Recently, I went salsa dancing at the Delaware House. The evening began with salsa lessons: Everyone was paired off in a circle around the instructors and we rotated partners once every 45 seconds or so. By the time the instructions were finished, not only did everyone have a solid foundation in the basics of salsa dance, everyone also had a pretty good sense of who they wanted to dance with again. Along with the dance instructions came a few basic guidelines for how the interactions of a dance should flow. The instructors demonstrated the standard salsa holds along with a simple way for the woman to indicate that she doesn’t want to get any closer and a reminder that dancing doesn’t have to mean anything more — it can just be a dance. They encouraged everyone to ask one another to dance, emphasizing that women are also allowed to ask men. Overall, they highlighted some simple ground rules and encouraged both human decency and lightheartedness.
I have been to a lot of dances — this one ranked among the best. If you didn’t want to, you never had to leave the dance floor. It was a new experience for me to realize that all I had to do was look at a guy and he would dance with me. Skill levels varied wildly, but none of the men I danced with made me feel uncomfortable or threatened. The dancing was wildly joyful, and I left feeling refreshed and filled with delight.
But there was something else there, too. On the way home, I tried to make sense of some of the deeper feelings welling up in my heart. As far as I could parse it out, what happened was that I felt more honored as a human being and as a woman than I had in a long time. And I had to wonder why.
I have spent most of my life in Catholic circles, and there are many things about that kind of life that are beautiful and a gift. There is no place populated by humans that is completely safe, but there are baseline levels of greater safety in a shared worldview. These groups have introduced me to truly wonderful people who have meant, and continue to mean, the world to me. It is important to be clear that many of those people on their own do make me feel honored and worthwhile like that salsa event did. But oftentimes, Catholic events don’t feel like that.
People use the analogy of a fence around a playground at the edge of a cliff to describe the rules of Catholic teaching. Those rules form a boundary that technically limits your space, but in reality gives you more freedom because you don’t have to worry about pitching off the edge of a cliff. I think this is a good analogy. I also think we can take it further. Sometimes it feels to me like Catholics are so enamored of the beauty and craftsmanship of the fence that they spend all their time inspecting and discussing it, leaving no time to actually play on the playground. Boundaries are important and necessary, but they are not enough. They exist for the sake of something else.
There are many world philosophies and religions that consider good and evil to be two equal forces, locked in an eternal struggle. It is easy to see why people would come to this conclusion: In our lived experience, good and evil do feel pitted against each other with odds that are equal at best. But Catholicism holds a different view. We believe that evil is an absence of good. This is profoundly important and has wide-ranging consequences in how we see the world. Evil is not its own entity, it is an absence of what ought to be there, an absence of the good. And on the flip side, good is not the absence of evil. Good is so much more than the absence of evil. In fact, goodness is strong enough that it is able to exist even intermingled with brokenness and sin. Anytime we try to define good by the absence of evil we are radically impoverishing the true nature of goodness.
In our commendable desire to resist what is evil in ourselves and in the world around us, sometimes we allow that to become our whole focus. We treat goodness as if it were the absence of evil. We can become so afraid of missteps that we choose not to take any steps at all. Lust, for example, is wrong because it is a destructive distortion of our call to love. But there is a subtler temptation: to allow my fear of lust to keep me from loving in the first place. That temptation ultimately leads to the same absence of the good that should be there. Our lives can become riddled with fear instead of radiant with love.
As I reflected on my feelings about the salsa dance, it became clear to me that this was not just a reflection on the people around me. It was a reflection on me. I am the one who approaches the world from a place of fear. At the salsa dance, the boundaries were clearly defined, but so were the signposts pointing back to the good they were defending. With their help, I shifted out of a mindset of fear and into one of play. It might be true that men at this event approached others with less fear, but the reality is that I did too.
The victory over evil that we commemorate during Holy Week was definitive. We can rest secure in the reality that, even though we are no match for the evil we see in the world, evil is no match for God. With our eyes fixed on him, we don’t let go of prudence, but we don’t have to let fear dominate. He is on our side and he is victorious.
