Thank You

I want to thank everyone from whom I received a valentine today. I haven't had time to read them all, but I will soon create the time. Meanwhile, I hope you will use your valentine haikus, short-stories, and poems to enrich the lives of your friends, families, and lovers, but I also hope you will use them to reach out to at least one of your adversaries. A teacher once instructed his few students as follows:

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

Surely even pagans like me who celebrate St. Valentine's Day must recognize and acknowledge the profound worth of such a radical and mostly ignored and seldom realized turn of thought in this neglected passage, which is arguably at the very center and fiery core of all of Christ's teachings.

I've read that one of the various St. Valentine's had been condemned to death by a Roman emperor, but that Valentine somehow performed a miracle by curing his jailer's daughter of blindness on the eve of his death.

Well, it's getting late here, too, at Casa Hepworth. Time for bed. Happy Valentine's Day to all of you.