Ash Valentines

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and a day in which Christians around the world recognize our fragile mortality and inevitable death. It’s also Valentines Day.

So maybe the proper thing to do is to take your loved one out for a romantic dinner in a funeral home. Or hand out heart shaped boxes of hearts and champagne at a gravesite service.

Weird. And somehow, appropriate.

I’m not morbid by nature; not overly romantic by nature either. But there is something deeply moving, and perhaps even lovely, about facing our mortality and celebrating our capacity for love side by side.

Love is without doubt the most powerful force we know. We know this because it is the most lifegiving force in its purest form, and the most corrupted ravaging force when braided into the dangerous strings of insecurity and selfishness. Love burns either way, a lifegiving warmth of safety in the dark, or a conflagration of destruction that consumes everything to ashes. Love is irrefutable; probably the only other force that comes close to its massive power is the shadow of death.

And if we’re really being honest, love and death are also probably the things we are most frightened of all our lives. We search for their meaning. We protect ourselves from both. We try to understand them, and inevitably fail. We joke about them, to stave off the shivers. We write songs about them. We hide the savage pain they both inflict. We never really fully recover from either one. They each await us around any corner. We do well to be in awe of both.

So today, when love and death coincide, light and shadow, we get a rare spiritual eclipse, something not just one nor the other, but something altogether new.

An eclipse hides the sun, or the moon, with the shadow of a heavenly body. Something which should be shining is cast in eerie shadow, and is so compelling, so weird and yet so familiar, we have to run out onto our porches to stare.

Perhaps its because an eclipse remind us of something primal in our hearts that we already know. It says that light and dark are not enemies of one another, but elements that deepen each other’s meaning. Light shining in darkness gives hope. Darkness surrounding the light calls us into mystery. Like plants, we need the light to grow. Like seeds, our deepest self starts in the dark unknown. Like the beasts of the field we thrive in the light of love. Like the young they carry in their wombs, we grow into what we will be only in the hidden, solitary dark. There’s a reason there are cave paintings from thousands of years ago. There’s a reason we bury our beloved dead. We are, in our essence, both light and dark, and cannot be complete without each one.

So today I think about all my unremembered, distant ancestors who loved, had families, and died. Their lives were so important, but I know nothing about them, not even their names, and I feel no sorrow at their deaths. I think about my parents, now long gone. I think about my baby granddaughters, bursting with energy and new life. I marvel over the thread of love that binds me to all of them, living and dead, and honestly, that love holds us together without my even understanding or feeling it in its completeness. Could I love my granddaughters with the fierceness I do, if my great great great grandparents had not thrown their tenuous lot into loving one another? If my loving parents had not yet died, and I had not yet experienced the shadow of that loss? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Something of all of those loves and all of those deaths has brought something to fullness in me that I will never fully understand or be able to explain. But I can feel it. Oh, yes, I can feel its truth. I love because we are here together now, we who are privileged to live these hours, and not for very long.

On this day, when Death and Love both have their day of remembrance, it does me good to remember the gifts they both impart. Impermanence and Eternity, sisters sitting side by side, holding hands, watching a candy heart that will melt eventually into the sand but never lose its sweetness.

Happy Ash Valentines. May it be a day for you in which you remember and cherish that what makes you truly human, precious, momentary, and forever loved.