St Valentine’s Day: It’s all about the Gift

A most beautiful mystery

“A mystery is not something we can know nothing about: it is only something the mind cannot wholly know… A mystery, in short, is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an exhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind’s thirst”.

These words of the great apologist Frank Sheed apply also to the “mystery” of human love, which can be contemplated again and again. Human love is in fact a “mystery” and this is because it is inseparable from the supreme “Mystery” who is God himself. How so? The human person is made in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:27), and “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is because God is love that, as St John Paul II puts it, “love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being” (Familiaris Consortio 11). 

The Blessed Trinity does not live in splendid isolation. Though he is totally perfect and self-sufficient, God freely goes out of himself through the divine mission of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (cf. Catechism 690, 743). Indeed the whole history of salvation, which continues in our own time, the time of the Church, is the loving seeking-out of man by God.

The unremitting longing of God for the love of human hearts is beautifully expressed in nuptial terms in the Old Testament prophecies of Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah. The Song of Solomon sheds light on divine and human love in an unparalleled way: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice” (2:13-14).

The Gift of gifts

But what does this love, which is the calling of every single human being, consist of? The answer can come only from contemplating God. The whole of Revelation shows that God not only helps us or gives us something; he gives his very self. As St Paul says: “He loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). God is pure gift, and we are made in his likeness. “This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24).

God’s gift is evident firstly in the fact of creation. As Charles Journet put it in his classic work The Meaning of Grace: “The first act in which God’s love pours itself out is creation. God is the Infinite, the Absolute. He possesses being, intelligence, love, beauty to an infinite degree. We should not say that he has being, intelligence, love; rather, that he is Being itself, Intelligence itself, Love and Beauty themselves. He dwells in himself; he is lacking in absolutely nothing. Why, then, did he create the world?

When man acts, it is always to procure for himself some benefit; but God could gain no benefit from creation. So then we are compelled to say that, if he created the world, it was through pure superabundance, pure desire to communicate his riches, pure disinterestedness, through love”. Dante rightly describes the Creator as “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars”.

God gives himself again in a new way in the Incarnation. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (Is 9:6), to us is born a Saviour (cf. Lk 2:11), “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven… and became man”. No wonder Christmas is the season of gifts, since it is the time when God makes of himself the supreme and ultimate gift. In the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus, God shows us the sacrificial nature of all true love and the ultimate fruitfulness and joy of that self-giving: “In this is love”, St John tells us, “not that we loved God but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).

God continues to gift himself to us here and now through the Church. “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and sanctify it” (Catechism 1999). The supreme gift of grace is of course contained in the Blessed Eucharist, the greatest sacrament, the very presence of Jesus in his Sacrifice, the “priceless gift” – inaestimabile donum, as the 1980 Instruction on the Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery approved by St John Paul II is entitled.

Every woman and man is called to be the living image of this life-giving gift of self. The human person cannot be understood without reference to the supreme Gift who is God, and who gives each person the gift of life and the mission to make of his or her life a gift in turn. “Human life is a gift received in order then to be given as a gift” (Evangelium Vitae 92). The human person’s way to happiness is love, and love is the gift of oneself.

The gift of marriage

The self-empting of Christ is at the heart of the marriage covenant. The spouses seek to give themselves fully to each other and to the children they may be graced with. This is of course the challenge of a lifetime, but a challenge that makes life truly worth living.

The married couple are not alone faced with the vicissitudes of their vocation. Their mutual self-gift is based on the firm foundation of Christ’s total self-gift to his Spouse the Church, which is made present in every Eucharistic Celebration. It makes sense therefore that where possible, the marriage of Catholics be celebrated within the Mass. Christ’s total self-giving on Calvary and made present on the altar, is the model for and the source of strength for married couples at the moment of their free and public consent, which constitutes the Sacrament of Matrimony, and every day of their lives, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”, till death do them part. As Pope Francis explains: “What allows the spouses to remain united in marriage is a love of mutual giving supported by Christ’s grace” (Angelus, 7th  October 2018).

Marriage is a gift received from the supreme Gift who is God. Like all Christian vocations it is sustained by the gift of Christ’s life through his grace. Married people are a gift to one another and to the children they may be gifted with. Christian marriages are a true gift to the human community since they are the basis and foundation for a stable and caring society.

The gift of celibacy

Apostolic celibacy too is a true form of love and a full expression of the human vocation to self-giving. Far from being a denigration of marriage, the Church’s constant veneration for total self-giving through celibacy only points to the greatness of matrimony. Each vocation sheds light on the beauty of the other, as different and complementary expressions of the sacredness and greatness of human love.

As St Josemaría pointed out: “Only among those who understand and value in all its depth human love can arise that other ineffable understanding of which Jesus spoke (cf. Mt 19:11). It is a pure gift of God which moves a person to dedicate body and soul to him, to offer him an undivided heart, without the mediation of earthly love” (Conversations 122).

“But what about me?”

All this talk of love as self-giving could leave us with the all too human question: “But what’s in this for me?” While understandable, the question is superficial since it hasn’t discovered or recognised the paradox of true love, as famously expressed in the prayer of St Francis of Assisi: “It is in giving that we receive”.

All true love is challenging and at times involves real suffering, but as St Josemaría put it with great pastoral sense: “To be happy, what you need is not an easy life but a heart which is in love” (Furrow 795).

Our Lord himself has told us this by his life and his words: “Give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back” (Lk 6:38).

A prayer

As we celebrate human love for St Valentine’s Day, let us pray for the gift of many vocations to happy fruitful marriages and to apostolic celibacy for the love of Jesus and of his family of the Church. With the Holy Father, “let us invoke the Virgin Mary, that she help married couples to always live and renew their union, beginning with God’s original Gift”. (Pope Francis, Angelus, 7th October 2018).