"I was crazy in love with her."
I was on the subway Friday night, Valentine’s Day. I counted 11 people who were carrying flowers or candy or some other gift to the love of their life. I suddenly remembered a friend who, years ago, saw this girl on the subway on his way to a meeting. They glanced at one another—really that’s all it was—and then the train came to a stop and she got off. Just as the doors were closing, he sprinted up off his seat and leapt through the small opening. She was standing on the platform, and he timidly approached her. What to say? “You’re not from around here, are you?” Bingo, he was right: she was from Norway! And that was the beginning of a long distance relationship, a storybook wedding I performed in Norway, and a marriage that lived and eventually died in New York. “I was crazy in love with her,” he told me. I knew that, I saw it in his eyes, especially when they were filled with pain at the end.
Valentine's Day, named after a Roman priest who lived about two hundred years after Jesus, who died on February 14th. The legend is that he used to send letters of love and encouragement to fellow priests who were being persecuted and murdered for what they believed, who were loving maybe a little too much in the way that Jesus loved.
Loving too much, in the way that Jesus loved. I don’t know that I've ever loved too much, probably never really loved enough, not in the way that Jesus loved. I remember one Valentine's Day I was head over heels for this one girl in college—she probably would have been the one I would have married if things had gone a little differently. And on that one Valentine's Day I snuck into her room while she was gone and filled the place with a zillion hearts of paper and candy and red carnations, the whole place was a picture in red. But even with her, my love wasn’t always too much, not in the way Jesus loved, and it was the exception rather than the rule that I went overboard in my love for her.
I asked my friend why he thought his marriage failed. “I don’t know. Maybe neither of us wanted to really give up some things that we thought were so important.” I wonder if I would have been able to do that if I had ever married.
In his first year as Pope, Francis gathered 25,000 engaged couples together in St Peter’s Square in an unprecedented gesture toward the romance of Valentine's Day. He mentioned to them how hard it is today to commit to marriage, or anything. “We must not allow ourselves to be conquered by a 'throwaway culture', “he said. “Today many people are afraid of making decisions that affect them for all their lives, because it seems impossible, and this mentality leads many who are preparing for marriage to say, 'We will stay together for as long as our love lasts.'” Not loving enough in the way that Jesus loved, right?
On Thursday I was in a store nearby, and they were selling all these cards and stuffed animals and Valentine's Day gifts, and the place was jammed. Those cash registers were singing. I watched this one kid next to me, he was trying to decide what to get his girlfriend, he kept trolling the aisles between the cards and the candy and the stuffed animals, and he didn’t look like he was really into it, and his friend said at one point, "Oh, who cares, just get her anything, at least you'll have something so she won’t be on your back about it tomorrow. He nodded back to him in agreement and picked up some heart-shaped thing and got on line. I wondered how many other people were just getting stuff so that nobody would be on their backs about it on Valentine's Day. Loving too much, in the way that Jesus loved?
And why I'm telling you all this is because that's sort of the point of today's Gospel, where Jesus is talking about the fifth, sixth and eighth commandments, it’s about loving too much, it’s about letting go, going beyond the letter of the law of love, not getting lost in the legal fine points. It’s about being so crazy in love with God—the One who loves us so much—being so crazy in love with God that you go way beyond the letter of the law.
You see, if you love too much of course you won’t murder or adulterate or separate from your wife or speak falsely or steal from your neighbor or dishonor your father and mother or disobey any of the other great commandments--if you are in love with the God whose constant love is sustaining you in life every moment. You won’t grow angry with your brother or your sister, you won’t lust in your heart, you'd never swear at all or take a pen from the office that wasn’t yours, you don't even need the commandments to tell you what to do if you're really in love with God, like you don’t have to go out and just buy anything for Valentine's day so nobody will be on your back about it—if you're really in love, loving too much, you don’t need some Hallmark holiday to show your love, you see?
It’s like all of our faith, it‘s like all our religion. It’s a matter of loving too much, in the way that Jesus loved.
It sometimes seems like we've got a lot of rules and regulations that we Catholics are supposed to follow—coming to Church on Sunday, confession with some frequency, fast before communion, no meat on Fridays in Lent. Often someone will come up to me and ask me if it’s OK to break one of them and change it around or exchange one for another, and you know, what I usually say to them is—what do you think?, because I can tell them what the rule is but if you're just concerned with the letter of the law, if it’s just a matter of making sure that God is not going to be on your back about it, well then, what is that? What kind of love is that, what kind of faith is that? Is it loving too much, in the way that Jesus loved, or is it not really loving much at all?
Good Pope Francis is all about that, has staked his whole papacy on the idea that we need to get away from the small ways of loving, the proper legalities that often make you miss the point of divine love that inspired them in the first place.
You see, what I'm saying is—what the Gospel is saying is—what Pope Francis is saying is--you've got to let go, God's waiting out for you to do something really stupid and dumb and silly like lover’s do, put ourselves and our lives on the line even, maybe like those priests who were being murdered for their faith that St Valentine wrote to. God's waiting for us to come alive in love, God's sending Valentines to us like crazy. What are we waiting for? Isn’t it time we threw all caution to the wind and really love, loving way too much, like Jesus loved?
