Faith Works 2-14-2025

Faith Works 2-14-2025

Jeff Gill

Is faith a romance?

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Valentine's Day falls on the publication date of this column, and it's a hard conjunction to ignore, so of course I will not.

As a faith and religion columnist, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it began as Saint Valentine's Day, a saint's feast day transmogrified by time and the seasons into an occasion for selling cards and candy and dinner reservations and other (ahem) romantic accoutrements.

Good St. Valentine was associated with Rome, but the bad old Roman empire Rome of martyrs and evil emperors. Tradition tells us he was a bishop, committed to evangelism and executed on this date for refusing to renounce his faith in Jesus as Lord. This all happened in the third century, with later tradition adding in miracles associated with courting couples and other reasons to see the poor man tied to red velvet hearts and cable network films where the lucky duo kiss finally in the last minute before the credits.

Give credit to St. Valentine, whose love for God led him to the ultimate sacrifice, before you move on to choosing between milk and dark chocolate. Where I did find myself stuck, though, was in that word "romance." Does it relate to St. Valentine's death in Rome?

I took enough Latin in school to know about the Romance languages, which are the various tongues descended from Latin, and I must suppose, out of Rome. Spanish and Italian, French and Portuguese, Catalan (around Barcelona) and Romanian the lesser known two along with a few smaller dialects around southern Europe. These are in contrast to northern Europe's Germanic languages, obviously related to German, and also Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, as well as English.

English has a huge amount of Romance content, though, thanks to William the Conquerer (1066 and all that); enough that if you had a paragraph of Spanish or French in front of you, versus a few lines in Dutch or Swedish, you'd have more luck puzzling out a few words from the Romantic than the Germanic.

None of which explains the core of romance, the romantic atmosphere, around love but with a word referring to a city in Italy. Granted, there's a "La Dolce Vita" vibe of supposed romance around Rome, but in our culture that's stronger for Paris. What does romance point back to Rome?

The closest thing to a trail I could find is the idea of romance as a genre, like a novel but further back, more poetic, and "in the Roman style." There's something about love, even platonic love (let's not get started on Plato), and two star-crossed lovers, that seems to trace back to a Roman ideal of some sort about hearts coming together.

For Western Christianity, there's a trail leading back to Rome that's not simply a Catholic narrative. It comes from Jerusalem with Paul and Simon Peter, whose stories ultimately come to rest in Rome, from which the Christian message expands. There's an Eastern Orthodox story which wends through Constantinople, now Istanbul, but in the West, Catholic or Protestant, our stories of faith tend to come down through Rome.

In the Roman style, where tales of devotion and sacrifice arrive at a consummation whether happy or (at least for a moment) sad, there's a kind of story which is rooted in faith, even if it has a more emotionally romantic expression today in those seasonal cable movies (you know which channel I mean). A belief in something better, something greater, something love and endurance can achieve.

So may we nod at least to St. Valentine, and the church he witnessed for in love as a leader, even as we put his name to more mundane romance on his festal day. May love abound!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not always good at remembering Valentines since he stopped decorating shoe boxes in school. Tell him how you mark the day at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.