Good Friday: Pizza vs. Jesus
Posted on April 9, 2004 at 11:48 am | No Comments
It’s a beautiful spring Friday here in Boston. The sun is shining, work is relatively quiet, Fenway Park will be filling up shortly, and the weekend is looking so good. Figured we needed something sorta special for lunch today, so I drove from Copley across the river to pick up some Pinocchio’s in Harvard Square. Best pizza around. Square, Sicilian-style perfection.
I’m placing the order for it this morning and my workmates overhear me.
“One 15-piece sicilian, half cheese, half pepperoni. 11:30 pick up. Thank ya.” (click)
One of my co-workers appears in my cube…
Whoa, hold on there. Did you just ask for pepperoni?.
“Um, yeah… isn’t that what we got last time? Half and half?”
Well, um, it’s Good Friday. No meat for us.
The look on my heathen face shows my surprise. “Seriously?”.
Now, of course I’m vaguely familiar with the ‘no food on certain days’ thing, but I’ve rarely thought about it, and certainly never made a faith-based faux-pas like this one. I didn’t even realize these co-workers were all that religious. I mean, it’s not like the subject comes up much at work.
While I was raised Roman Catholic (a label that now sounds fairly alien to me), I’ve followed my own disjointed, disillusioned, then curious, then semi-spiritual path since I was confirmed in my early teens. I’m not what you’d call a “fan” of organized religion in any form, although I’ve got many friends who follow their own religious stylee. Thing is, they don’t preach it to me, don’t shove it in my face, and I respect them for that. It makes me value their beliefs and their individuality even more. I’m of the mind that faith is a deeply personal practice, and those who shout the loudest are usually those sporting the biggest crutches. Too often those who blindly follow are those who shun serious self-reflection, who find it easier to live by a set of pre-existing precepts than to calibrate their own moral compass.
If forced to define my religious beliefs (or lack thereof), I wouldn’t go so far as atheist (“One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.”). I’ve seen too much weirdness, too much coincidence, too much sporadic magic in my life to believe there’s not something going on behind the scenes. I can’t be so presumptuous as to know there’s no one out there, or in there, or wherever there is. So I’d have to go with agnostic, a phrase that it seems my co-workers equate with athiesm, but it’s a far different animal. Most of you know this, but for those who don’t… “Agnostic, n., 1. a) One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God. b) One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.” That would be me. I’m a firm believer in the “everything happens for a reason” philosophy, but I don’t know who or what is running the show. When it comes to a higher power, all I know is that I simply don’t know. I can live my life by the golden rule, and still keep clear of arbitrary, rigid, sometimes discriminatory, and occasionally insane guidelines from some dusty book.
So there I am this morning, the agnostic amongst my anti-pepperoni peeps. They take their ‘meat-free-friday’ pledge seriously, didn’t even want those slices anywhere near their plain cheese pieces. So I called back Pinocchio’s and changed the order… only three pepperoni slices please. The guy on the phone says “Oh, Good Friday, right?”. Exactly.
As I bit into my first piece, contented grin on my face, co-workers around me, I couldn’t resist one last heretical ha-ha. “Take that, Jesus!”, I exclaimed, looking upwards. If I’m going to hell, I’m already well on my way. One piece of pepperoni pizza isn’t going to make the difference. But it sure tasted good.
For my Christian friends and family, have a good Easter weekend. For my Jewish pals and in-laws, I hope you had a wonderful, peaceful seder earlier this week.
Oh, and if someone wouldn’t mind, can you refresh my memory on the whole “no meat on Good Friday” thing? What’s the story behind that, again? Why exactly can’t those Fenway faithfull have their franks? Save me some google time. (update: thanks for the responses… it almost makes sense.)
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