It's Time to Take Back Fridays

For most of my life, I have considered Fridays to be a big party! Who doesn’t love making it to the end of the week so you can kick back and enjoy your weekend? Fridays were for happy hours, hanging your business suit up in the closet, forgetting about your work email and enjoying life. And the excitement over Friday starts buzzing Thursday night. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?” “Got any plans for the weekend?” We start reaching out to our friends to celebrate this special day of the week to leave behind the workweek grind and enjoy a relaxing two day holiday.

I continued to feel this way and hold on to this American tradition after getting married, becoming Catholic and even after having my first baby. Babies do really ruin your sense of happy hour Friday celebrations but I tried my best to recreate the fun at home with Netflix and hard apple cider with my husband.

Then my heart started to change. I don’t remember the exact moment or even a specific book I was reading to cause this, it just sort of happened slowly. The more I immersed myself in Catholic tradition by reading about the lives of the Saints or modern books by Scott Hahn, Matthew Kelly or Patrick Madrid, I began to feel that Fridays should be set apart. We get a glimpse of this during Lent when we go without meat or completely fast on a Friday. But even these small practices didn’t completely open my eyes to how sorrowful and also how very special Fridays should be.

Spending three months reading the Pieta prayers every day really brought me closer to the harsh reality of the sacrifice Jesus made for us. Reading about the Passion in such a detailed way will absolutely change your view of just what He did to wipe away our sins. And the more you meditate on the broken body of Christ on the cross, the harder it is to turn away from it. The more I read, the harder it became to throw a party on Friday.

You see, the devil wants us to forget about Jesus. The devil wants us to think only of ourselves and our hard workweek. The devil wants us to feel as if we’re entitled to kick back and throw ourselves a party simply because we’ve completed five days of working.

Forget about Jesus, he whispers. Nothing important happened on Friday. Have a drink and hang out with friends, it’s good for you. You are free; free to do whatever you want and enjoy your life. God exists in church on Sunday but that’s it. He definitely isn’t part of your Friday celebrations.

And the devil is winning this battle. We’ve almost all fallen for this lie. We no longer come home on Friday to contemplate Jesus dying on the cross. Few of us serve a simple evening fare of soup and bread lit by candle light, followed by prayer and silence. We have lost the tradition of setting Fridays apart. Instead, we have drowned out this sorrowful event with so much noise that we can’t hear Jesus’s cries for our hearts and our conversion.

It’s time that Catholics take by Fridays. We have to stop having a party. We have to be different. We have to be weird. We have to start protecting this evening by giving it back to Jesus. After all He did for us, cannot we manage this for him?

I know it’s hard. I know you want to go hang out with your friends. And maybe you can’t yet give up the whole night. My own faith has come in baby steps so I understand the need to change slowly. But we have to start moving in the right direction, even if it takes us a while to get it right.

Here are 10 ways that you can start setting Fridays apart:

1. Don’t eat meat all year round.
2. Give up alcohol.
3. Turn off all electronics after the sun sets.
4. Eat a simple and dare I say, boring meal, like soup and bread.
5. Say a family Rosary.
6. Spend one hour in adoration.
7. Spend half an hour in silence at home.
8. Read your Bible for 30 minutes.
9. Read the Pieta prayers.
10. Say a Divine Mercy Chaplet.

I know this isn’t going to be popular. I know it’s a bubble bursting idea for most of you. But I want to challenge you. After reading this article, I hope a seed has been planted in your heart. I hope you feel a small twinge of longing when you’re out on a Friday, a longing for Christ. I want you to remember Him and His sacrifice.

We must live our lives as a light for Christ. We want others to look at the rhythm of our life, the choices we make and see that we are different. We want them to ask us questions. Setting Fridays apart is a great way to do this. It starts conversations and hopefully it will also start conversions.