Friday

Certainly, the chief purpose of Friday abstinence is penance, but let’s not forget the collateral benefits of leisure and luxury. If you don’t know what I mean, then sit on your front porch next Friday at supper time with a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, an apple and a mug of beer, and eat them slowly. Here is real leisure: there was no cooking, and there will be no dishes to wash. And here is luxury: at the end of a day without beef, you remember just how delicious an apple tastes. A good Friday meal is not a wallowing in culinary gloom, but a reminder of the extravagance of God’s smaller gifts, in the light of which you can see the bigger ones more clearly. No one enjoys the filet mignon so well as the one who revels in the potato next to it.