Love & Death & being Human

Ash-Valentines, ice-cream, Hallmark and Leviticus.

Welcome to Just Beautiful, a newsletter exploring places where beauty and justice meet - lots of times through literature and the liturgical year. Onwards! xx Steph

Foto de Samantha Gades en Unsplash

I spent my Valentine’s Day missing an Ash Wednesday service in order to go to the gynecologist. Nothing says embrace your humanity like missing both cute romantic breakfasts and holy Ash Wednesday services to have someone talk about your ovaries. It was weird, but yet it also felt like a very correct Ash Valentine’s Day activity.

Sometimes I picture days like this as one giant Love, Actually movie¹. Like, a camera zooming in on people all around the world, who are all in these different stages of life, who are all connected because we are alive at this exact moment in time and it’s Valentine’s Day.

This Valentine’s Day, someone is reaching into the cupboard above the fridge to pull out a second coffee mug, and then remembers they are all alone. Someone is opening an envelope that shows an ultrasound picture of a brand new life. Someone is laughing at the world’s best inside joke Valentine’s day card and deciding that yes, this person IS their soulmate. Someone is visiting a grave. Someone is raging at the universe and wants to stab every pink helium balloon they see. Someone is waking up to sexy rose petals and lingerie. Someone is waking up to the fact that their crush doesn’t love them back. Some of us have cute kid-scrawled notes. Some of us are buying ourselves chocolate. If we step out even further: this Valentine’s Day someone is getting bombed. Someone is wondering how to get food on the table. Someone is searching for their child under rubble. Someone is waiting to visit someone they love in prison.

Holidays, for me, are like this big picture frame that surrounds all of these mundane activities, a narrative that gives new meaning to whatever is going on. “Valentine’s Day” becomes this piano sound-track behind everything else, all of these ordinary and hopeful and sad and extraordinary human activities are somehow all made more poignant because people are doing them on Valentine’s Day.

So that’s a whole thing. But then weirdly, this Valentine’s Day, a bunch of us are also waking up and standing in lines to get ashes smeared on our foreheads, a mark of death.

I can’t remember who first shared this meme with me, but this is totally the vibe

At first, this seems the weirdest holiday mashup. Poignant Valentines Day music AND funeral dirges. A super trippy soundtrack. But the longer I think about it, the more it makes sense. Love and Death. Two of the things that make us very, very human. Two of the things that give meaning to all these mundane moments of waking up, making coffee, writing notes, packing lunchboxes, writing emails².

We’re reading Leviticus in our small group (speaking of weird) - and it seems that two things that our western consumer culture likes to keep far, far, far apart — love and death— are all tangled up in human life and God’s story of redemption. Without death, there’s no forgiveness. But the reason there is death is also that there is love, there’s risk, there’s relationship. All this shedding of blood in Leviticus is sort of an almost desperate way of patching the gap between God’s all-consuming goodness and our innate sinfulness. If God wasn’t so bent on being in relationship with us, we wouldn’t be in this mess, yes, but we also wouldn’t be here. God risked. God suffered.

All the best love songs (to lovers, yes, but also to children, to the open road, to places and moments in time) — they’re all the best because they understand the fleeting nature of life. These moments won’t be here forever.

Maybe the hallmark cards and movies seem superficial to us because they’re trying to cut death out of the story. Death doesn’t sell well. (I mean, St. Valentine was a martyr, but we kinda leave that part out³).

Or maybe we mock the hallmark cards and the unironic enjoyment of glitter and love and red roses because we’re trying to cut death out of the story. We don’t want to think about dying, about loss, about leaving. So we don’t want to think about real love, either. It’s easier to make a joke about it or cynically throw it all out as sentimentality. In our broken world, you can’t have one without the other. This is what it means to be human - love and death.

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Foto de Adrien Olichon en Unsplash

I did get an Ash Wednesday service in the end. It’s one tradition that has remained unbroken since my son was a little baby in my arms and was told that, “although you are little, from dust you came and from dust you will return.” So we marked the start of Lent by keeping our kids up way past their bedtimes in the back pew of a church by feeding them crackers. We got our ashes. They were formidable this year, one woman in the congregation commented to me later. It’s true this year was no perfunctory dusting. The ashes were thickly mixed with oil, blazed across our foreheads. And then, since it was already past bedtime, we went to get soft-serve ice-cream as a celebration/bribe for sitting in church.

I felt a bit silly eating ice-cream on the first day of Lent. In fact our family got a few chuckles from passers-by as we ate our Valentine’s Day sugar outside of the hamburger joint with our formidable crosses of self-sacrifice parading on our foreheads. It was a bit embarrassing.

But perhaps it was a good reminder that the self-sacrificial love of Lent is not a performance, but a humbling. To love, to die, to be a bit embarrassed — it’s all very, very human.

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Just Beautiful Links

Thanks to everyone who is a paid subscriber and keeps me writing! I’m so grateful for each of you - below is a list of links to books, audios, articles that are about justice & beauty (or, frankly, just something that I wrote somewhere on the web) and some Lent Printables. THANK YOU! This month I’m neck deep in Little Women edits (exciting!) and counting down the days until How to Stop a Train releases in South Africa (my Gandhi picture book). Thanks for making this work possible. As always, if you can’t afford a paid subscription but would like access to this part of the newsletter, shoot me an email & say, “I’d like the links”, and I’ll set you up for a free year, no questions asked.