Valentine’s Day and Lent: an Invitation to Radical Love

To open the Lenten season 2018, which this year coincided with Valentine’s Day, the Daughters of St. Paul of Johannesburg organized a meeting entitled: Lent Begins on Valentine’s Day: A Call to Radical Love in Troubling Situations of Hate.

The encounter was guided by Nontando Hedebe, a South African theologian, who with great skill presented Lent as a call to radical love. Taking the troubling current situation as his point of departure, he said that as Christians we must ask ourselves: Where are we in this pyramid of hatred and violence? How do we react to this spiral of discrimination and corruption? Do we consider it normal or are we striving to go beyond it in order to restore genuine love to its proper place?

In a context of penance and self-denial, the radical love to which Jesus witnessed represents the true path of love, passion and death