Dear friends,

My time away from you continues, but you remain in my heart, right where you belong. May we be in each other’s hearts, as tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Our family celebrates a wedding on this day—the melding of two hearts and also the melding of families across time zones and continents, across hard times and great faith. It will be a beautiful day, I have no doubt.

Valentine’s Day is often figured as a day to celebrate lovers, and that is certainly a good way to spend the day. Yet there are other loving relationships that might be marked, though it is unlikely there is a Hallmark card or an especially-designated box of chocolates for the relationship I propose you give some attention this week. And that is the loving relationship I pray you have with yourself.

The collective who provided us this month with our Soul Matters theme materials offers to you a spiritual practice of writing yourself a daily love letter about all that helps you experience your life as trustworthy. In her blog, “The Pulse and the Beat of a Daily Valentine Ritual,” Ruth King invites you to end your day with reflection on the three best things that happened to you. King says that her choices are Valentines to her life, in a way: “In days too rushed, full of good fortune but not frustration-immune, holding these moments close turns out to be a more profound act than [she’d] thought possible.”

Further, King says, the Valentine ritual works best only “if I choose genuinely, if I select the bits of joy that pulse and beat their way into my sleep-ready mind from the day just passed. Those genuine Valentines come from the place where I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a person who cares for animals, a reader, a writer and, yes, an anthropologist and scientist, too.” You can read more of King’s blog here .

I invite you, friends into this practice of noting those moment of grace and beauty, moments of love and loveliness that put frustration and pain and uncertainty into perspective and enable you to trust. Perhaps you will let me know how your practice goes, when I return to the Fellowship next week.

In the meantime, may you remember, today and every day that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so. May it be so. And amen.

Blessings, Rev. Rita