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The Personal Nature of New Life on Valentine's Day

© Karl Evans

Now, about Valentine's Day, and economic development in low income communities. Valentine's Day has about it a history of giving people a sense of developing their own relationships. We usually put this in a romantic or even sexual setting, but there are many relationships within our lives that are not primarily romantic or sexual. The question is whether we can take responsibility for our own relationships and possibilities.

These relationships are going to include every kind of family relationships, community relationships, business relationships, and so on. Most of the population of the world lives in situations where others try to control our lives. Democracy is a precious commodity among people who have had a taste of personal responsibility and possibilities. But even in so-called free nations, it is necessary to struggle to keep alive the dream of responsibility and possibility.

At Valentine's Day in our churches, we can do this. We can talk about taking personal responsibility for relationships. We can talk about changing negative relationships to positive, and how to do it. We can make real small and large experiences that give certainty and meaning to better relationships, and to personal responsibility for them.

In our churches, we can enlist the voices of people with long and good marriages to talk about how they have kept their relationships alive.

We can read the Beatitudes, those words of Jesus that speak of how to have good relationships with one another.

We can read the words of some of the world's great thinkers, words about loving and treating each other well.

We can sing great songs of love and hope and understanding and compassion.

We can laugh at our own stupidities along the way, and even cry at our own attempts to do something better.

There are many ways, but each of these is a way to make ourselves and each other stronger, better able to cope with life.

Back to Martin. When I looked in those eyes on that April day, I knew that the world would be a better place socially, economically, spiritually. It would be better because more of the world's people would be able to take social, economic and spiritual responsibility for the conditions under which we live.

On that day I saw this in the mouths and eyes, the tears and laughter, the power and weakness of the 150,000 or so of us who gathered.

Today we can see this same sense, this same wonder, this same hope in the eyes and mouths of our congregations and communities. That is what Valentine's Day is about.