I Hope You Dance

               This past Saturday, I enjoyed my first dance in over 4 years. I honestly could not recollect the last time I had danced. As a seminarian, we are ‘highly advised against dancing’. Having had such little practice, and having picked a partner who was equally unskilled, the dance was…bad.

               But I am a firm believer that a bad dance is better than no dance at all. If you describe the cosmos as a dance, this idea, along with a little bit of technical language, resolves the problem of evil. For those of you who don’t know, the problem of evil is basically the question why a good God allows evil to occur. While I could easily drone on about this, -and probably will someday- I think that my time is best spent elsewhere.

               Dancing is a terribly funny thing. It seems so romantic. If romance is awkward and clumsy, I guess dancing is wonderfully romantic. As I sat, I watched people spin, twirl, and shuffle their partners to a giddy ecstasy- I am not so sure that the giddy ecstasy was not alcohol related-I wondered if you could extract all the good from dancing while leaving behind all the bad.

               I think people try awfully hard to do this with life. Take sex for an example: people attempt to divorce pleasure, from consequence and responsibility. Getting old is another example. People want to forget about the ensuing insanity at the end of life. People want romance without heartache, payment without work, growth without virtue…

               I think that God created a much bigger, much more wonderful world than that. Life is nerve racking, but the consequences and responsibility make life worth living. Life can lose its romance because we expect all the joy without all the sorrow. If it wasn’t for the sweaty palms, and the butterflies in the stomach, dancing would just be a silly pattern of bodily movements.

               My point is that we should not allow our expectations to rob us of the experience of life. I guess I’m trying to say that we should all live more... We should all dance more…except you seminarians of course, because you really shouldn’t be dancing.