gather: St. Valentine's Day
Inviting birds to our table
For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,
Of every kinde, that men thynke may…Excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls (14th c.)
Welcome, friends. I’m Kristin: a Pacific Northwest artist, mom, & farmer offering support for seasonal, local, liturgical living. Together, we’ll explore the agrarian heritage of the Church calendar and ideas of sacred time & sacred place.
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For the past few years, I’ve hosted a Liturgical Life group. We’re a diverse gathering - of all ages, from a variety of denominations, learning alongside each other and working to graft the traditions of the liturgical calendar into our own varied circumstances.
I always joke with friends that we tend to celebrate the “b-sides” of the calendar: a lot of the holidays that are less prevalent these days, that have been lost to time & are often just curiosities in the lectionary or the liturgy…without the great fanfare of Christmas & Easter.
For February, though, I wanted to take on a popularized holiday - St. Valentine’s Day - and see how we could deconstruct it to get a better sense of this celebration. It’s one I’ve taken for granted for years, after all…and, with the figure of St. Valentine being shrouded by uncertainty and layers of legend, it can be challenging to distill the real seed of his feast day.
Though we tend to focus on love at St. Valentine’s Day, its historical celebrations offer us more of a flavor of rebirth & reunion. It’s a springtime holiday: the landscape is warming, work in the farm fields is speeding up, and animals are returning & reconvening in their northern climes.
The return of a migratory bird is a remarkable feat that I often take for granted: these birds disappear from our life for months at a time, and then - suddenly - we hear birdsong again…a steadily growing chorus, day after day.
Almost as if they’re back from the dead (and, indeed, earlier beliefs saw some migratory birds as “resurrecting”).
It’s a bit like a prefiguring of our coming Easter celebrations, isn’t it?
So, although St. Valentine’s Day surely prompts us to celebrate love, its wider context is a preparation for the coming of Easter: when we celebrate love spoken through the Cross, through sacrifice and resurrection, death and life, absence and presence, separation and reunion.
Here’s a look into how we celebrated St. Valentine’s Day in our community…