Food has long been associated with the season of Lent. Or, to be more accurate, the lack of food. Those of a certain age can remember when every Friday, whether it was Lent, Advent, or ordinary time, was a no-meat Friday. It made us different and in a good way.
First, it was sacrificial — at least it was for our family. Now, before anyone gets ready to send angry letters, I stipulate that my brothers, sisters, and I loved our mom with all our hearts. But she was not a great cook. There were exceptions to her culinary deficiencies: her fried chicken, meatloaf, and tacos, dripping with grease, were wonderful things to behold. And you needed to know just how to hide the graham crackers she would spread with store-bought chocolate icing if you had a chance at “seconds.” But smelling her stuffed bell peppers or liver and onions cooking away when I got home from school can still initiate a case of PTSD.
To be fair, our mom was also cooking industrial-sized portions of food, so what she lacked in culinary artistry, she certainly made up for in volume. And let the record show, none of her children died of hunger while living under her roof.
But Fridays were especially challenging. Whether she was doing this on purpose, or it was just another example of her basic — and I do mean basic — cooking skills, there was an added sense of deprivation every Friday. The good news was that Friday was popcorn night, and she would lay a blanket on the living room floor so we could gorge ourselves on popcorn while watching TV past 8 p.m., since it was not a school night and not a night before Mass.
But you had to get through Friday dinner first. And our options were as limited as they were unappetizing, like creamed tuna and noodles. The noodles were always mushy, and the cream sauce had the consistency of wallpaper paste, but not as tasty. Other Fridays, it would be deviled eggs, with the emphasis on the devil part, or canned salmon. If we were lucky and the budget was not so tight that week, frozen fish sticks were in the offing.
Growing up in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles when I did, where every nun seemed to be Irish American and every priest was foreign-born Irish, St. Patrick’s Day would be a “day off” from Lenten observances. But our mom, God rest her soul, still managed to sneak in some penitence with boiled corned beef and cabbage.
When my wife and I were newlyweds, and she told me she was going to be making salmon for dinner, I told her I did not like it. She was perplexed. She insisted I would like the way she made it, and as a newlywed, not wanting to initiate annulment proceedings so soon, I assented. To my amazement, the salmon was delicious, as my wife demonstrated that salmon out of the ocean is demonstrably tastier than salmon out of a can.
Today, even during Lent, when we abstain from meat, we are not suffering at all. My family loves fish, especially salmon, and so we observe the letter of the law, but we are not really getting the spirit of it.
Back in the day, we really were depriving ourselves of a simple pleasure — eating food we liked. Now, Friday is just another day. Of course, nothing is stopping any of us from abstaining from meat every Friday, regardless of the season.
I can understand the change that was made. The Church wants to treat us like grown-ups and encourages us to keep Friday as a day of penance, and if we do not abstain from meat, we should do some other form of penitential self-denial — but most of us do not.
We are like a bunch of sixth-graders told by the teacher before she must step outside of the classroom on some school business to sit in our chairs and read Chapter 6 of “The Red Pony” while she is gone. The door behind her barely latches before mayhem ensues.
Like everything, thanks to Our Lord, it is never too late to amend our ways, to ask for forgiveness, and even to give up little pleasures on a regular basis to reorder our spiritual batteries toward what really matters. Just don’t ask me to eat salmon out of a can.
