Dr dear Dr: Am I the only one around my village who does not enjoy St Valentine’s Day and is happy to see the old feast of lovers consigned to the bins of history, liturgical time anyway, since really speaking it is now the memoria of Sts Cyril and Methodius, right?

Right but let us call off such sincere and pious but misunderstanding guided thoughts a while, to quote the lovely poems of Hopkins. But honestly, as Rafe Hubris and Uncle Dan sometimes say nowadays, some presenters on media outlets can be killjoys; switched on the TV the other day about a programme on St Valentine’s Day and all that the presenters and panels could talk about was a grand theft auto approach of “romantic fraud” for the occasion - how utterly self-defeating. Rare. Down to the question, even if somewhat mischievous - sent in by a flock guided Christian from the old haunts of Tresham and Catesby and Fawkes up north near the old Coombe Abbey:

Extreme Christians do exist though, like the CRF of the Christian Reaction Force, and some of those extreme Christians while laudable and pious as the ladies and gentlemen of the Far Right often are in their naivete, still, an extreme is always an extreme, and does not always go by wholly unnoticed as an extreme either. Like Christians who do not buy Christmas presents for their children during Advent; like Christians who fast three times a week during Lent, Monday, Wednesday, Friday; like Christians who turn their noses up at the lovely easter eggs at the shops; like Christians who will not stoop down so low as to buy and bake Hot Cross buns; like Christians who do not buy a Valentine card for their crush on today’s feast, but feast and festal we must out, simply out of respect for the pious customs of our forebears and forefathers and foremothers; such is the plight of the extremes even in our modern times especially after a trying time like Covid.

While there are those Christians in the flocks of a somewhat evangelical hue and of maybe an overly pious extreme nature who take their day to day orientations from a precise if over precise fidelity to the feasts and memorials of the liturgical calendars, but ignoring the old feasts of the older calendar as merely secular feasts of dubious confection, still there might yet be something approaching an error which we might call Liturgicalismus, in which some revanchiste Christians cling to the liturgical calendars but at the expense of the many indicators to the heavenly beings in the “secular” but actually older customary calendars of the customs of the Christians down the ages, and the Feast of St Valentine is one of these.

Very popular abroad and this is the day when many Christian believers stop at local little churches to light candles to God and the angels to direct them to Mr Right or Miss Right, depending on the woke criteria of modern loving and living. Now granted that liturgically speaking many purists like to celebrate the memorial of Sts Cyril and Methodius on this day, two founders of the old Rus vocabularium and the old Rus graphology and arguably founders of the whole Russian Federation, it would be woeful and quite abject of us to miss a soft pressure pad of an indicator to the reception of the gospel message in the apparently secular feasts of the receptive audiences around us.

St Valentine is such a popular feast all around the world and this is both objectively mete and subjectively good, since it celebrates something also still very very popular around the world, despite pandemics, and that is the soft cell and harmony guided world of romantic love. So more power to it all. Do go out there today and buy your soft cell teddy bears and romantic cards and those romantic ventricled chocolates that we love and which the French Brittany poet at @poeticoceltico hymns into shape in his poem “Valentine Eve” from the collection “Under the Strawberry Tree.” Nice. Enjoy this lovely and love-guided day, conscious of nothing but the force of love in the world and in the universe among the twinkling stars above.