednesday today, it might seem unfortunate that the penitential season of Lent begins this year on a holiday famous for candy, fun, and romantic dinners. But it is a good reminder of the fact that true love is not just about happy feelings and pleasure, but requires sacrifice to survive and thrive.
While physical intimacy and feelings are certainly a part of love, particularly the romantic love that leads to marriage, the bedrock of any successful relationship, whether romantic or not, is the ability to sacrifice for another’s good. This might sound less than exciting, but any married couple of many years will affirm it. Modern America’s culture of selfishness is part of the reason Americans (especially young people of my generation) are struggling so much with our relationships.
In fact, even without discussing Ash Wednesday, St. Valentine’s Day is a perfect reminder of my point, because its namesake loved God and God’s people so much that he sacrificed even his life for them. St. Valentine was a priest in the Roman Empire in the A.D. 200s. It is said that the Roman emperor at the time, Claudius, not only persecuted Christians but had issued an edict restricting marriage for young people. The theory was that unmarried men make better, more dedicated soldiers because married men are less likely to risk their lives without question. Between the edict and the widespread sexual corruption at the time, marriage was in a bad way — a situation that might sound all too familiar to us in the 21st century.
Related: Why We Send ‘Valentines’ on February 14
Valentine, in defiance of the edict, secretly married many young couples. This good work, and his Christian faith, eventually led to his imprisonment and execution. While Valentine was in jail, he healed the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Before his death, the saintly priest sent a letter to the girl which he signed “from your Valentine.” That’s where the practice of sending valentines came from!
St. Gianna Beretta Molla once observed, “Love and sacrifice are closely linked, like the sun and the light. We cannot love without suffering and we cannot suffer without love.” Gianna certainly lived that maxim to the fullest. She died in 1962, having refused a surgery that might have saved her life but would have killed her unborn baby (who lived to become a doctor and witness Gianna’s canonization). Like Valentine, Gianna Molla understood that love is not mere feelings or words, but actions.
This used to be understood widely in popular culture, not just religion. Ancient myths and classic fairy tales frequently depict one or both lovers undergoing great sufferings and trials to win their “happily ever after.” Hector (unusually among Homer’s licentious heroes) tells his wife Andromache in the Iliad that his main concern amidst the Greco-Trojan war is for her and her potential future captivity. The Romans wrote of Psyche’s sufferings before reuniting with her husband, the god of love, Cupid.
Fairy tales find brave men scaling glass mountains, battling dragons, and storming castles while many a heroine suffers poverty-stricken abuse before her prince falls in love with her. Even Romeo, who is in many ways a very selfish and imperfect man, prefers death over life without Juliet. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” only has a happy conclusion once Darcy and Elizabeth learn to care about each other more than themselves. Musicals and movies of the modern age used to reflect the same truth. “Casablanca” is sometimes considered the greatest movie ever, and it ends with two lovers sacrificing their earthly happiness for the greater good. In “My Fair Lady,” Eliza Doolittle sings she’s sick of “words, words, words” and urges Freddy, “If you’re in love, show me!”
In fact, the whole idea of marriage and family, the building blocks of society, is based on self-sacrifice. A man and woman have to sacrifice romance and relations with all other men and women to be married; now, almost everyone hooks up and shacks up years before marriage, and more and more Americans are unmarried or divorced. Families as a whole never thrive unless every member of them is willing to sacrifice his convenience and desires to some degree for the sake of the other members. Now, families are fractured, divided, and disunited. Exploit other people for your pleasure, we are told. Take and take and never give back. Make the rest of the world bow before your irrational whims and wishes. No wonder so many Americans are alone and unhappy!
Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that intense love makes one think less of the sacrifice involved. He also noted that the “day men forget that love is synonymous with sacrifice, that day they will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly extracted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature she must have been who demanded solid gold in the form of a ring, just as they will ask what cruel kind of God is it who asks for sacrifice and self-denial.” For the Jew or Christian, love, sacrifice, and religion are all linked together.
This Ash Wednesday, Catholics remember that Christ suffered and died a humiliating and excruciating death out of love for mankind, and that we do penance in return out of love for Christ. This St. Valentine’s Day — all Americans should remember that sacrifice and love go hand-in-hand, and that we cannot have one without the other. As Jesus said (John 15:13), “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
