Quick check: It’s April 11, how is your New Year’s Resolution coming? Do you even remember it?

My New Year’s Resolution was to be a better Catholic, which is to say that I was/am going to do a better job at the outward signs of the Faith. And though I didn’t define it very well, I’m happy to say that I’m still holding strong at my resolution. We’ve already discussed daily mass, but there’s more to it than just churchgoing.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve given up meat on Fridays and altogether during Lent. It’s an old practice of the Church that we basically gave up on in the 1960’s, and in a lot of ways, it may be somewhat peculiar. After all, there’s nothing un-Catholic about cattle. But it’s been pretty amazing to me how the little outward things have made a big impact on my inward self. Let me explain: on a random Tuesday, I’ll eat whatever I’m feeling like. If we’re out to dinner and a cheeseburger sounds good, I’ll order a cheeseburger. If we’re making dinner at home and we’re in the mood for taco night, we’ll have taco night, ole! But on Fridays, things are different. Our Good Lord died on a Friday, and Catholics are called to make His sacrifice part of our sacrifice.

Don’t get me wrong. Crab legs =/= Crucifixion.

But it does become a spiritual act to eat dinner. There’s a conscience decision to do what I do for a reason other than wanton cheeseburgery. I hope I’m explaining myself correctly here.

A few years ago, I was working a part-time night job slinging pizzas at a restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. As part of my training, I worked with this guy who went over all the items on the menu, then we ate some of the items that we just went over—it was one of his perks of training that he got dinner out of the deal. He said that we were going to talk about one of their pizzas, but we weren’t going to order it, because it was made with 2 different kinds of pork sausage and that, as a Jewish guy, he didn’t eat pork. I commented that there weren’t a lot of people that kept Kosher laws anymore, and that most of the Jewish people I knew in college were bacon-cheeseburger eaters. Then he explained: now we think that a lot of the Kosher laws came from pretty practical roots: before modern sanitation or refrigeration, a lot of now-common foods were kind of rare. And handling them could get kind of dangerous, because of the way that animals were slaughtered and their meat preserved made people pretty susceptible to foodborne diseases that could kill; even today, pork and shellfish can get contaminated or compromised pretty easily. But if Kosher laws started as a way to prevent trichinosis, today, they do a way different task. He explained it as part of defining his Jewish identity, that he was asked to forgo ham as a way of setting himself apart from the rest of the world. It wasn’t about pork; it wasn’t about shellfish; it was about making each thing he ate a small act he did for God.

Woah.

I cook most of the meals we have around the house (because I spent so much time in restaurants, I really enjoy cooking; my lovely wife is happy to oblige), so I started slipping in fish-Fridays at the beginning of the year. I don’t know if she noticed it at first, but before Lent started, I said that I was going to go carne-vale (Latin, loosely translated “goodbye, meat!”) for Lent. She blankly looked at me as if to ponder the madness that had crawled inside her husband’s brain, having long ago given up asking why I did half the stuff I do. She reluctantly consented to the idea. I won’t expand on it here, but I’ll say that it was easier and harder to do than I thought, but by the closing notes of Easter Vigil Mass, I was calling to make reservations at the late-night two-patty bacon cheddar Jack Daniels beefathon at Thank Goodness It Is a Friday Restaurant.

I’ve never read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I admire the essence of the book—that people are so far removed from what they eat that people don’t even consider to think how an egg becomes a McNugget. If someone handed me a cow and told me to make a cheeseburger out of it, I think I’d try to sell the cow and go to Wendy’s. But it’s also what drives the National Catholic Rural Life Conference with their super motto: “Eating is a Moral Act”. Specifically, NCRLC is interested in educating people that the decisions they make at the dinner table affect people all around the globe. I’m inclined to agree, but that’s another topic altogether. What I like best about both Pollan and NCRLC is that they ask people to make recognizable decisions about their supper that go beyond simple urges for buffalo wings.

I do loves me some buffalo wings.

Early in Lent, one of my co-workers was eyeing my baked potato and steamed broccoli in the lunchroom and asked if I’d eaten my sandwich on an earlier break. I replied that it was my lunch and that I’d given up meat until Easter… and got the most slack-jawed look I’ve ever been given. He looked at me as if I just said that I eat moon rocks. Another rolled back in his chair and chortled “Looks like it’s going to be macaroni and cheese for a while!”

Well yes, actually. Who doesn’t like macaroni and cheese?

On Easter ‘morn, I had my share of Easter turkey (and ham!), but by Friday, my lovely wife and I were back to fish-sticks. She’s been very gracious about the whole thing. Good Midwesterner that she is, my wife had never really eaten a fish until just before we met, now it makes up practically 1/7 of her regular diet.

All in all, I have to admit that it’s not really a penance to forgo meat on Fridays. I love fish and I enjoy cooking vegetarian. It’s really not that hard. But what it does do is make dinnertime an offering to the Lord—I do this because of Him. Furthermore, I’ve come to think of it as part of my Catholic identity; being Catholic means more to me than 9:00 AM church services and 10:02 AM doughnuts, so why limit my Catholic identity to a hour on the weekends?

Little things like this don’t mean much by themselves. And as an offering to God, they probably don’t mean much, either. But as a small step on my understanding of Faith, they’ve come to mean a lot to me. Once or twice a week, I wake up early to spend a little time with God. And when we make our weekly dinner plans, I go grocery shopping for Jesus.

I know it may sound silly to you. But I don’t do it for you.