A VALENTINE PRAYER
We pray today for those in love, those out of love, and those in between. We remember especially those who find themselves a little bit lonelier than normal.
We pray today for those in love, those out of love, and those in between. We remember especially those who find themselves a little bit lonelier than normal.
We do not pray today for loved-up couples, exchanging overpriced flowers and foil wrapped hearts, leaking pheromones like diesel fumes at candlelit dinners. We are pretty sure, Lord, they will be OK (for now).
Instead, we hereby dedicate this happy-crappy day to all the brave teenagers who dared to send a card (hoping in vain with every fibre of their beings for something back.) Let them be a little bit more OK because we prayed.
We think of the mother, coping alone, who quietly bought herself flowers yesterday. Let her kids be kind today. Let her teenagers tidy their bedrooms. And if that's a miracle too far (we realise youve got a lot on in the Middle East right now), could they at least initiate a hug?
Finally, we ask you to look upon the elderly gentleman gazing today at a fading sepia photograph in a silver frame of a wedding in another time. Look at him and look with him and be with him in the remembering and the unremembering too.
King of Love, on this day named after an unmarried saint, embrace the unlovely, unloving parts of our world, of ourselves today. Song of Songs, inspire simple thoughtful acts, scatter sparks and rekindle the fires of romance wherever marriages are mired in the mundane.
Melt our tiny, tinny expensive chocolate hearts. And forgive us today we pray for this cheap, gaudy, hysterical, isolating thing we have sometimes somehow tried to make of love and of You. Amen.
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