It was about 2004 when I realised I hated Valentine’s Day. Mrs B and I were sitting in what till then had been one of our favourite hipster South London restaurants. Overnight, it had been crammed full of two-person tables and now proffered a ‘Lovers’ Menu’. Suffice to say, this feast day has been marked in a lower-key way ever since. Poor Valentine – a Roman martyr of the third century about whom we know virtually nothing – is now the saint that launched a thousand gifts.

The Bible tells a love story between God and humanity, first with the children of Israel and then with the whole world. But Scripture has lots of different words for what we translate as ‘love’. For example, perhaps the most famous passage about love in the whole New Testament, Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, is about agape. Agape is sometimes rendered as ‘charity’. Elsewhere you then find philia which is ‘friendship’ and storge which might be ‘familial love’.

But Valentine’s Day is about eros – romantic or sexual love. You might think that this is something that creatures do and not the Creator – and indeed at times Christianity has seemed to suggest that sexuality is something fallen or shameful, and certainly not divine.

As a celebration of eros, the Old Testament’s Song of Songs understandably forms part of many weddings, including our own 20 years ago. But tradition also regards it as a poem of Christ’s love for the church or, put on a wider canvas, a poem of God’s love for his creation.

This tells us two things. First, that it makes sense to speak of God as one who loves in all the ways his creatures do. For sure, as the marriage service puts it, sexuality needs to be hallowed and directed aright, but it is not something bad or wrong.

But second, and more extraordinarily, we learn that God loves us with a lover’s passion. God loves the whole creation, of course. But God is wearing your ring, looking at your picture, keeping your letters. In other words, it’s as if, forsaking all others, God keeps himself only unto us, like we were the only one.

Chris Braganza