For our marriage, Saint Valentine we pray

That tedium not be resisted nor evaded but simply witnessed

Win for us, O Patron of Love, the humility of heart for which the sacrament was made:

Crucible for molten egos, and the cross to hang us out to dry

Hallow marriage in the 21st century mind, that we

Like the lovers you joined in the dark, and enkindled with whispered prayer

Might arrive at maturity through and with our spouse

We bind and rebuke the false promises of fresh starts, hook up culture and extra marital allure

Dead ends all: The greater the promise, the further the fall from the devotion you reveal in your passion:

In every blow of the club that bore down on you, and in those final cleaving moments

When the body you submitted stumbled bloodily out from beneath your martyr’s crown

In glorious self-giving to your bride,

The Church

Help us to gaze into the mirror intimacy holds before us

And surrender to God every trauma, victimhood and hopelessness we find there

Gather our intentions like sheep, Successor of Lupercus, that we might

-Safe in the ark of our covenant-

Weather the waves which buffet our souls

Echoes of long-ago storms that upended us into the deep

Our vessels scuttled on the rocks of memory

Pickled and preserved in the brine of our ache

For freedom at last

To bask like Dante, who having journeyed through the Underworld after Beatrice’s gaze, found himself in The Beloved’s instead

To nestle into Christ, sleeping in the bottom of our boats

To hide in the salt-crusted wounds, knowing they are ours

To inflict and to suffer

And that all is well.

May His ascent of Calvary, O Physician of Hearts

Gather us too at the foot of the cross

And raise us with Him to life in love with The Other

Remind us that love is as war, that there is no “falling out” of the love God ordains

And that the way to reconcile Mars with Venus

Is not through Cupid’s bow but Christ’s cross.

By your prayers, O Eros Redeemed, may we learn how to siege and when to retreat

When the clarion call of our heart’s horn threatens to burst asunder

May we choose grace over grift

Communion over callousness

And forgiveness when we’d sooner fight to the death.

And yet may our fights bear good fruits

For when the apple rots, smothered by the soil, does it die along with its sweetness?

Or the violence done in the mouth and bellies of ruminant sow?

The seed, once planted, will ever win out

So it is with love.

And so Saint Valentine

Whose love is known a thousand years beyond the grave

Pray for us

That we embrace the composting of self, bedded down in rage and ruin

To be resurrected in glory.