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Tag: valentine’s day
Be Mine
By Jeremy Walton
On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent what surely must have been one of the blackest Valentine’s greetings of all time to novelist Salman Rushdie. Invoking somewhat dubious legal and theological authority—as a Twelver Shi’a, Khomeini could hardly claim to speak for all of the world’s Muslims—he called for Rushdie’s death on the charge of blasphemy, based on certain passages of the novel The Satanic Verses. The politics of Khomeini’s so-called fatwa are intricate, and deserve to be understood beyond the typically Islamophobic responses voiced by many Western defenders of Rushdie. This question of politics aside, however, Khomenei’s Valentine to Rushdie provokes me to ask: Which one of us has not felt a certain chill, the risk of annihilation in our beloved, upon receiving or giving a Valentine? Freud, for one, would appreciate Khomenei’s gesture—perhaps the most authentically libidinal expression of love is the desire to expunge, and to be expunged in, the object of one’s affection. In any event, I call to mind Khomenei’s Valentine each year even as I scrawl greetings on mass produced cards and distribute chalky sugar hearts proclaiming, somewhat sadistically, “Be Mine.” Perhaps we would be wise to meditate on the relationship between “Be Mine” and “Be Dead” a bit more cogently, even as we rush to purchase chocolates and red roses (with thorns!) for our sweethearts today.
Jeremy F. Walton is an assistant professor/ faculty fellow in New York University’s Religious Studies Program. Continue Reading →
A Red Bagel
By Adam H. Becker
When I was little my mother would get me a red bagel on Valentine’s Day and a green one on St. Patrick’s Day. Although Jewish, on Christmas Eve we would go to my grandmother’s house. She was Catholic and had a Rembrandt-esque picture of Jesus on the wall. I always thought it was my mother’s elusive stepbrother David.
Heart in the Snow
By Mary Valle
My last semester in college, I spent a lot of time taking phone calls from my brother Michael. He was nearing the end of his working life and about to go on disability due to HIV. He’d call me, in Massachusetts, from his office in Beverly Hills and I’d hog a communal phone which was shared by four or five other people. I came to dread the phone calls but I felt it was important to be there, breathing quietly, sometimes listening, sometimes not. He didn’t talk about anything, really. Movies he’d seen or things he wanted to buy. “What do you see out your window?” he’d ask me. “Snow,” I’d say. “A Saab driving by. Some Finnish kid who lives in the woods scuttling off to his lean-to.” And he’d tell me about the sunshine and palm trees and diamonds and facelifts he saw out of his window. My heart hurt. I thought: I should be there even though I knew California was already finished for me. And that I didn’t want to be there, really. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was go back and I was in a state of ongoing panic due to not having the faintest idea what to do with myself when I graduated. So I listened and twirled the communal phone cord into knots.
Neither one of us had a “real” valentine that year. I cut a heart out of pink construction paper, trudged out into several feet of snow, and taped it to a tree. Then I took a Polaroid of it and mailed it to him. I have the photo now, tucked away amongst his other things. Someday I will give it to my daughter.
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St. Valentine's Fallen Face
By David Metcalfe
An urban youth lends no pastoral allure to chalky candy charms and flimsy cardboard tokens. Until, within a sepulchral view of a rose adorned skull, faint echoes of divinatory lots and sympathetic magic are discerned beyond St. Valentine’s fallen face.
Wandering beyond mercantile districts, into a dispersed and disputed hagiography, we find him moving with all the invisibility of an adept. Through Jacobus de Voragine, a partner in beheading with St. Denis, whose street leads the alchemist Flamel to his vocation.
Here, outside of time, we see him fully, valorous knight of Christ, and patron over the grand feast of amour fou.
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St. Valentine’s Fallen Face
By David Metcalfe
An urban youth lends no pastoral allure to chalky candy charms and flimsy cardboard tokens. Until, within a sepulchral view of a rose adorned skull, faint echoes of divinatory lots and sympathetic magic are discerned beyond St. Valentine’s fallen face.
Wandering beyond mercantile districts, into a dispersed and disputed hagiography, we find him moving with all the invisibility of an adept. Through Jacobus de Voragine, a partner in beheading with St. Denis, whose street leads the alchemist Flamel to his vocation.
