Meatless Friday

We have company coming for lunch today, and I’ve stopped counting the times somebody in the household has passed me here at my desk to ask what we’re having to eat. FOOD, all right? Now pick up that Q-tip and get back to dusting the settee.

Being a Southerner, I generally have a ready answer to the question of what’s for company lunch: chicken salad, nice bread, tossed green salad and/or fruit, iced tea. There’s something to be said for tradition and foregone conclusions, which save you no end of time, energy, and gratuitous thought when you’re already whirling through your house like an outtake from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” hurling people’s muddy wellington boots into closets and trying to find something in the fridge with which to bribe the dog to go outside, which the dog will not later, and in company, yurk up on the living-room rug. The dog is both independent-minded and finicky and — for a creature bred to hunt bears and sleep under the smokehouse — remarkably delicate in his digestion. Maybe if we had a smokehouse and he slept under it, instead of on one of the two boys’ beds (they sleep together in the other one), all these things would resolve themselves. Anyway, out he goes.

As I said, tradition and foregone conclusions come in handy at times like these. They are a shore upon which you can cast yourself with a gasp of relief. Unfortunately or, as it happens, fortunately or not, we have in our household a collision of traditions and foregone conclusions, because we’re not only Southern by birth but Catholic by conversion, and we abstain from meat on Fridays.

Yes, yes, I know we don’t have to. We’re really not trying to be rigorists here. For one thing, we think that if we’re going to observe Fridays at all, as the commemoration of the Lord’s sacrifice, it’s just easier to have a habit of observation than to wake up every Friday and say, in a panic, “I must make an act of charity today.” Not that we don’t try to make acts of charity, on Fridays and always, but in my experience, unless something is a hard-and-fast habit, it’s simply not going to happen except as a kind of midnight recollection of something I should have done but forgot to do. Again. I’m never less charitable, it seems, than when I really need to be.

Too, we’re a family. As parents, my husband and I are responsible for forming our children in the faith; it is what we have to give them. And mind-control, while an attractive option sometimes, really doesn’t seem a workable kind of thing in reality. If my dog is independent-minded, he’s nothing to what my children, or maybe even most children, are like. I can tell somebody, for example, until my lips turn blue and I pass into a cyanotic coma, that she might enjoy Irish step-dancing, but I cannot make that person want to dance.

So it is with religious observance. I know perfectly well that, much as I’d want to and try though I might, I can’t make them believe things. This doesn’t mean that I don’t tell them what I think is true. Of course I do. If they’re going to grow up and reject something, they had better know with perfect clarity what it is they’re saying no to and have compelling reasons for saying it. In the meantime, given their free will, the best thing I can do, it seems to me, is to give them a culture of lived belief.

Faith, after all, isn’t something merely memorized or reasoned; it’s the shape of life, and there is nothing not encompassed by its outline. As my mother always says, it is about being mindful of the needs of others, but more than that, it’s being mindful of God in even the small and private things that we do, and especially in the small and shared things.

We could each, privately, come up with some act of charity to do each Friday, and this would no doubt redound to each person’s spiritual benefit. Still, the Body of Christ isn’t a confederation of individuals. It seems to me that a corporate habit like Friday abstinence — not only in Lent, but all year round — redounds not only to our personal growth towards holiness but towards growth as a family, as a church, as a culture, as a Body. We need things to do; we need things to do together. And, well, this is something to do together.

So what’s for lunch, since chicken salad is out? We’re swimming in homegrown tomatoes right now, both from our own garden and the community garden at church, so I’m baking chunks of tomato (mostly Roma) with bell peppers, sweet onion, and whole garlic cloves, in olive oil with a dash of balsamic vinegar and a drizzling of honey. We’ll toss that with some fresh basil and asiago cheese and serve it on pasta, with a spinach salad and some grapes and blueberries. The 6- and 11-year-olds are in charge of making mint tea: they’ve cut every stalk of mint and lemon balm in the yard down to the level of the ground and will brew the leaves with some black tea and honey before adding orange juice and ice. This is our homegrown version of a mint-tea recipe in a Memphis Junior League cookbook from the early 1970s; I grew up on that tea as a party drink, and it is delicious.

I’m not sure that any of this seems obviously sacrificial, except that I had to think about it, which is more of a sacrifice than you might suppose. The company has just called; they are about 90 minutes from our house right now, so I guess I ought to stop writing about this meal and get up and make it.

Aw heck, Al. Make my day.

[Rating: 100 out of 100]

Al says he’s rating Friday abstinence, not my cooking. I say I’ll just offer that up.

For more on the practice of Friday abstinence, see Eamon Duffy’s essay, “To Fast Again,” from the March 2005 issue of First Things.