Friday Fasts, Friends and Fish Fry

There is this curious American Catholic custom on Fridays during Lent…and that’s the “fish fry.” Fridays in Lent are designated as “abstinence” days, which means avoiding meat. Fish, however, is acceptable. Usually the next question is “why fish?” So rather than use my own words, I did some surfing and found this (on an ecumenical, non-Catholic website). It’s a fairly simple, straightforward explanation:

“In the first century, Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. The original Christians all were Jewish and were used to the fasting as a spiritual discipline. They moved the fast days to Wednesdays and Fridays, because Judas engineered Jesus' arrest on a Wednesday and Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Most often that fast took the form of avoiding meat in the diet. In those days, meat was a luxury food. You either had to buy it in a market or you had to own enough land to keep cattle. On the other hand, anyone could grow vegetables or forage for them, and anyone could catch a fish in a lake or a stream. You could buy better fish and vegetables, but the point is that you could eat without money if you were poor. So meat was rich people's food and fish was poor people's food. That is why the most common form of fasting was to omit meat and eat fish.”

In other words, eating fish on Fridays used to be form of fasting – choosing to go without something special, and also choosing to save money. That’s what makes the modern fish fry seem a bit incongruous: it costs $9 and you eat a lot! But it is also a significant fund raiser for the Knights of Columbus who put it on, so that $9 always goes to one of their charitable causes – thus participating in the fish fry is a form of almsgiving, but definitely not a case of fasting! (except the not eating meat part)

Bert volunteered to help fry fish and serve at tonight’s event; I, on the other hand, merely came, paid and ate. I did, however, first stop by and pick up a friend of mine who otherwise was simply going to grab a “to-go” box because she did not want to sit alone. So I squeezed in an act of kindness (well, it was an act of kindness toward myself, too - I didn't want to sit alone either). We had a wonderful conversation, we shared in a community event, raised some money... a great first Friday in Lent.