A Valentine Homily by Father James Donelan SJ

 A Valentine Homily by Father James Donelan SJ

     If by some happy chance you should ever find yourself in the Italian City of Florence, take a little time out for a sentimental pilgrimage. Leave the Piazza Vecchio, cross over the Ponte Vecchio, where the goldsmith shops are. Go up the Via Maggiore towards the Pitti Palazzo where, just opposite the Palazzo and the church of San Felice, stands the Casa Guidi. This is the shrine of our pilgrimage. It is a proper pilgrimage to make on Valentine's Day, for here in this old ancestral house of the Guidi family was enacted one of the great love stories of all times. 

     I would like you to re-live with me two touching scenes from that love story. The first scene takes place on an early spring morning in the year 1849. Standing on the street below, we can see the large windows of the Casa Guidi open up, and a man, an Englishman, stand there looking across towards San Felice, but actually lost in thought. He is a writer, a poet, and he is thinking about what he will write that day. He doesn't hear his wife come up behind him until he feels her hand push some papers into his pocket - and turning, he sees her fleeing from the room.
 

     An hour later he is still standing there by the window, his cheeks wet with tears. For what he read in his wife's neat handwriting on the crumpled sheets of paper was the answer to a question -- an answer which he kept to himself for 12 years. Until his wife died. Then he gave it to the world. We all know both the question and the answer:
 

     How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:
     I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
     My soul can reach…
     I love thee to the level of everyday’s
     Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
     I love thee with the breath,
     Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose, .
     I shall but love thee better after death.
 

     Elizabeth Barrett, the Englishman's wife who wrote the immortal lines of “How do I love thee?” never dreamt she would ever say such things, feel such things. At 16 she had fallen from a horse - the injury developed into tuberculosis. It also gave a tyrannically possessive father the weapon with which to imprison her for 15 years in a room where no brightness -- neither of smile or sunshine -- ever came. To pass the time, she wrote poems. A kindly uncle published some of them. One day, she received a note which read “I love your poetry with all my heart, and I love you, too.” Signed, Robert Browning.

     What followed is an astonishing example of the power of love. Elizabeth escaped from her father's house, married Robert Browning and sailed to Italy, to Florence, to the Casa Guidi on Via Maggiore which was to be her home until she died. That “incurable” invalid bore her husband a son, and so filled his heart with song that Robert Browning became one of England's greatest poets. While she, transformed by his love, wrote a collection of Sonnets which earned for her an immortal place among the world's great poets of love. 

     What advice do you think Elizabeth Browning would have for you today on Valentine’s Day? I choose to ask Elizabeth rather than her husband because I have found at least in my reading of literature, that while male poets like Sydney, Wyatt, Shakespeare, John Donne excel in expressing their love, it is the women who get to the heart of the matter. Perhaps because, as Jane Austen, an English novelist wrote – “Love is only part of a man's life. It is a woman's whole life.” And she went on to say that while men may love as long as there is hope, women love long after there is none. When Jeremy Irons, playing the English gentleman, asked the French Lieutenant's woman if she walked those bleak shores waiting for her lieutenant, the woman proved Jane Austen's point. She had learned, she said, that the very brave can be very false. She knew he wouldn't return and yet she waited.