Today is Valentine’s Day. Or Saint Valentine’s Day, if you prefer a religious theme.
I wonder if anyone will send me a valentine. I doubt it. Because Valentine’s Day has its roots in a Roman festival of fertility.
Lupercalia celebrated the first flashes of spring in southern Italy. Naked men romped through the streets, hitting women with strips of bloody skin from sacrificed animals, to make them more fecund. A lottery paired eligible men and women. Perhaps for life. Perhaps just for a night.
At my age, I’m long past fertility rites.
Valentine himself may actually have been themselves. Catholic history identifies three sainted Valentines. All three were executed. One of them may have written a secret letter to his jailer’s daughter, signed “Your Valentine,” thus setting a pattern for future Valentines.
Just to confuse matters, some histories suggest that two of the legendary Valentines may have been the same person, both executed on February 14 by Emperor Claudius II, but in two different years.
Go figure.
Making valentine cards
Once upon a time, of course, we all made little valentines. Our school teachers provided coloured paper and lace doilies that we could cut up and stick together.
I distantly remember having crushes on various girls. I always hoped they’d feel the love oozing out of the card I made for them. And vice versa, I suppose. But it’s hard to sense true love when everyone gets a card.
Joan and I gave each other valentine cards, most years. If we remembered. Also, if we got to the store before the only cards left were either profane nor ridiculously sentimental.
Sometimes I bought flowers instead. Another fertility symbol, I suppose.
Valentine’s Day seems somewhat fruitless for one who now lives alone. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not whining. I’m much more comfortable with being on my own these days. When I think about it, I live a privileged life. I have a warm house. I have adequate income. I eat well. I have friends.
But it does give me an outsider’s perspective on the urge to couple up.
In our society, solo life is the exception, not the rule. Perhaps in every society. The Buddhist monk living in a cave high above a Himalayan river, the Christian ascetic perched on a pillar in the desert, that attractive man or woman without a partner – these are the “odd man out.”
The urge to merge
Arthur Koestler coined the term “holon”; philosopher Ken Wilber popularized it. It means (I think) that every living entity has a deep desire to transcend the limitations of being an isolated individual. Single-celled creatures want to clump together. Multi-celled creatures want to work together.
Wolves form packs. Birds form flocks. Fish form schools.
We humans join hands and hearts in social organizations. We march for civil rights. We attend meetings. We hold reunions. We join political parties and churches, to affirm what we believe in, as a collective group.
I’m not sure where this urge to merge comes from. Some will cite the Bible, where the Creation story says that God made everything and “saw that it was good” – until God made the first human, and saw that being alone was not good.
So God created a second human. This time, female.
Both, according to Genesis, created in God’s own image.
If that puzzles you, forget it. Clearly, two was preferable to one.
Referring to the Bible also can’t explain why cultures that have no acquaintance with the Hebrew scriptures still form couples.
Some would say it’s an instinctive desire to procreate, to have sex, to have children. Why then do some couples choose to remain childless? Indeed, some loving couples cannot have children.
Our marriage rituals emphasize this sense of incorporation into a larger body. Of two becoming one. Of bonding with each other, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”
“Be MY Valentine…”
I’m less enamoured with the notion of possession, in marriage -- the sense in many cultures, even in ours, still, that the male now owns the female. She belongs to him, to do with as he pleases.
Even the traditional valentine message implies possession: “Be MY Valentine.”
I don’t want to be an outsider; I want to belong. But I don’t want to belong to somebody else. I certainly don’t want someone else to belong to me.
Partnership, yes; possession, no.
How would one put that message into a conventional Valentine’s card?
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
I suppose last week’s column – lamenting the lack of cooperation between medical disciplines – was a bit of a rant.
Lynda Mandryk corrected me on a medical matter, “on why ICU patients on ventilators are sometimes lying face down...a procedure called proning. It is not done to drain fluid. It is done to better match the areas of good blood flow to lungs with areas of lung tissue that might be healthier. Blood flow is gravity dependent so if you lay on your back your best blood flow is to lung tissue at the back of your lungs, but the best air in the alveoli is at the front of chest. If you flip a person onto the stomach the best blood flow now goes with gravity to lowest part of lungs and hopefully they have functioning lung tissue there and the oxygen levels in their blood will improve.
“It is tricky to do with all the tubes and intravenous lines sick patients have and requires a lot of staff to do safely. It's been used for probably 20 years -- often as a last-ditch effort to salvage a person -- and it works.”
Otherwise, most of you responded to the idea of “mental silos.”
Isabel Gibson: “Yet another reason to despair of our human ability to do anything, or to marvel that we ever get any part of anything right.
“I've been astounded that no one in government or LTC-home management companies seemed to think of effectively quarantining LTC home staff, using the same staffing model that we use at remote camps (several weeks "in", a smaller number "out") with a premium paid for people to live like that. (Expensive? Yes. Effective? That too. A small town in France and one in Quebec did it on their own initiative and had no COVID deaths.) The separation between the industrial and the medical silos is more understandable than the one you identify between the CF and infectious-diseases ones.
“In every emergency there is a need for someone who stands back and says, ‘What else could we use? Whose help might we need?’ When everyone is running flat out, there's no one to do that. It can arise spontaneously, but it can be achieved more reliably by planning for it as part of our emergency response and adding that role to our training programs.”
Rob Dummermuth: I find this ‘silo mentality’ very evident in academic circles, to the extent of deliberately excluding the insight and knowledge of old experience and ‘ancient wisdom’.
“Many of the people with university training believe they know it all.
“In a recent discussion I pointed out the university training is more than three generations out of date -- one generation has to learn something, a second generation has to accept it and write a book, a third generation has to include it in the syllabus and teach it to the fourth generation -- who then take it back to the first generation as a new insight.”
Bob Thompson found a personal applicaton: “We were visiting a cousin of Norrie's in late fall, and he, like me, has COPD. In the course of the conversation, I was saying that I am producing (and having to cough up) a lot of mucus these days, and my doctor doesn't seem to understand why it is happening. The cousin said that that is one of the side effects of COPD -- the damaged lungs produce an excess of mucus to try and rehabilitate themselves. He showed me a 'puffer' that he used a couple of times a day. I bought one at the respiratory clinic in Vernon. You breathe into it fairly rapidly, and then breathe out slowly and steadily, and a blade inside sets up a vibration that works just like clapping did for your son -- it jiggles the mucus so it is easier to cough up. I find that it makes a great difference for me.”
Bob Rollwagen: Several months ago a CBC interview discussed a reduction in the use of ventilators because of the use of some of the techniques you describe. Having spent decades managing enterprises with many silos and knocked around a little in Medical research funding, I would suggest there is a fair bit of integration. Looking from a greater distance without the same Intimate experience, I would suggest that a bigger hurdle to success could be regional priorities and tribal politics directing Public Health. 40 years ago, a senior member of my family needed senior healthcare. On the first visit, I was shocked. She was relocated as fast as we could to a better home, at greater expense She could afford. Why was this necessary. Why do such poor facilities exist. Doctors are needed when we have a problem. Let’s fix the problem.
Clsre Neufeld responded to my closing lines: “When lives are at stake, no potential source of information should be excluded. No matter whose silo it’s in.”
Clare wrote, “I find myself easily moved into your corner in this matter -- largely for moral/ethical reasons.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns