'Blood, as all men know, than water's thicker/But water's wider, thank the Lord, than blood.'

— Aldous Huxley, Ninth Philosopher's Song (1920)

This week women in the western world will once again subject themselves to the mental and psychological trauma that comes along with the observance of St Valentine's Day. That's fine, I guess, if you're a woman who likes contact sports. That is to say, if you don't mind lying battered and bloodied on the field at the end of February 14, because something will invariably have gone not according to plan, something that will make you contemplate whether or not love as a concept is real. Especially when you see neither hide nor hair of it the other 364 (or in this year's case: 365) days of the year.

But that, some may charge, is a cynical way of looking at things, and there are those who want to celebrate the day in blissful denial.

So, this year, forget about romantic love; I'm preoccupied, instead, with storge love. As we know, there are four types of love: agape (the unconditional love that God has for us), eros (romantic), phileo (friendship) and storge (affection). Storge love is in essence fondness that arises through familiarity, especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. But even with this kind of love, which to me is the most basic of your four kinds of love, there is difficulty with its expression. On local news a few weeks ago, for example, two parents were accused of stuffing the body of their dead two-year-old child in a suitcase. A post-mortem has since shown that the child died of natural causes, mind you, but, weirdly, the parents simply refused to report his death and accord him a respectable burial, opting instead to dump him in a suitcase and pretend that nothing had happened, that he'd never existed. Help me. I don't understand how a child, for whom a bond is formed by the mother during pregnancy, could be disposed of in this manner.

Then there is the apparent case, last week in Portmore, of sororicide, something we don't hear about too often. I understand that in the heat of an argument, tempers flare and sometimes one can give in to murderous impulse. But to further complicate a bad situation by attempting to bury the body in cement? How does a sisterly relationship deteriorate to the point of murder, over, as is being alleged, a quarrel about keeping the bathroom untidy? Again, I've thought long and hard about such a scenario. I'm actually a big sister, so it was easier for me to mentally construct this image. But again, I came up at odds and ends. I love my sister unequivocally. Always have. Always will. I remember clearly her first day at prep school. I looked in on her, took her to the bathroom at lunch time, saw to it that she was OK. How protective of her I was! Still am. She's my sister, and I would without thought take a bullet for her. But we've had our differences, our times when we've had to take time off from each other. Lord knows, when we were children who had to share a bathroom, as the neater sister, I exchanged many harsh words with her. I was perhaps the only 10-year-old who bandied the word "pigsty" about with such frequency. But love covers a multitude of faults, as the Bible says. I'm sure she couldn't stand my fastidiousness which she probably saw as not winning me any awards. So you put the cover back on the toothpaste, Sharon, so what? Is that going to qualify you to win a Pulitzer? Sadly, no. Love for each other, however, made us recognise each other's humanity despite our differences. That's what sisterly love — in fact, any kind of love — does.

And, finally, there's the recent grisly case in the foreign press that has shocked Canadians: the honour killing of three stunningly beautiful teenage girls and their stepmother by three members of their Afghani refugee family. The father, the apparent mastermind, who thankfully was last week found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison, along with his current wife and his son, was wire-tapped by police and heard discussing in "vulgar and graphic" language the disgust he felt for his three daughters who had apparently disgraced his family by arriving in Canada and assimilating by wearing so-called inappropriate clothes and dating boys.

Cultural differences notwithstanding, where is the honour in killing the fruit of your loins simply because of a perceived violation of your religious beliefs? These were your daughters, flesh of your flesh, how could you do that? Of what good is a religion that depends on its subjects to fight its battles? Why serve a god whose battles I must fight for him?

I love this quote I came across a while ago, from Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who authored 40 books about spirituality:

"Forgiveness is the name of love practised among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour — unceasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."

In this season of celebrating love, perhaps this year we could contemplate brotherly love. If we can't love our own brother, how can we love our significant other?

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