Sean Dietrich
The original holiday was called Lupercalia. An ancient Roman festival. A real scream.
Picture this. The Roman town square was crowded. Everyone was buck naked. Even the old people, whose bodies were ravaged by gravity.
Young women would line up, men would swat them with the hides of sacrificed animals. This supposedly made them fertile. It goes without saying that beer was involved.
Sean Dietrich
Women then put their names into a big jar. Whereupon each guy would select a name. Then, everyone would go off together and, um, read the Bible.
No. Wait. The Bible hadn’t been invented yet. So, I’m sure they were all doing something else. Maybe playing Twister.
Fast-forward about 300 years after the death of Jesus. Rome was a cesspool. If you were a Christian, you were—how do I put it?—screwed. Christians were mass hated. Why were they hated?
Politics, baby. Nothing arouses hate like politics.
So, you basically had two different groups in Rome. You had those who thought the emperor was a spiritual genius, sent by God—actually, they thought HE WAS A GOD. And you had the other crowd who listened to talk radio.
Christians didn’t fit into either group. They simply wouldn’t play the game. They met underground. They refused to worship Caesar. Not only because he was a tyrant, but because he made a crappy salad.
Why was this such a big deal? Because to Romans, religion was a social and public thing. Refusing to sacrifice a goat to a Roman god was like disrespecting the flag. The role of a priest was a public office. Not playing the politics game meant you were unpatriotic.
And this is why they started killing Christians. They had all kinds of ways to kill you.
They would wrap you in the carcass of an animal and let dogs attack you. They’d put you into barrels with protruding spikes and roll you down hills. They dipped you in tar and lit you on fire as a human torch. They crucified you upside down. And worse, they forced you to watch Live with Kelly and Mark.
Meantime, Rome was involved in a lot of war campaigns. Their military was running thin, so the emperor banned marriages. He couldn’t have young men choosing to stay home with their families when they needed to be in the army.
Which leads us to Saint Valentine.
An underground Christian priest named Valentine was marrying young lovers illegally. He conducted a lot of weddings. Even after they imprisoned him, he kept officiating mass weddings, right there in the jail.
This was EXTREMELY unpatriotic, converting soldiers into enemies of the state. So, they dragged Reverend Valentine before the prefect of Rome. Publicly, they beat Valentine to death with wooden bats. They cut off his head and held it up for the crowd. Rome cheered.
But before he died, the priest wrote a letter to a young Christian. It was the correspondence of an old man. A dying man. He signed his final letter, “Your Valentine.”
So anyway, I just wanted you to know that today isn’t only about chocolate.
Your Valentine,
Sean Dietrich