Ashes or chocolates? Or both?
By Michael Cook, Mercator.
Tomorrow is both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, a rare coincidence. In the 20th century, this happened in only three years — 1923, 1934 and 1945. This century, it happened in 2018 and again in 2024 and 2029.
It’s a thought-provoking juxtaposition. Valentine’s Day is all about greeting cards, and chocolates and roses, romance and sentimental excess. It’s a celebration of love as sugary consumerism. Ash Wednesday is almost the polar opposite. In Christian churches it is a day of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. A charcoal smear of ashes on the forehead reminds believers that “thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return”. It’s a celebration of love as bitter sacrifice.
Wearing ashes is not a custom which has died out, by the way. One of the legion of press secretaries for President Trump, Sean Spicer, was mocked mercilessly on Twitter for appearing on a brief on CNN with a large cross of ashes decorating his forehead.
Perhaps the two days have more in common than meets the eye. We know very little about Saint Valentine, but all surviving accounts agree that he was tortured and killed as a martyr for the Christian faith. So perhaps the message of the dual celebration is a reminder that romantic love finds its ultimate fulfilment in sacrificial love.
For decades now love has been debased in popular culture to the cloying sentimentality of Valentine’s Day. Love is a passion, a will-o-the-wisp. It’s not a commitment.
This is not just a contemporary trend. There are surprisingly few eulogies of married love recent literature. In the canon of works in the English language, there are volumes upon volumes of romantic passion, but little about faithful marriages. Perhaps Jane Austen comes closest, with her ironic but affectionate dissection of courtship in early 19th century England. Even Dickens, the most humane of English novelists, often features marriages that are loveless and harsh.
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