Letter Writing as a Contemplative Practice

I am taking my best friend Gwa back to Santa Maria in Cosmedin when we visit him in Rome.  He doesn’t believe me that the relics of St. Valentine are instated there, but I recollect that we have seen them:  he, Miss S. and I, together.  Walking past the short line of tourists waiting to take their pictures at La Boca di Verita, we enter the church, and I direct him to a chapel along the northeast wall.  There, in a gold and glass reliquary the size of a bread box, the remains are displayed.  Next to the reliquary, a brass tent sign is standing, embossed with the name ‘S. Valentino.’  It looks rather bizarre, actually, like a title plate one might see on a banker’s desk in your local branch.    

St. Valentine’s gap toothed, jawless skull sits delicately on its bed of white satin — I would swear, in fact, that it was no bigger than my son Paddy’s—who at two and a half is in the 5^th percentile for head circumference among boys his age.  One can’t always be sure of the size of objects within churches such as this; their expansive scale makes every copse and window seem smaller than it actually is.  Without a doubt, there is an optical minimizing effect at work, due to all the Baroque grandeur at work here.  But St. Valentine’s seems the skull of a child — a tiny, corrupt vessel shirking in its smallish space.

In all truth, the nominalizations attributed to him as the patron saint of interfaith marriages and letter writers really didn’t facilitate my having formed any sort of attachment to him, but there is an undeniable heroism and wisdom that the myth of Valentine evokes for me — a call to deep and intentional dialogue.  This call to dialogue was at the heart of his ministry.

I revere this wisdom, and often return to a singular image in my contemplation of the myth of Valentine — one in which, incidentally, the figure of the man himself isn’t present: the image of a prison cell, fettered with scraps of parchment that have been hurriedly stuck in the crevices of its rude walls.  The notes possess a ghostly translucence in the gloam, yet the rain falling black around them doesn’t penetrate their ink-veined hearts, the capillaries being protected by envelopments of stone.

Letter writing is a dying art.  But then, so is the deep and intentional dialogue that it facilitates — the sort of conversations in which we are fully invested in listening with our whole bodies, our eyes falling up and down over the familiar cascade of another person’s handwriting, our minds curling around the space of his or her voice as we recline in a quiet place and draw it in.    

It is a most beautiful intimacy. 

In a world where multi-tasking is the norm, and ‘instant messaging’ and social networking allows us to ‘keep tabs’ on almost anybody we would care to have contact with with almost instant gratification, Valentine offers us an almost absurd alternative:  spend up to several hours in silence.  Commit yourself to a state of suspended conversation with an absent other—and laboriously commit that conversation down in writing.  Send it off to them, and wait for a response that may never come.

Most people aren’t willing to make the investment.  What they fail to see is that the first return of the letter writer comes through the very process of writing itself.  When one picks up a pen, he or she enters a meditative state, a state of deep listening to the self as it extends itself outward in fellowship with another human being.   Such intentional action is exhausting and emancipating at the same time — as Gwa once described the feeling of writing to me in a letter, a “profusion of energy, a real and hard endeavor.”

Though we argue throughout our visit to Santa Maria whether this is in fact a relic of Valentine or not, it seems only proper that we’ve made this pilgrimage together; over the course of the last sixteen years I have exchanged more letters with him than with all other people combined.  It began, I suppose, as a practical necessity.  For two young people in college, the seven hour time difference between Italy and the Midwest and the once extraordinary cost of international calls, made it quite attractive to drop a note rather than pick up the phone in order to get in touch.  But what began as an economy became its own extraordinary gift. 

Letter writing is a movable feast, a contemplative practice that affords each and every one of us ample opportunities to enter deep and intentional dialogue with one another, with ourselves.  Every month of February I discover this for the first time again.