Leela Ramdeen

To­day is Valen­tine’s Day, a day to cel­e­brate not on­ly ro­man­tic love, but love in all its forms. Over the years, this cel­e­bra­tion has be­come high­ly com­mer­cialised. How­ev­er, we must not equate love with ma­te­r­i­al ex­pres­sion.

I re­mem­ber en­gag­ing in a con­ver­sa­tion with a young woman who was “ste­ups­ing” be­cause she felt that the bou­quet of flow­ers her boyfriend had giv­en to her on Valen­tine’s Day was, as she said: “too scrawny” (sparse).

There is a say­ing that true love is about pres­ence, not presents.

A lack of love in our world is ev­i­dent in many so­ci­eties. Spend some time to­day to re­flect on what love means to you. I al­ways find it help­ful to re­flect on Apos­tle Paul’s Let­ter to the church in Corinth (1 Corinthi­ans 13:4-7) and on the mean­ing of “agape” love:

“Love is pa­tient, love is kind.

It is not jeal­ous, it is not pompous,

It is not in­flat­ed, it is not rude,

It does not seek its own in­ter­ests,

It is not quick-tem­pered, it does not brood over in­jury,

It does not re­joice over wrong­do­ing but re­joic­es with the truth.

It bears all things, be­lieves all things, hopes all things, en­dures all things.

Love nev­er fails.”

In 2016, Pope Fran­cis is­sued an Apos­tolic Ex­hor­ta­tion Amor­is Laeti­tia (“The Joy of Love”). He pays trib­ute to hu­man love, which should be in har­mo­ny with the love of God. In it, he gave a line-by-line com­men­tary on Saint Paul’s “Hymn to Love” - 1 Corinthi­ans 13:4-7 (Chap­ter 4). Read what he says about mar­riage, eg, “When love is mere­ly phys­i­cal at­trac­tion or a vague af­fec­tion, spous­es be­come par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble once this af­fec­tion wanes or phys­i­cal at­trac­tion di­min­ish­es”; and fam­i­ly life: “The fam­i­ly is the first school of hu­man val­ues,” which, of course, in­cludes love.

True love in­volves build­ing the right re­la­tion­ship with God, self, neigh­bour and Cre­ation. In a world plagued by wars and con­flict, the root caus­es of which are based on, for ex­am­ple, ha­tred, racism, greed, abuse of pow­er, and self­ish­ness, two sen­tences in Amor­is Laeti­tia stand out: “Love ab­hors mak­ing oth­ers suf­fer.” “Love sur­mounts even the worst bar­ri­ers.”

I re­mem­ber the pow­er­ful con­clud­ing line from the mu­si­cal adap­ta­tion of Vic­tor Hugo’s Les Mis­érables: “To love an­oth­er per­son is to see the face of God.” Let us recog­nise the di­vine in “the oth­er.” The char­ac­ter, Jean Val­jean, was trans­formed through un­con­di­tion­al love. Com­pas­sion and for­give­ness help us to build com­mu­ni­ty. Agape love/self­less love is pa­tient, kind, not self-seek­ing; it’s about sac­ri­fi­cial ser­vice; it leads us to seek the high­est good for oth­ers with­out ex­pect­ing any­thing in re­turn. We are called to mir­ror this kind of love, which was demon­strat­ed by Je­sus. “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

We need to cul­ti­vate agape love in our homes, our work­places, our com­mu­ni­ties, our world. Per­haps if those men­tioned in the files of the late fi­nancier and con­vict­ed sex of­fend­er Jef­frey Ep­stein had opened their hearts to em­brace agape love, they would have been more em­pa­thet­ic; they would have seen God’s face in the faces of the count­less chil­dren/mi­nors whose dig­ni­ty and lives they vi­o­lat­ed so ruth­less­ly.

All peo­ple of good­will are still reel­ing from the in­for­ma­tion that is be­ing shared about Ep­stein and his as­so­ciates’ long-term al­leged sex traf­fick­ing and sex­u­al ex­ploita­tion of count­less chil­dren—of­ten from vul­ner­a­ble back­grounds—through force, fraud, or co­er­cion. 2019 fed­er­al in­dict­ment doc­u­ments in­di­cate that Ep­stein ran a “vast net­work” to trans­port and ex­ploit un­der­age girls, some as young as 14, for sex­u­al acts. God alone knows the full ex­tent of the hor­rors the chil­dren faced. They were scout­ed, re­cruit­ed, and “groomed.”

This de­prav­i­ty will be re­mem­bered in his­to­ry as a shame­ful stain on hu­man­i­ty. Count­less women have been com­plain­ing for years about the das­tard­ly acts of a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of rich and pow­er­ful men and some women in­volved in this sor­did scan­dal. Will the sur­vivors ever re­ceive jus­tice?

Gretchen Carl­son and Julie Ro­gin­sky re­mind us that “Ep­stein’s sto­ry is not re­al­ly about one man’s de­prav­i­ty. It is about a sys­tem—le­gal, cul­tur­al and in­sti­tu­tion­al —en­gi­neered to pro­tect the pow­er­ful through si­lence. His crimes thrived not be­cause they were hid­den, but be­cause the peo­ple who knew were co­erced, en­cour­aged or more than will­ing to shut up” (UK Guardian, 8/12/25).

We must play our part in build­ing a world that is tru­ly wor­thy of chil­dren. On this Valen­tine’s Day, “Let us be­come agents of love ... chan­nels of God’s love and mer­cy” (Pope Fran­cis), so that jus­tice and peace can flour­ish.