Jared Bower on Banquet & Ball

I was surprised when I received the elaborate invitation to what would be my very first Ball. I was halfway through my junior year of high school and suffered from a crippling inability to relate to women.

I was determined not to date until I was able to support a family and managed the ensuing loneliness with ruthless social isolation. This resulted in an inability to so much as carry on a conversation with girls. Loneliness began to haunt my daydreams, and I began to sense that something was amiss. One can easily understand, then, why the prospect of a ball, where I danced with women all night, both frightened and intrigued me.

I accepted the invitation.

I will never forget the first dance. I was wearing a mismatched, ill fitting suit and had a justifiable conviction that I would prove tedious to dance with.

The ballroom was a rustic, fragrant old church. It featured creaking plywood floors, a large steel drum stove, and elaborate decorations that filled the sanctuary with the scent of evergreens. Wax candles illuminated the many windows of the rectangular room, and the sound of murmured conversation drifted down from the balcony where parents, in their Sunday Best, snapped pictures with disposable cameras.

I approached a young woman who stood rigid with formality, excitement, and fear. I bowed, made eye contact, and asked:

May I have this dance?

She curtsied with slow deliberation but didn't respond, instead taking my outstretched hand and, stepping with me through the press of young men, accompanied me to the middle of the floor.

The young woman, a lovely creature, knew how to dance. I did not. Somehow, it didn't matter. After the music ceased, we bowed to one another, then to another couple, then to each other again. I escorted her to "the women's side," bowed one last time, and returned to my compatriots.

I was thunderstruck on the walk back across the now empty dance floor. My preconceived notions of morality, many of which I was utterly unaware of until this very moment, vanished in the face of an ancient and profound absolute.

I was unable to ponder the implications of this new dimension which had somehow become visible to my stupid imagination as there was an entire night of awe that couldn't be neglected. The men were nervously looking at their ornate dance cards, trying to discern which of the young women on the far wall matched the name on their second dance.

A portly, kindly fellow was my particular friend on this occasion. We had split wood together the day before, and while I couldn't tell him apart from his twin brother, he was happy to help a stranger discern which of the five Sarahs in attendance was the "Sarah W." who was my next dance.

We were joined by Ryan, a tall, handsome young man, who also needed help.

"Hey, Drewskie," said the newcomer, addressing my guide in a muted tone, "which one is 'Sarah A.'?"

Drewskie peered with a concentrated squint, "She is the one wearing the shawl, talking to the girl in the green gown...no, the other girl in green."

Ryan thanked him and strode across the room. I hung back until the other men had winnowed the options, then stepped forward.

The women who were without dances would stand near the black woodstove on their side of the room, seldom going more than one song without a dance.

The men, with their woolen suit jackets and blazers, danced every dance. The resulting perspiration soaked through their shirts. During the breaks between dance sets, they would step outside the venue's main entrance and, whipping off their coats, sigh with relief as the steam billowed off their shoulders into the bitter, freezing December night.

There was a sense of quiet, excited joy in the air.

I remember a young man, who was called Fitz, taking a handful of snow and rubbing the back of his neck while exclaiming, "Can't we let the stove burn out?"

Ryan agreed that the heat had grown oppressive, but the fire would burn merrily throughout the ball, regardless of the men's discomfort.

The last two dances of the ball were solemn and rife with sweet-sadness. The ball, finished with various batches of friends exiting in groups, chatting in hushed tones, wishing it wasn't over, excited to to share what they had just experienced.

I took careful notes throughout the entire weekend, hoping to hold on to every possible detail.

You see, what I found on the way back to my compatriots after that first dance was an ancient absolute that the immoral was pent up in its own twisted tree, bound by bark, propagated by poisoned fruit, utterly incapable of tasting true selfless love. Narcissism kills the senses, twists all things to serve the lust and shame and sickness. So much so, that it is only by imagining deeper perversions that lust can be temporarily slaked.

But if the immoral be a twisted tree, the moral is a profound orchard, impossible to savor in its entirety. Creation stands and beckons her steward to partake in the adventure that exists outside of self-gratification. The adventure that requires self-denial, self-sacrifice, and, ultimately, the laying down of one's life for another.

We find a clue to this in the daydreams of children.

The boy slays the dragon, rescues the princess, and restores justice. The girl is pursued, wooed, and, in the company of the beloved, carries the day over and against overwhelming odds.

How is it that so many of these dreams are buried?

The simple fact is that abuse and despair exist, that very few women are born to a royal family, that there are no physical dragons – these things disabuse young people of their daydreams, myself included. But by the time I reached the far side of the room and retrieved from my waistcoat the dance card, I had been changed.

Not that I was free of immoral desires, far from it. But I had looked up from the tedium of "trying to do no wrong." I was gaining a Hope. A Hope that asserted that I could win. That this obsession with sinlessness wasn't all there was to a moral life. On the contrary, I was convinced that we win by first imagining, then creating, and finally savoring a life of self-crucifixion.

Hope can do terrible things. Beautiful, but terrible, things. Hope makes you feel joy and pain, disappointment and ecstasy, conflict and resolution, loss and gain. The moral imagination demanded that I relish the beauty in all this, to the glory of God. And, having embraced this Hope, I look to the dragons...the powers and principalities...as the great adventure I was made for.