My Pagan Valentine
Why Christians Should Not Celebrate Valentine's Day
Lupercalia
Most women who have ever been in my life became upset around the
14th of February because I didn't believe in St. Valentine's
Day. I figured, (1) if I loved them, I shouldn't have to prove
it and (2) being a robot and throwing money away just because
Hallmark said we should is no way to do (1). The main problem
with customs is they are customs, which is to say these rituals
are so deeply embedded into our social DNA they rise to the
standard of a religious obligation. Which is ironic considering
I could talk most any woman I've been involved with into
skipping church but skipping St. Valentine's Day was pure
heresy. She would experience rejection. She would all but accuse
me of lying when I refused to cooperate with this foolishness.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, of God or the bible
involved in St. Valentine's Day, a seemingly benign distraction
which actually tracks back to heinous pagan rituals.
The custom of sending lover's greetings on February 14 began
with an ancient pagan celebration called The Feast of Lupercalia,
"Wolf Festival," a pre-Roman blood rite honoring Lupercus, the
god of shepherds. The celebration featured a lottery in which
the names of young girls were written on slips of paper and
placed into a vase. Young men would draw a girl's name from the
jar, and the girl would be his sexual companion during the
remaining year.
In 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius changed the name of the Lupercalia
festival to St. Valentine's Day, and ordered a slight change in
the lottery. Instead of the names of young women, the box would
contain the names of saints. Both men and women were allowed to
draw from the box, and the game was to emulate the ways of the
saint they drew during the rest of the year. Not too
surprisingly, this prudish version of Lupercalia proved
unpopular, and by the fourteenth century they reverted back to
the use of girls' names.
The feast included blood sacrifices of two male goats
(representing fertility) and a dog (representing purification).
Girls and young women would line up to receive lashes from whips
made from the skins of the animal sacrifices to ensure
fertility, prevent sterility and ease the pain of childbirth.
Paul's insistence that such ancient rituals no longer have any
power [1 Cor. 9] have led pastors to tell me we are, therefore,
free to emulate them; to use benign improvisations of these
rites (St. Valentine's Day, Trick-Or-Treating) as agents of
evangelism Which is faulty exegesis. Even though the Apostle
Paul denied the power of pagan gods and rituals, even though he
instructed his followers to not chastise the new Christians for
eating the meat of idols, such selectively myopic interpretation
of scripture misses the broader context: Paul himself never ate
the meat of idols and Paul himself never included pagan rituals
into his Christian belief. Just because Paul says these “gods”
have no feet, have no real power, he is not endorsing our
emulation of pagan rituals, behavior Paul condemns [I Cor.
10:20-21].
Rituals and practices designed, from their inception, to deny
the holiness of God are inappropriate vehicles for evangelism.
Some have argued that we’re just taking Satan's tools and
turning them against him. By definition, Satan's tools are
Satan's tools. By definition they are FOREVER condemned and
ineligible for inclusion in worship to God.
It frustrates me that if, when asked why I don't participate in
St. Valentine's Day, I said if I was a Muslim, people would
accept that. Nobody demands long explanations of my Muslim
friends. Their wives don't turn them inside out over this
foolishness. But Christians, apparently, have no standards. And
I am belittled, mocked, berated and dismissed as lazy or, worse,
as someone who does not love. Churches having "sweetheart
balls," and so forth are especially contemptible to me. Papering
the fellowship halls with red and pink hearts is the height of
ignorance. Why not build an altar to Baal while you're at it. I
would like to respectfully disagree with pastors who endorse
this heresy, but I can't be all that polite about it. There
simply is no biblical defense for this practice. It is shameful
and antichrist. We are a deceived people, led by pastors who
either don't know better or who rigidly enforce the parts of the
bible they like while crucifying Christ afresh with paper
hearts.
I'm not all that bent about the paganism and religious aspects
of this (though they are important to know). I just, flat out,
think emotional blackmail is not love. My beloved sulking,
refusing to speak to me, crying, experiencing rejection because
I refuse to deal with this nonsense Is Not Love. If my love for
her is so weak that she requires such Santa Claus-like external
validation, our relationship is in serious trouble. I want to be
with someone secure enough to not make demands of love, as true
love makes no demands. Someone who knows herself and knows me
and knows God and wants to please God more than she wants to
please herself. I want to be with a grown-up: somebody who
accepts me for me and accepts my conviction to not
participate--even indirectly--in emulation of pagan rites that
blaspheme the God I worship. Forcing me to participate in this
idiocy Is Not Love. And, to me, it's really sad when a woman
emotionally blackmails a guy into this nonsense. He's miserable,
she knows it, she doesn't care. She's wallowing in self
deception even as she undermines her relationship with him
because he's marking this torture off on his calendar, February
14th becoming a dreadful obligation and a day when this woman
loses her dang mind and acts like a pouty ten-year old.
There's certainly nothing wrong with giving your sweetheart a
bouquet or a box of chocolates. But let's stop being lemmings,
doing things because we've always done them. Let's understand
the roots and origins of our customs and traditions and ask
ourselves, truthfully, if these practices please God. I mean, we
should demonstrate our love for one another every day. And if
you want to designate a Sweethearts Day, there's certainly
nothing wrong with that, either. But blindly following pagan
tradition makes us obstinate and lazy and, ultimately, guilty of
integrating paganism into our belief system. After all, waiting
to Monday to give her those flowers would honor her and
God. But she'll likely have a dang fit. Fellas--this is how we
got tossed out of the garden in the first place.
Christopher J. Priest
13 February 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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