On February 14 lovers will exchange cards and flowers in celebration of St. Valentine's Day. Three days later we celebrate Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Traditionally, Lent is a season of preparation for baptism. Indeed, through the motions and movements of the Holy Spirit, we are always becoming who we are called to be in grace and truth.
Love is more than a feeling.
It is a capacity for relationship, a relationship of mutuality and self-giving which has its perfect expression in the inner life of the Trinity in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit give and receive from one another in an unceasing circle dance of dispossession. Like it or not, baptism binds us together in bundles of relationship. Some of these seem like the mystic sweet communion of which we sing. Others, none of us in our more sane and rational moments would ever have chosen. God's imagination is fierce and wild when it comes to determining who belongs in relationship with whom.