Charles E. "Chuck" Maier, 33°
489 Jasmine Street, Laguna Beach, California 92651–1615

Agape, the highest form of love, is the basis for a romance lasting a lifetime.

Do you remember those long-ago days when we either bought Valentines, five for 10¢, or teacher helped us make them in school? You didn't have to be a traditional Christian to recall good Saint Valentine who died 270 A.D. You merely had to have an object of love. As children, that usually meant Mom or Dad.

In the Middle Ages, Valentine became associated with the union of lovers under conditions of duress, rather like the anguish you felt when, at about age 13 or so, you quit throwing rocks at the boy or girl next door and, instead, thought of sending Valentines. It was amazing how much that lovely creature had changed, seemingly overnight! Those days were both joyful and painful, the marvelous melodrama of young love. Some of us take quite some time to move beyond these romantic notions to a fuller sense of love.

Two weeks before being returned to the Korean War, I received the Second Degree of Masonry. That night I heard the Chaplain speak Saint Paul's great hymn to love, First Corinthians, Chapter 13. I must have known about it through my home or church, but on that Tuesday evening, I really heard it, along with the staircase lecture which is so beautiful. As Providence would have it, the next Sunday our Presbyterian pastor preached on the same text, one of the finest sermons I had ever heard. At that time, I had no knowledge that the New Testament Greek has three words for love nor that the word Paul uses in Corinthians is agape, the highest form of self-sacrificing love, the basis for a romance lasting a lifetime.

So let our Valentines be Corinthian, writ by the tongues of angels, patient and kind, never jealous or rude, not irritable or resentful, bearing and believing all things, never ending but carrying us from that first crude and clumsy paper Valentine of adolescent splendor to the hope of a golden wedding anniversary.

Charles E. Maier was a U.S. Marine during the Korean War and is a veteran of the Chosin Reservoir Campaign and a member of the Chosin Few. Raised in 1954 by Laguna Beach Lodge No. 672, he is the founding Chaplain of Orange County Daylight Lodge No. 833 and Irvine Lodge No. 841. Since 1995, he has served as Grand Prelate of the Grand Commandery, York Rite, California. He was Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of California, 1987–88. After graduating from a major seminary in 1960, Father Maier served as a missioner with the Navajo Nation in Arizona and as a pastor in small parish development in California. In 1980, he was called into the hospital ministry as a chaplain and therapist, working with alcoholism and substance-abuse patients. He began active retirement in January 2000.