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| Fish and Chips - A Friday Favorite! |
Many Roman Catholics abstain from red meat on Fridays,
often choosing fish instead. Why is that? And do Episcopalians do that too?
The simple answer is yes and no. The longer answer follows…
The Book of Common Prayer is not just our worship service
book. It’s our manual and handbook on devotion, spirituality, theology, and
Christian practice. It doesn’t contain everything
we might be looking for, but most people find in contains a whole lot more than
they suspected. It is, in essence, our guidebook for practicing the Christian faith. (The Bible, of course, is our guidebook
on what the Christian faith actually is.)
For instance, did you know that the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) provides us a spiritual schedule? That's right. The BCP has a calendar that gives us a spiritual way of encountering the entirety of Christ’s life, the major
themes of Scripture, and a diverse package of spiritual disciplines and
practices.
In regards to spiritual disciplines, the Book of Common
Prayer provides a list of “Days of Special Devotion” (p. 17). In this section it says, “The following days
are observed by special acts of discipline and self-denial: … Good Friday and
all other Fridays of the years in commemoration of the Lord’s crucifixion,
except for Fridays in the Christmas and Easter Seasons…”
Now here’s the trick. We are, according to our manual on
keeping the faith, to observe Fridays with special acts of discipline and
self-denial. This is not an optional observance. Optional observances are listed in the next section (p. 17-18). Our Friday observances, however, aren’t limited to abstaining from meat of
Fridays. It's up to each of us in our personal conversations with God to determine how we will “commemorate”
– that is, to commit to our memories together – Christ’s self-sacrificing love
for us and his submission to God by his death on the cross, which are cornerstones of our salvation.
