The best valentine ever

by Inge Schmidt

I have to be honest: Valentine’s Day is not my favorite “holiday.” In college, I even played a part in organizing a few Anti-Valentine’s Day parties—no romantic comedies allowed. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against the colors pink and red, I’m always up for a reason to eat more candy, and I’m all in favor of telling friends and family members that I love them. I’ve got a boyfriend so my resistance isn’t because of a lack of romantic love. But one special valentine made me rethink.

One Tuesday not so long ago, I was reading a friend’s blog and came across a story about Hilary Clinton’s campaign stop in New Hampshire being interrupted by protestors screaming “Iron my shirt.” A few weeks earlier on my university campus, the newspaper had run a story with the headline “Misogyny Claim Leveled at Frat.” Since the initial story, the paper printed a series of articles and opinion pieces reporting similar incidents of harassment on campus. At a meeting of graduate students in my department, there was a lengthy discussion of gender imbalances in academia. And here on tmcyouth.com there are various threads in the discussion forums about men acting inappropriately or other women’s issues. The picture was grim. Every where I looked, I was confronted with inequality, intolerance, even hatred. There was a tangible sense of oppression; in spite of all the human efforts made to deal with the individual situations, I had trouble shaking the feeling that there was little hope for overall progress.

But in the midst of this dark outlook, I had a gentle, quiet sense that this just wasn’t right. One of the very first lessons I learned in Sunday School was that Father-Mother God loves every one of Her children equally and infinitely. And I have had healings of all kinds of problems, including hateful or unfair relationships, that proved that law of love to me. The very suggestion of inequality, intolerance and hatred was totally counter to all the evidences I had had to the contrary.

That inkling of faith was a starting point, but I knew I needed to go further. I wanted to understand—to see what God was seeing about His creation at that moment. I had a lot of errands to run that afternoon, and as I drove around, I was in a serious conversation with God. I don’t really know how to describe it, other than as a steady stream of inspiration.

I thought about the truths I have learned and demonstrated from studying Christian Science. Occasionally, I’d get stuck—something wouldn’t make sense or I’d feel like I needed more. And each time, a new idea would come and I’d be off and running again. It was peaceful and comforting, but I still felt a sense of unease—that maybe I wasn’t doing enough or maybe these were just nice thoughts that had no impact on real life situations.

All of a sudden, one idea came so clearly and strongly it might as well have been in neon lights. It was the Golden Text from the Weekly Bible Lesson the week before. It said: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.” And that’s when I realized that that’s the ultimate valentine—so much better than the usual “Be mine.” It was so clearly not my own reasoning, but Divine Love’s answer to my questioning— remember I’m not so big on Valentine’s Day! Instantly, my unease was replaced by a sense of hope and joy. I felt the relief and confidence of God’s promise “Thou art mine.” It wasn’t my job to maintain perfection, and it certainly wasn’t my job to pray away any problems. But it is my job to stop and see what a beautiful job God was doing.

I kept coming back to the part “I have called thee by thy name.” At first, I couldn’t figure out why. What did naming have to do with gender inequalities and intolerance? As I continued to pray, I started to think about the two different accounts of creation in Genesis. In Chapter 1, God creates the whole universe, complete and perfect. He creates man, male and female, in His own image. Every single element of the universe is divinely created, divinely governed, and declared to be good. In Chapters 2 and 3, we have the account of mortal Adam and Eve. Creation is incomplete. God creates the heavens and the earth and the plants, but He doesn’t cause it to rain and there is no man to till the ground. Man is created from dust, and woman is created from man. They are deceived by a serpent, and cursed as punishment for their disobedience.

Interestingly, in the Adam and Eve account of creation, God brings every living creature to Adam “…to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” I realized that all these attacks on womanhood were part of the whole Adam and Eve myth. They were suggestions that woman was made from a man, subject to man’s control and domination, and that material man was responsible for naming [identifying, defining] the universe.

God’s declaration in Isaiah that “I have called thee by thy name,” however, was a direct rebuttal to this whole story. It was a definitive stand for the first account of creation, the spiritual account, where God—not man—created the whole universe, defined every identity, and beheld its glorious perfection. All the derogatory name-calling in the world would not and could not overthrow the fact that man and woman were made in the image and likeness of God, upright, and very, very good.

With that realization, the feelings of burden and disappointment just vanished. I stopped wondering whether my prayer would actually do any good for the situation and rejoiced that God already had the situation under control. I reveled in that divine valentine—the message that spoke directly to me and embraced me in Love. This doesn’t mean I’ll quit praying! It’s that I now have a firmer conviction that my prayers do have an effect and the reason is because they are only acknowledging the truth of what God has created and is maintaining.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures where Mary Baker Eddy writes, “The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love.” It can be tempting to feel like our prayers for the world aren’t enough—that we need to do something more, to say something more to heal the situation. But the ultimate valentine, aflame with divine Love, is whispering “Thou art mine” to every individual. And that Love is enough.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.