Alternative Valentines for Open Hearts
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When I was a little girl, Valentine’s Day was about LOVE. It wasn’t just the amorous kind, although there was plenty of that in the fourth grade hallways, it was about all those kinds of loves defined by the Greek words: eros, agape, Philadelphia, olive-you, words I learned around campfires in the summertimes in North Carolina and whose definitions I now need to google for clarity.
Back then, the words on the conversation hearts and the corn ball slogans on the printed paper valentines we glued messily onto doilies were about telling people how great they were, telling people how much we cared. Sometimes it was a stretch to let someone know—if we weren’t quite sure of the reciprocity of their feelings--but usually it was a natural: Valentine, You Bowl Me Over.
In the mas-o-menos thrity years since fourth grade, the world has gotten a little more complicated...OK, a lot. Fourteen year-old-boys can be fathers, eleven-year-olds girls dress like hot mamas, and elementary school carpool discussion revolves around America’s Next Top Model. Valentine’s Day is all too much chocolate and black lace with a back beat of desire—a relentless tune that proclaims what matters most is being a hot tamale. But as the wise C.S. Lewis shows in The Four Loves, letting love be driven purely by passion and our own desires gets us into a heap of trouble.
As the world rapidly rhumbas to the rhythm of this pre-packaged sensuality on steroids, we can sit that dance out and wait for a song that speaks to our hearts. Love is a verb; we can choose how we do it. Skip the pumped up expectation of champagne and romance, and consider alternative valentines. There’s a Joe Ely song about St.Valentine. Joe’s Saint drives a red Continental, with a headlight out and a dent in its side. There’s a different take on true love. No doves, no roses. Picture him cruising the shopping mall, listening to the blues. Love takes many forms, and everybody’s talking about it this time of year. But as we say in Texas, talkin’ ain’t doin.' Or, as they translate in California, talking the talk isn’t walking the walk.
Here’s a Valentine’s Day thought that takes me back to evenings around the campfire, holding hands with little girls in a completely agape way, learning about unselfishness and love under the pine trees. It’s called Open Hands, and it is a collection of stories by Jana Mullins, a lovely lady who has spent many years sharing her gifts with others, walking and talking.
Everybody has a different reason to write a book: some people have a story inside them that longs to be told, others feel that spinning tales is like breathing air. Still others have a great collection of recipes, or adventure tales, or business advice that friends beg them to share. But Jana wrote her book to say thank you for some real love that was shared with her.
When she was a young woman, she wanted to go to graduate school, but she wasn’t in a financial position to do that. A generous friend offered to pay. Jana resisted—bootstraps, pride, not wanting to take advantage, you name it. Finally she opened herself to the concept that the flip side of being generous is being willing to receive generosity. She took that gift horse by the mane, and hopped on. As she watched her life become changed by what she learned in graduate school, she realized it was even more changed by the circles of giving and receiving that she saw all around her.
She collected some of the most wonderful stories that she encountered and put them together in one volume so they could share their transformative power with others. But she didn’t stop there. Her stories were so moving that she got them produced pro bono (there’s another great foreign term). Now they are being published nationally, and she is giving all her profits back to charitable organizations. And for those of you not intimately familiar with the publishing world, that is hard work, an act of love far beyond a dozen American Beauties. But Jana doesn’t care, because she is giving back, and the circle is unbroken.
So whether you drive a red Continental or a custom one, a Smart Car or a hawg, I hope your Valentine’s Day is about real love, and I hope you are open to receiving it where ever you find it. And to the producers of ANTM, the marketing executives at Victoria’s Secret and everyone at Godiva’s parent company (have you gotten the chicken noodle-filled chocolate yet?): bless your little corporate hearts. Whoever you are, I hope you have a Happy Valentine’s Day, too.
Because as Jana and her collected friends have show us, the world works best when we are willing to put in a little more love.
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