st. valentine and the praying mantis

When I awoke this morning, in a sudden flash of insight, I realized that it was St. Valentine's Day. Now having never had a Valentine's Day that didn't consist of the continual realization (and the subsequently bothersome awareness) of my singleness, this epiphanaic flash of what day it was was followed very closely by thoughts of the praying mantis. I suppose that may seem strange, and indeed I find it so as well, especially since waking up most days I find it difficult to string together even the simplest of thoughts, let alone two rather striking thoughts. Usually, "Boy, it's sunny outside today," is a brilliant and insightful moment when I am dragging myself from sleep. But today I had two, followed closely on one another's heals: (1) it's St. Valentine's Day and (2) the praying mantis is a bug that kills her mate.

Looking into the praying mantis, I found out a few things. I found out that the mantis gets its first name (i.e. praying) from its prayer-like posture, as it clasps its hands before it. Its second name (i.e. mantis) is derived from a Greek word meaning prophet or fortune teller. So the praying mantis is some kind of praying fortune-teller prophet. The female of the species, interestingly enough, rips the head off her mate during the mating process. Or, as Wikipedia puts it: "The female praying mantis is known for her habit of biting the head off her partner while they are mating, though contrary to popular belief, this act has no influence on the reproductive process, save for terminating the male's ability to pass his genes on to any other females. Sexual cannibalism may be rarer in the wild than in captive mantids kept in a cage, due to the lack of room for the male to evade the female after mating ends." I find it particularly troubling that one mantis biting the head off another seems to be the best method that the mantis has come up with to ensure monogamy.

As for St. Valentine, I was surprised to learn that he wasn't simply one person. It seems that there were at least three different St. Valentines, all of them martyrs, recorded in the early martyrologies under February 14. One was a priest and one was a bishop, and these both suffered near Rome in the second half of the third century. The third Valentine suffered in Africa with a few friends, although that's all that's really known about him. Now normally this sad sort of tale isn't enough to get people in the mood, so to speak, or to cause them to pluck that saint's day from the calender as the perfect occasion to buy their significant other flowers; no, it seems that Valentine's day developed into its conventional, popular form (as celebratory of love sweet love) in the fourteenth century in England and France, where February 14 (i.e. the middle of the second month) came to be known as the day when birds pair off. In "Parliament of Foules," Chaucer writes:

For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.

Ah, the seeds of romantic love--you can almost feel it buzzing in the air, as the birds return and find their mates... Of all the seasons, Spring seems to be that romantic time of year, that young-love-in-Paris season. Of course, Valentine's Day seems less about spring and little birdies than it does about dragging ourselves through the last weeks of winter. All in all, Valentine's Day past seems to be filled with violence and depression and regret: Valentine(s) the martyr; the praying mantis mating ritual (which although it may seem like a good idea at the time, will inevitably come to be remembered with regret--especially when baby mantis asks about daddy); those creepy birds who return in the middle of February; and Chaucer's poor spelling. It all seems so made up and contrived. Like the perfect opportunity to sell more greeting cards and chocolates after the holidays--just enough to get us from Christmas to Easter.

But then, if you ease your soul a moment, and simply reflect on what love looks like to you, you can let the strictly narrow-sighted sense of romantic love drift away, and you begin to see all the love in the world. Last week in church, for instance, we talked about the Sacred Heart of Jesus (or, as the French say, Sacre Coeur) and about all the compassion and intensity of unconditional love. Maybe Valentine's Day isn't so much what the commercials have made it to be. Maybe it's less about romantic love and it's more about all love--that is, capital "l" Love.
A little while back I had this idea that maybe because God is love, in the sense of being love-unconditional, and that since this means that his love is boundless, the only way to have true love is to have eternal love. And that's not to say that only if you love someone for all eternity can you love them at all, because I'm not sure if that's possible. Rather, I think I'm trying to say that loving someone is like dipping into eternity--like dipping into the very heart of God, and realizing that love itself is a sign of the Divine. And you can glimpse, in a fleeting moment, the boundlessness and the depthlessness of Love. You realize that it takes you as you are only if you will take all of it.


The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
--Thomas Merton