Redeeming Valentine's Day

Here is a great message from Christopher West which I saw today:

"On this insecurity-inducing day, couples around the world exchange chocolates, romantic dinners, diamonds and other gifts for sex. Men and women, it seems, will go to great lengths to save themselves from the loneliness that creeps up when all the red hearts and romantic songs replace Christmas dcecorations and carols. It seems we all wonder at times "Am I really loved?" or "Do I have to buy his or her attention with something?"

This makes Valentine's Day an annual event ripe for redemption, ripe for John Paul II's Theology of the Body.

The fact that we set aside a day each year to celebrate romantic love points to the importance we place on it, and rightly so. The love of man and woman is what makes the world go round. When the love of man and woman ceases, so does the human race itself. And it's precisely because it's so important, so valuable, that it has become so terribly distorted by the enemy. The devil is not creative. He cannot create his own parrallel universe of pure evil. All he can do is to take what God created to be true, good and beautiful and twist it, distort it. This means that behind every temptation the father of lies uses to lead us astray from God, we will find something that God created to lead us to him. And behind every distorted desire in our own hearts that lures us away from God, we can discover a God-given desire that will lead us to him.

So, Valentine's Day can become, if we will allow it, an opportunity to celebrate the love we all truly long for, the love of Christ for the Church, of which man and woman's love is a mere shadow. We needn't prostitute ourselves to know we are loved. We needn't spend lots of money. We ourselves have been purchased at a high price."