The coincidence, this year, of Ash Wednesday with Valentine's Day, generates, in addition to jokes and memes, an interesting reflection on the need to renew our relationships, to free them from what kills them.
Valentine's Day has become, like everything else that touches our market society, a new excuse to spend or, if the pocket does not allow it, at least want to spend: We spend on gifts for our partners, on dinners or trips for couples, on movies that idealize love as a couple... And, if we do not have a partner, we spend on clothes-accessories-makeup-perfumes to please the person we want to conquer on this romantic day. The thing is to spend and give pleasure to the body, let's eat and drink, tomorrow we die!
Ash Wednesday is, therefore, its antagonist, because it is a day for deprivation and austerity. For fasting, abstinence, prayer and almsgiving. A day to recognize, yes, that we will die, that we are fragile and fickle as dust, so we need to reconcile ourselves with God so that He may be the one to give us life.
This Valentine's Wednesday, this Ash Day, is an occasion to reflect on what our relationships are like, on their meaning, on what we expect from them. Because our marriages also need that conversion that is sought in this time of Lent that we inaugurate today.
What a pity that so many have reduced love to a feeling! If I "feel" something for you (we do not know which of the five senses is the one that allows us to "feel" something for someone), I will love you; and if I stop "feeling" it, I will stop loving you. Referring to this kind of magic of feelings, disguises as spiritual what normally has a lot of material.
We say feeling when we really mean convenience. If the other person is convenient for me (he/she attracts me, cares about me, allows me to fulfill my desires of fatherhood or motherhood, contributes financially, keeps me company, etc.) I will love him/her; but if the other person is not convenient for me (he/she no longer has the youthful attractiveness, his/her defects surpass me or has health problems), my feeling of love disappears. The magic disappears when being with the other person does not compensate me.
Precisely in a homily for Ash Wednesday, Pope Francis reminded us that "ash brings to light the nothingness that hides behind the frantic search for worldly rewards. It reminds us that worldliness is like dust, that a little wind is enough to blow it away. Sisters, brothers, we are not in this world to chase the wind; our hearts thirst for eternity".
And the fact is that true love, when it is not just a Netflix romantic comedy feeling, resists not only the wind, but any gale: it is eternal. Can one stop loving one's child? Can one be surprised that a widower misses his wife with whom he celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, even if she has been dead for years?
To love is not to seek convenience, "love does not seek its own," as St. Paul would say. To love is to give one's life for the person chosen. Thus God chose us and loved us to the point of giving his life for us. There is a will of the lover towards the beloved that is not sustained only by feeling, but is supported by understanding, by reason, by the desire to do good. And this sometimes costs. Letting ourselves be carried away by sentiment (towards a more attractive woman or a more attentive husband, for example) is easy, but it does not make us freer, but more slaves of that worldliness to which Francis alludes and whose promises of happiness are carried away by the wind.
In this loving beginning of Lent 2024, what things do I put before the person I freely decided to love? What selfishness of my own makes me see the other person as an obstacle to my happiness? And, most importantly, how could I make the other person happier by my side?
This is a very serious reflection, but can a penance be romantic?
Like Jesus in the desert, we will be tempted: "If you are the Son of God, why doesn't the other person change to become more to your liking?"; "As good as you are, why doesn't the other person have you on an altar?"... It is essential to establish spaces for dialogue to ask ourselves these questions together and to discover that the other person has exactly the same doubts and temptations, and also feels incapable of loving as we wish to be loved.
Without knowing ourselves, without discovering the wound of sin that undermines our capacity to love and to feel loved at all, it is impossible to sustain a marriage, a courtship or any Christian vocation.
A good way to celebrate as a couple the day of the patron saint of lovers on this penitential day can be to go together to the parish to impose the ashes and then share at home or outside a dinner at which we can ask for forgiveness and recognize our weakness, our need for conversion, because we are ashes, we are dust, but dust in love.
Journalist. Graduate in Communication Sciences and Bachelor in Religious Sciences. He works in the Diocesan Delegation of Media in Malaga. His numerous "threads" on Twitter about faith and daily life have a great popularity.
