The prayer-and-pastrami theory dates back to my days as a senior novice in my religious community. I had joined the order after four years of teaching, and the general superior had told me early on that she wanted me to teach high school religion after our two-year novitiate. The problem? Eighth grade catechism had been the end point of my religious studies. 

So, as a senior novice I was assigned to the jet-propulsion version of an undergraduate equivalent in theology: two crammed semesters of Scripture, dogmatics and moral theology at a Catholic college. I lived at a convent near the college five days a week and then took a bus back to our motherhouse for novice classes and CCD on Saturday and Sunday. In the midst of that weekly convent carousel, I had a bad day.

Before I had to head to classes one morning, I sat in the convent chapel communing with blank space rather than God. I muttered a few words of prayer. They came out like nonsense syllables. So, I left for campus. The trip was gray and cold. I took the long route, internally convinced that God had gone missing and that what I was doing was a royal waste. 

Then a deli appeared. It offered pastrami on rye, which I hadn’t had for years. My extra bus money made the sandwich seem like the proceeds of a megabucks lottery win. Just before the first class, I made a quick stop at the college chapel, and God showed up.

The lesson of my prayer-and-pastrami experience is that sometimes we need to balance prayer attempts and an overdrive work ethic with earthly enjoyment. If I had had any sense on my recent bad day, I would have decided that routine prayers and the first few items on my checklist sufficed — and headed out for a tall cappuccino before trying to muster up energy for the remaining ministerial to-do list and devotions. 

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his treatise on temperance in the Summa Theologica, says that “weariness of the soul must needs be remedied by resting the soul; and the soul’s rest is pleasure.” He means legitimate pleasures, of course, but pleasures nonetheless. Aquinas recommends “fun” games. He cites the virtue of eutrapelia, recreation. For some of us, pastrami may do more than a game of poker or pinochle; a stroll to a coffee shop for a tall cappuccino may be more restful to the soul than checkers or tennis. 

Maybe if I had paused to practice the virtue of eutrapelia, I would have been less annoyed by the tasks at hand. I might also have had a holy moment rather than a curt retort when it came to my colleague. 

There’s some Lenten wisdom here. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are noble and widely advised. So, too, are acts of charity. But turning our penitential practices into Olympic trials and riddling our calendars with commitments to service may leave us irritable and exhausted. Maybe why God and his Holy Mother Church schedule St. Patrick’s Day amid every Lent is that we need to make room for innocent pleasures, too.