St Valentine's Day does not feature in the monastic calendar. Usually on 14 February we are celebrating the dull but worthy SS Cyril and Methodius (may our Slav brethren forgive me) and meditating on the beauties of Old Church Slavonic rather than the loveliness of the beloved. There is not a red ribbon or rosebud in sight. The feast is too minor to merit a glass of wine or piece of chocolate: everything is suitably drab and dreary. While the commercial world goes into a spin in the name of lurv, we remain relentlessly focused on the spiritual, rejoicing in the preaching of the gospel to our eastern neighbours over a thousand years ago. No wonder many think the Church hopelessly out of touch with the world in which "ordinary people" live and work, unbearably serious and a bit of a kill-joy.

By a happy accident, St Valentine's Day coincides with Sunday this year, so we had the Beatitudes at Mass. I daresay many a preacher compared the two ways of loving, Christian and commercial, contrasting the self-giving of the one with the exploitation of the other. I wonder how many dared to argue that Christian love, as expressed in the Beatitudes, is the most romantic of all loves, because it catches us up into the mystery of Christ's love for his Church, looks to the Other rather than to self and is eternal rather than ephemeral. There are no ribbons and rosebuds to express such love as this, no poetry adequate to proclaim it. Only a morsel of bread and a sip of wine, transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ, can contain the Love "which moves the sun and lesser stars". This is the love-feast of the Christian, the source of all his joy; and we celebrate it, not on just one day of the year, but on every day save Good Friday and Holy Saturday. For us ars amandi, ars vivendi: the art of loving is the art of living.