Ashes or chocolate?

It last occurred in 2018, before that in 1945, and it is happening again: Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. Or does Valentine’s Day fall on Ash Wednesday? There’s the rub: which takes precedence? Can they go together? Can both be celebrated Feb. 14?

Well, sure: enjoy that stale bread and water with your sweetheart!

Alright, perhaps the answer is a bit more nuanced, and as a husband, father and deacon, I have a vested interest (there’s a pun there!) in a more thorough answer.

But in short, Ash Wednesday trumps Valentine’s Day. That is, if Catholics are going to celebrate Valentine’s Day (and there’s nothing that says we must other than perhaps a now Hallmark-dominated custom), we must do so in a fitting manner when it falls on Ash Wednesday. That is, there is something — or rather someone: Mother Church — who says that as Catholics we must observe Ash Wednesday at least by abstaining from meat and by fasting. So there seems to be something just a tad incongruent about chocolate and wine and cheesecake (all technically allowed) on one of the two remaining mandatory fast days of the entire year.

Additionally, on Ash Wednesday observant Catholics (and others) will notice a change in color (to violet), a change in music (more somber), a change in prayers (no alleluia, no Gloria at Mass, a whole panoply of different antiphons and responses in the Liturgy of the Hours), a change in décor (more spartan, no flowers). And many if not most Catholics (and others) participate in Mass or another ritual in which ashes (from burning last year’s palms) are smeared or sprinkled on our heads as a sign of grieving for our sins, for our self-centeredness, for abusing our freedom to love, and beginning to say, “I am sorry.” All these external expressions are meant to enkindle internal disposition from, perhaps, “same old, same old,” and to wake up, pay attention, begin the journey, stir the heart. Turn from distracted love to Love himself.

Ash Wednesday, far from being an isolated day, is meant to be the starting gate for an entire season of embodied love, a “stress test on the heart,” to see what our hearts are made of — like one of those treadmill exercises when they wire you up to monitor the ol’ ticker and see how healthy or not it may be. It’s meant to be an entire season of 40 days of almsgiving, prayer and fasting: embodied practices. In the baldest formula: give your money away and take care of others, shut up and “waste” a lot more time on God, and don’t eat food.

Putting aside money, time and food inwardly opens me outward: turning from me to others, to God.  Not a bad trajectory, that. Rather than always satisfying self, I acknowledge I am empty and need to be filled with the One who loves me to the end. I begin to say to God more than I typically do, “you matter.”

And here, perhaps, is a common link to Valentine’s Day. For Valentine’s Day is also a time set aside to say (and not simply think) to one we love: “you matter.” And then to express it in embodied fashion:  with words (lavishly), with chocolate (preferably), with time (a lot), with diamonds (well, maybe), with acts of kindness (the more the better), all embodied expressions that say, “you matter.” Like Ash Wednesday, it’s only a day, but it is meant to represent a whole lot more. It’s meant to say, perhaps, “my life is focused on you.”

My wife, Anne, and I have a practice — an embodied expression of love — that we began on the day of our wedding. Every day — twice a day, in fact, each morning and each evening — we repeat part of our wedding vows to each other: “I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.” We started doing it sort of on a whim, but after a while we noticed that expressing love increased our love.

It became difficult to say “I will love you and honor you all the days of my life” through gritted teeth of frustration, or to let the sun go down on our anger, or to not back it up with some deeds of service, or to neglect conversation on everything else, or to fail to care for each other in illness.

So, we decided to do it again and again. That means we’ve said it again to each other 21,170 times in 29 years (as of Jan. 14), not counting leap years and additional repetitions in cards and notes. If we’re apart from each other, we text or phone or write ahead of time. (I’m tempted to say for us “Every day is Valentine’s Day,” but, sadly, I all too infrequently back that up with flowers and chocolate). But we’ve also come to realize that one of the best ways of loving one another is by encouraging each other to pray, to pray together (daily), and by giving each other the space to spend that time with God. The more we express to God “you matter,” the more readily we express the same to each other.

So, hold me to it: Anne will get the chocolates before Valentine’s Day. And on Valentine’s Ash Wednesday? The best gift I’ll give her is to be with her in church, declaring to God: “I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.”

Deacon Michalak is director of the Office of Synod Evangelization in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.