Soon Valentine’s Day! Romantic lovers celebrate it by reaffirming their sentiments toward each other and desires for each other, by giving each other presents and hope of a happy future. They are not unaware that love like a river or a well in the volatile eathly climate comes up, or ebbs, or even dries up, and that in any case no life is ever possible without any water. Love like water gives you hope of getting somewhere, love is faith. Without hope or faith you can’t embark on anything, or have anything evolving, you are unable, really unable, to conquer evil.
What’s more, you lovers don’t forget that romantic love does not substitute for parental love, or its reverse side: filial love which will appear along with offspring, or love of the neighbor, the expansion of which is going to change the world for the better (Sign 28/7).

Photo : Logan Voss (Unsplash)

When will
romantic love,
parental/filial love,
love of the neighbor,
come into simultaneous existence and get much more spread on earth than their opposites, hatred, contempt, selfishness and indifference?
Particularly the love of the neighbor, the key to the gateway most heavy, but most wide, to the future, featured by The Sign.
We Sister Christiane and I have celebrated Valentine’s Day only once in 40 years. Because we don’t celebrate the saints’ days. Because romantic love happens to us every day. That Valentine’s Day was a chance celebration, therefore, in 2003. I was 73 years old, Christiane 58. We were out one day from Bordeaux.
At dinner time we walked into a restaurant supposed to be empty and dull  in February and found the main room filled and buzzing with joyous diners. “Is this a wedding party?” we asked. “No, this is Valentine’s Day,” the waitress answered while seating the two of us in the billiard room, because there was no available table elsewhere. So we realized that in a hole in the middle of nowhere couples any age used to celebrate their loves!
As romantic love is chronic sentimental disease with us, we Christiane and I raised our flutes, filled with good champagne on the house, to
romantic love, the sufficient, though necessary condition for the nuptials (Sign 33/21),
parental love (36/20) and fifial love which children reciprocate,
love of the neighbor, which on earth mirrors the far too loving Father’s love for all his creatures (Sign 12/7).
Love of the neighbor is not sentimental. It is love with a sense of duty, which you have to give all of men, even the man whose lips are purulent or conceal a worm or a hook (Sign XXII/8), but it is the tremendous wisdom that will make all hatreds and evils and even death and even time subside and disappear some day.