Last night, I went swing dancing for the first time in years. As I awkwardly began to remember the steps, it felt like my body sprang free from its pen like a gangly, restless colt. Giddy within minutes, I asked myself, “How did I ever give this up? How could I forget how much I love this?” It felt like running into an old friend and wondering why I ever lost contact with them in first place. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened in my life. In the language of the New Testament, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” (Romans 7:15). I’m pretty sure Paul wasn’t talking about dancing. But as much as he was talking about the phenomenon of  humans knowing a better way to live but not doing it, he was talking about dancing as far as I’m concerned.

Dancing is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. Within the conservative Seventh-day Adventist community in which I grew up, dancing was considered a sin. Dancing let loose sexual impulses and base desires. Dancing pushed moral, upright Christians to the very brink of fornication and beyond. Dancing did to humans what feeding gremlins did after midnight. I took my church’s teachings to heart. I made real adolescent sacrifices in the service of this cause. At my eighth grade graduation dance, for example, I sat on a bench in my purple sequined dress replete with gigantic shoulder bows and from the sidelines watched my peers have a lot of fun sinning. Two boys sat down to my left and I thought I heard one of them tell the other that he was thinking of asking me to dance. Wanting to spare both of us the inevitable pain and embarrassment if he did ask me, I stood up nonchalantly as though I hadn’t heard and walked away.

In those years, I became practiced at depriving myself of the things I loved for the things I thought were right. In fact, the more I loved something, the more I needed to sacrifice it on the altar of my devotion to God. And the more I came to sacrifice the things I loved, the more I came to distrust my own heart’s impulses and desires and instead rely on external rules to determine right and wrong and avoid sin in my life. And the more I saw the world as a list of thou shalls and thou shall nots, the less prepared I became to face the larger world of thou mayests and thou mayest nots.

It was in seminary, of all places, where my theology of sin got upended on its non-dancing ass. At a dinner party at the end of my first semester, a friend brought with her a box of wine (yes, a box). A teetotaler by religious affiliation and commitment, I did not drink alcohol (also a sin) except for one time in college when I took a sip of a friend’s wine cooler and felt enormous guilt about it afterwards.

The night of this dinner party was different, however, as it came on the heels of a terrible, heart-crushing, involuntary break-up with my first boyfriend. If there were ever a time in my life for unbendingly self-destructive behavior, then that was the night. So I had a glass of wine. Just one. But in my mind the act of sin was complete. And if I committed a sin against God simply by drinking one glass of wine, then what difference would it make if I drank seven? As far as I was concerned, I was already neck-deep in iniquity.

Things went well the beginning. At about the third or fourth glass, I had the inspiration to make a pineapple upside-down cake. (It turns out I love to drunk bake.) When I finished the cake, I sat back down at the dinner table. But most of the evening after that point is kind of foggy in my mind. Except by the seventh glass of wine, I do remember attempting to perform fellatio on a beer bottle and the awful moment not long after when I felt something go terribly wrong in my belly. Too far from the bathroom and suddenly feeling the need to vomit the entire contents of my gastro-intestinal tract, I reached for the closest thing on the dinner table to me–my own wine glass–and filled it to the brim.

Friends helped me to the toilet. And that’s where I stayed for the next hour or two. And between bouts of vomiting and crying out “Why doesn’t he love me?” and “I hate myself,” I learned a very important life lesson about sin. The sin wasn’t in the one glass of wine that night. It was in the seven. And the sin I committed wasn’t against God except insofar as the divine is a reality within me. In the end, I only sinned against myself (my Self) and my roommate who was left with the task of cleaning up my vomitous mess as I lied passed out in bed.

For the rest of seminary, I worked to dismantle the theology which helped make that evening possible. Fortunately, I found kinder ways to do it. Like taking ballroom dancing lessons. I started lessons on the advice of a friend who thought it would be a great way to meet men. It was. The men just all happened to be 60 and older. But that didn’t matter in the end. I fell in love with dancing itself. And dancing taught me about moderation. I learned about the interplay between structure and creative freedom. I learned about the invitation to intimacy that respects boundaries while nurturing one’s experience of connection and beauty and grace with another human being. And I learned to inhabit my body differently and with a little more confidence than before. I learned I could be a sexual being without becoming a sexual gremlin.

I’ve been thinking about all of this since last week when I talked to a woman who belongs to a very conservative Christian denomination. She happened to bring up her dating experiences before her conversion, acknowledging both how fun but  risky dating had been for her. I acknowledged what a complicated “dance” dating can be. She said, “That’s why we don’t allow young people in our church to date.” To myself I thought, huh, that’s one way to handle it. Instead of helping teenagers learn the steps to the intricate dance of relationship, eliminate all risk and have them sit it out. And instead of helping them learn how to responsibly nurture their natural instincts and the deep loves of their hearts and souls, tell these kids they cannot be trusted with them. This church’s rule against dating struck me as a metaphor for how Fundamentalism views Life as something to be managed, contained, separated out, fenced off, and protected from rather than experienced and embraced and explored. The problem with this way of thinking isn’t that Fundamentalists are always wrong about the risks inherent in being alive. They aren’t. It’s just that life is ultimately way messier and unpredictable and beyond the control of any of the rules that try to hold it back. The rules of the religious life can help people become better dancers or better wallflowers. Or, when things start to get ugly, overzealous chaperones who resort to spraying dancers with Lysol to keep the dance floor safe and clear.

And yet, if I have learned anything besides the fact that I can no longer eat pineapple upside-down cake, it is this: you and I cannot step off this particular dance floor. We were born and we will die to rhythms and beats and movements of life that are beyond our control but which require our full participation. We can fight that truth. We can try to tie it down with theology. We can be afraid of it. Or neurotically repelled by it. Or Lysol it into submission. But even our resistance is part of the dance. In my life, with all the effort I’ve spent to kill off parts of me I love and to resist Life itself, I am ready to try another way of moving through the world, to leave behind all the vestiges of Fundamentalism on my soul, and to simply step forward with a smile and an outstretched hand as my dance partner whispers in my ear: “No sacrifice needed. Just thank you for dancing with me.” For me, it would be a sin if I didn’t.