Beginning of Lent

Since we have passed both Ash Wednesday and the first Friday in Lent, millions of Catholics around the world have experienced the sudden sensation of, "That's right, I can't have meat today."
Lent should be a time of penance, and we practice that with two traditional forms, fasting and abstinence. Fasting is a limit on the quantity of food we eat; abstinence is a limit on the kind or quality of that food. While it is true that other kinds of fasting and abstinence can be effective, such as abstaining from forms of entertainment or fasting from too much talking, the old ways are still very effective because they hit us where it hurts, right in the gut.

On Ash Wednesday, as I was eating vegetable soup, I started to ask myself, why abstain from meat at all?
It is because it used to be expensive, a luxury, and so it indicates poverty and simplicity?
Does it derive from a sense of guilt over killing animals?
Is it because vegetables are better for us, as many a vegetarian will claim?
Or is it for a kind of ritual purity? Mahatma Ghandi, in keeping with the religious tradition in India, followed a strict vegetarian diet, because he believed that it gave him discipline and spiritual strength.

The last answer, I think, is closest to the truth. The desert hermits in the Christian tradition followed a very strict diet. The strictest diet is vegetables, salt, water and bread. The salt, of course, is a luxury, but it is a condescension to human nature since even the freshest vegetables cooked without salt are hard to finish. Fruits and nuts are sometimes permitted in this diet.

Many monastic communities today follow a less strict died, one which includes milk, eggs, butter, cheese, and even wine or beer. However, they only eat meat on the greatest feast days. Meat, by the way, has always meant meat with blood, i.e., from warm blooded animals. Fish and shellfish were not included as meat, and this is why even today fish can be eaten on penitential Fridays.

The fundamental sense of the spiritual tradition is that a disciplined and pure body leads to a disciplined and pure mind. This disciplined body does not ingest the savory, fatty, heavy foods which seem to weigh down the stomach and the spirit. That is why we don't eat meat on Fridays.

Have things changed today? Is meat no longer what it was? No, I would say that meat hasn't changed a neither have we. That is why the discipline remains. Although most Catholics don't know this, abstaining from meat on all Fridays of the year, although no longer under pain of sin, is still the discipline of the Church.

Even beyond the meat, the insight of the ancient Church seems even more valuable today. In a land which serves junk three meals a day, no wonder people are in such a bad shape spiritually. I wonder if we should consider not only meat but all junk food off-limits during Fridays in Lent.