Ashes 1: Love that never turns to dust
St Valentine has a lesson to teach us this Ash Wednesday, writes George Pitcher
A tad extra Word to you Wise this week, with a couple of reflections on Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Herewith Ashes 1, about today’s coincidence with St Valentine. Tomorrow, Thursday, will come Ashes 2 - The Parable of the Prodigal Harry. When I started training for priesthood, I confess that I thought tomorrow was Maundy Thursday… so I’m hoping the piece will be marginally better informed than I was then.
Ash Wednesday, the start of our penitential season of Lent, this year fell today, on St Valentine’s Day. Easter being a moveable feast, this doesn’t happen very often. Most of us might remember that it happened last as recently as 2018.
But before that, it really only happened for generations that have gone before us – in 1923, 1934 and 1945. It’ll happen again in 2029, but after this little batch, Valentine’s feast won’t coincide with the first day of Lent again this century. I’m afraid I can’t calculate when it will occur next century. And, I have to say, I don’t care.
I was tempted – only momentarily, you understand, and after all Lent is the season for resisting temptation – to suggest that, instead of tracing a cross of ash on the foreheads of the faithful at our Ash Wednesday service today, as is our custom, we might draw a heart there, in honour of Valentine.
I don’t think that’s an entirely sacrilegious suggestion. The red heart shape is a universal symbol of love. As, I hasten to add, is the cross. All I mean is that they share this symbolism in common, though the heart is more commonly associated with romantic love (other than on tourist T-shirts), while the cross represents God’s universal, self-sacrificial love.
But it’s the commonality between Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day that I’d briefly like to explore. What both celebrate is the eternal durability of love.
“Dust thou art”
As congregants were “ashed” at our service this morning, the priest intoned the words: “Remember that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.” A stark reminder of our mortality and, at first consideration, somewhat dark and depressing; we’re simply made of matter and the dead state of dirt is our destination.
Apparently not much room for the transcendent and spiritual there. Where’s the hope of resurrection that we describe as “sure and certain” in our funeral services?
At one level, we’re in the territory of the famously agnostic poet Philip Larkin (though he described himself as “an Anglican agnostic”) who, on being moved beside a medieval tomb, wrote: “What will survive of us is love.”
The triumph of love
The story of Lent – which, if you like, offers us the chance to resist the temptation of thinking otherwise – is about (among many other things)is the triumph of love over death. Love doesn’t return to dust.
Another poet, T.S.Eliot, wrote in The Waste Land the thoroughly existential line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It echoes the story of the Sybil of Cumae of Greek mythology, who had been granted eternal life but not eternal youth, and was now a measure of dust in a jar who could not die.
There is something here of the idea that we need to die in order for love to be fulfilled. That is certainly a central tenet of the Passion story of the Christ that we’ll read at the other end of Lent.
“Love forever”
There’s also more than a measure of the romantic love that we concurrently celebrate this year on Valentine’s Day. A common theme down the ages (as well as in modern pop songs) is that lovers might commit with some version of the sentiment that they love each other “more than life itself.” A phrase written in many a Valentine card will be “I’ll love you forever”.
What can these promises possibly mean, if humans are just a handful of dust? If we have to remember on Ash Wednesday that we’ll return to dust, what sense does “forever” even make?
Perhaps the story of Valentine can help. As with so many saints’ real lives, we have to start with the caveat that very little is known about him (if indeed he was a him and not a her). But stories can tell us who we are – and legends no less so.
“From your Valentine”
I particularly like the medieval notion that Valentine’s Day became associated with romantic love because birds start to pair in February. But my favourite story of Valentine is that when he was imprisoned in Rome ahead of his martyrdom, he wrote a final letter to a local judge’s daughter, whose sight he had miraculously restored, and signed off “from your Valentine” – a phrase that has inspired millions of romantic missives since.
To paraphrase Larkin, what was left of Valentine was love. But there’s more than that. He gave himself to God, as the Christ does on our Good Friday. One of the vows in our marriage liturgy goes: “All that I am I give to you.” The act is one of exercising God’s love in the world (the Greek word agape) as well as the romantic love we feel as humans (eros).
In love, we join God eternally. And not just as a handful of dust. That’s to say: Perhaps Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday can have more in common than we might think.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest