Listening to the Beat

The big reveal for the November Waltzing Party is that no young women came to it. There were a mum, her little girl, the dance teacher, and me. The rest were men, and so the teacher led an expert and enjoyable Leads’ workshop. The party was, in its way, a success, but Catholic partner dance events to which young women do not come are not viable.

Let’s travel back in time.

When I was completing an M.Div., I was accepted as a chaplaincy intern at a Catholic college. There I got into trouble for refusing to agree to have my feet washed on Holy Thursday and for inviting a solitary undergrad along to a restaurant Sunday lunch with a number of people from my program, some of whom were in the religious order he was discerning (and later joined).

I was also upbraided for not doing enough. This was probably projection, as women of that pioneering generation of lay ministers seemed always to be flogging themselves to ever greater heights of doing. They would lament about having to work twice as hard as a man to be taken seriously, and I was too junior to ask them if that were really true, or what “being taken seriously” meant in the context of ministry, or why they were comparing themselves to men, or if it isn’t simply impossible for a layperson to be as useful a chaplain as an actual priest.

I did ask one supervisor if she were a workaholic. My previous placement supervisor, who travelled all over our huge diocese every week, eventually drove her car under an eighteen-wheeler, and it’s a miracle she survived. So when the woman chaplain, after interviewing me for the job asked if I had any questions, I posed what I thought was a reasonable query. She looked stunned–probably because she was a workaholic (although she denied it at the time), and nobody had been rude enough to point it out.

I forget if she had the double bypass surgery during or after my tenure. At any rate, I spent my internship sitting in the students’ chaplaincy office listening to the students. They liked that, saying that the actual chaplain was too busy to sit around and listen to them. They may have been doing her an injustice, as I am sure they could have made appointments to see her. However, I think they just enjoyed the unstructured time. They would drift in and out of the office to join in the chatter or, if alone with me, share their hopes, dreams, theology and anecdotes. And I would listen.

Ministry, as it was taught to me, was about listening, never repeating what I was told without permission, and recognizing when I was out of my depth and should refer the person to whom I was ministering to someone else. Today I am not a youth minister* (and other TLM Catholics may be shocked by the way I throw the word ministry around), and I think these are very useful skills for every Christian.

And thus my ears pricked up when, at a pizzeria on Sunday, three young people presented their ideas on why no young women had come to my November Waltzing Party. This is to say, the eldest of the three young people presented an idea that he or they had come up with the day before.

In short, said the theorist in his own words, the Waltzing Parties have no clear goal. If the Parties had a clear goal, like preparing everyone to dance magnificently at one of the Ticketed Dances, then people might be more inclined to go. Therefore, instead of having a Waltzing Party every month, I should have them in concentrated blocks before the Big Dances.

But “people” in this context means “women,” I thought. Despite my parties’ lack of a clear goal (other than having a good time learning how to dance), young men turn up in respectable numbers. Are Young Women Today that goal-oriented?

But I did not argue. I had been worrying about the Not Enough Girls problem for a week, and here at last was a proposal–not out of my own Gen X head, but from a Millennial as two members of Gen Z listened in apparent agreement.

In dancing, it is not enough to know the steps: you also have to listen to the beat. Perhaps this is an apt analogy for planning dance events for a younger generation: it is not enough to rent a hall, engage dance teachers, make announcements and bake cookies; a host or hostess must also listen to the community’s beat. It is more than possible that, just as I could hear the Millennial rhythm a little more clearly than my Boomer supervisor could, my Millennial pal has got a better sense of the beat Gen Z dances to.

The beat–or interest in dancing parties–is going to vary between communities, of course. I think it very unlikely the Not Enough Girls problem would exist in Canada and the United States–at least not where young women go in large numbers to the Traditional Latin Mass. I think it also unlikely in Poland–and those are the borders of my personal knowledge. If you have organized a partner dancing event for the young, please to write to me and tell me how you have got on.

If I sound rather harsh to my ministry preceptresses, I should honour them with the acknowledgement that they, like few other female authorities in my life, have sunk into the blood, bones and sinews of my philosophy. Twenty years later, here I am thinking and writing about them. They worked so hard, believing they were blazing a trail for women of my generation, and ultimately I said “Nah” and became a Catholic traditionalist. Like not driving myself into heart disease or a Mack truck to prove myself, there’s a lesson in that, too.

When it comes to the young, listening is more important than doing. Thus, I have announced that the December Waltzing Party will be the last monthly event.

*Despite not being a youth minister, I recently had a vivid dream in which I had organized a party for the Young of the Parish which featured basketball, not dancing, and someone stopped it–mid-game–on the grounds that it was too dangerous for men and women to play basketball together. The young person who volunteered to buy cans of soda pop didn’t come back, and a pizza order went awry. There was then much wandering together through an unknown city.

This was a startling departure from my Work Dreams. In my last Work Dream, President-Elect Trump was annoyed that I was sitting in front of him at the Republican Party Convention and asked me to move.