March 19, 2010
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Abstinence
Today the word “abstinence” is associated with a movement that discourages people from having sex outside of marriage, but, when I was growing up, it meant something altogether different. We had a church calendar on display in our kitchen, and many of the days had pictures of little red fish on them. There was a fish on every Friday, but there were fish sprinkled on other days throughout the year as well. Those days with the fish were Days of Abstinence for Catholics, and that meant that you were supposed to abstain from eating meat. Fish and other seafood weren’t considered meat, even though seafood might be much more of a delicacy than even the best cut of meat. For example, a priest friend in Illinois loves oysters, and he told me this afternoon that he ate raw oysters for lunch today. He had to drive 50 miles to find them, and they were about $22.00 a dozen. Here raw oysters are about $3.00 a dozen.
Anyway, the Catholic Church made meatless Fridays optional a few decades ago, but one exception to this is the 7 Fridays of Lent. Since today is one of those Fridays, I dutifully ate tunafish for lunch and fried oysters for dinner. As I was waiting for my take-out oysters tonight, it occurred to me that the real sacrifice of not eating meat isn’t having to eat seafood; the real sacrifice is having to make arrangements to obtain seafood. We live in a seafood-rich area on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and fish and shellfish are abundant and cheap all year; my friend in Illinois, though, has to go to real trouble (driving 100 miles round trip) and expense ($22.00 a dozen) just to have a dish that we take for granted. [In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my friend has people from Florida visiting him this weekend; he ordinarily wouldn't go to such lengths just to eat oysters, even on a Friday in Lent.]
Practices like Days of Abstinence are greatly deemphasized–or ignored entirely–by the majority of rank and file Catholics these days, but I like following it because it sort of puts me in touch with a venerable, worldwide tradition. Oh, and my Catholic calendar still has little pictures of fish on the Fridays of Lent.
ED
Comments (1)
Somebody told me once that the real reason why the Church does not allow meat on Fridays during lent (and throughout the year as it used to be) was because hundreds of years ago, the Church and the Pope made a deal with the struggling fish industry as a way to encourage fish consumption. While I don’t know if its true, I always found it odd that meat was considered wrong to eat during this time but not fish.