Spirituality Essay:

Happy Valentine's Day! ( February 2005 )

I confess to being a foppy romantic. I love Valentine's Day. It's included those cut-out and pasted-together Valentine's Day cards we made back in Grammar School, Hershey's "Kisses" and red roses, and of course the days of breathless dreams, wrapped in lace, with lovers in my younger days. So this time of year always reawakens those truly beautiful feelings for love and heart openings.

Many of us consider giving and receiving love the most wonderful gift of being human and being alive. As other holidays prompt and focus our awareness to bigger themes (Fourth of July: our country's values . . . Christmas: sharing), so too we can let Valentine's Day be a catalyst that reacquaints us with our love of love, and inspire us to better, richer connections to our lovers, our family, our friends, and our world.

Surprisingly, I don't resist the industry-driven shameless promotion of chocolates and flowers, the way I do with other holiday commercialism. With Valentine's Day, I find each ad, each display at Safeway lifting my heart - opening natural feelings of goodness and love that permeate my consciousness.

As our UU's second spiritual foundation encourages us to always be working to develop our ability to give and receive love (to others and ourselves), I love Valentine's Day as a Universal Call to bring more love into all our lives, and let all the joy that brings to spread to everyone.

This is one in a series of essays on spirituality by Rick Childs, lay leader of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Mendocino Coast. You may want to:
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