Here, outside of time, we see him fully, valorous knight of Christ, and patron over the grand feast of amour fou.
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A Simple Dinner
By Anthea Butler
I used to hate Valentines day, until a dinner changed my mind.
After a particularly ugly split from another fool right before Valentines Day, a friend in grad school saw my distress, and invited me over for dinner. Our friendship was complicated. He made us a spectacularly simple dinner. I can still remember the tastes on my tongue. I fell in love. It was never consummated. Years later, I can still taste it. It was as if our feelings had merged into the food.
Whatever love is, I think you can taste it. With the right person, it is like touching the divine.
My Wish This Valentine's Day
By George González
No doubt, much of our contemporary consumer society is magical and ecstatic. This extends to our niche and lucrative markets in love and romance. Hallmark and Hollywood movies send the message that the truest expressions of romantic love are ones that sweep up two individuals—preferably heterosexual, white, English speaking, lovely and bourgeois—into a world where little else matters but the passionate love the protagonists share. Similarly, the multinational chocolatiers have to assume this kind of self absorption when they ask us to give that special person in our life a box of chocolates. The companies do not want us to think about the child labor, much of it in the Ivory Coast, that actually produces the cocoa that makes Valentine’s Day sweet for the American consumer of romance. By and large, the chocolate industry is not kind to African farmers. My wish, this Valentine’s Day, is that religious conversations about love turn away from the singular focus on gender—another form of self absorption–and draw more and more upon powerful religious resources for understanding the ethics of sociality and gift exchange. Marcel Mauss, the anthropologist, stressed the ways in which gift giving creates powerful bonds of obligation between the giver and the receiver of a gift precisely because one always gives spiritually and existentially of oneself when one gives a gift. One loses part of one’s soul, as it were, if one fails to reciprocate and repay a gift. To this let us add the more critical idea that when we give gifts in an economy of consumption, the existences of the very people who make the totems and fetishes we live and even love by are rendered invisible by the workings of commodity magic. Jesus, echoing prophetic Judaism, is understood by Christians to stand with and lift up the least among us. For all they can also occlude, religious narratives and practices can also provide resources for remembering. What is owed the least among us whose very real hands, sweat and tears we fail to see?
My Wish This Valentine’s Day
By George González
No doubt, much of our contemporary consumer society is magical and ecstatic. This extends to our niche and lucrative markets in love and romance. Hallmark and Hollywood movies send the message that the truest expressions of romantic love are ones that sweep up two individuals—preferably heterosexual, white, English speaking, lovely and bourgeois—into a world where little else matters but the passionate love the protagonists share. Similarly, the multinational chocolatiers have to assume this kind of self absorption when they ask us to give that special person in our life a box of chocolates. The companies do not want us to think about the child labor, much of it in the Ivory Coast, that actually produces the cocoa that makes Valentine’s Day sweet for the American consumer of romance. By and large, the chocolate industry is not kind to African farmers. My wish, this Valentine’s Day, is that religious conversations about love turn away from the singular focus on gender—another form of self absorption–and draw more and more upon powerful religious resources for understanding the ethics of sociality and gift exchange. Marcel Mauss, the anthropologist, stressed the ways in which gift giving creates powerful bonds of obligation between the giver and the receiver of a gift precisely because one always gives spiritually and existentially of oneself when one gives a gift. One loses part of one’s soul, as it were, if one fails to reciprocate and repay a gift. To this let us add the more critical idea that when we give gifts in an economy of consumption, the existences of the very people who make the totems and fetishes we live and even love by are rendered invisible by the workings of commodity magic. Jesus, echoing prophetic Judaism, is understood by Christians to stand with and lift up the least among us. For all they can also occlude, religious narratives and practices can also provide resources for remembering. What is owed the least among us whose very real hands, sweat and tears we fail to see?
A Valentine Offering
By Genevieve Yue
A Valentine offering, lifted from the words of the late Edward Rondthaler, pioneer of the Rutherford photo-lettering machine and champion of phonetic spelling: “The bluebirds are flying from my heart to you.”