“Expectations”

Rev. Vann Knight

January 9, 2005

Today I want to speak to you about expectations.  Expectations are like a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, expectations create energy and excitement and hope.  Such are the expectations around love, new jobs, vacations, and visits with distant friends. Expectations also give stability to life.  When driving, we expect that other drivers will stay on their side of the road and will stop at red lights.  When we get up each morning, we unconsciously expect gravity to work and the laws of nature to operate in their normal fashion.  And there are expectations of moral behavior that society depends on.  We expect people not to murder, not to steal, not to lie.  In other words, there are lots of legitimate expectations. 

But there are lots of expectations that, if tightly held, cause us and others great suffering.

These are the kinds of expectations I want to address today. 

The essence of what I want to say is that our expectations can unconsciously be a way that we try to control life and grace,  and one of the most important lessons of life is that we cannot control how life and grace come to us.  Life and grace always come to us in unexpected ways.  We can reject how life and grace come to us, and when we do that, we create suffering for ourselves and others.  But the better option is to open ourselves to what is and to love what is.  It’s okay to have expectations, but it is very important to be non-attached to them; in other words, not to hold them too tightly, to be able to let go of them very quickly.

Let me illustrate how expectations, tightly held, can cause us and others great suffering.

First of all, let’s look at the expectations we have of ourselves.  When we hold onto those expectations of ourselves too tightly and those expectations become in quite a contrast with what is, this creates all sorts of anxiety and fear, anger.  When my daughter graduated from high school, I gave her a simple gift.  It was an anonymous writing, and I thought that if I could give this gift to my daughter, it would be the most valuable thing that I could give her.  I knew that I had beaten myself up so much of my life with feelings of being inadequate, feelings of not measuring up to what others expected of me, that I had lived so much of my life under the burden of others’ expectations and of my expectations, and so here is the gift that I gave to her and that I would give to you.

There is really nothing you must be, and there is nothing you must become.  There is nothing you must do, and there is really nothing you must have.  There is nothing you must know.  However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet.  Know this, and you can always find your way to peace.

Hold gently the expectations you have of yourself, and when those expectations begin to cause suffering, determine which of those you need to let go of.

Another area that causes great suffering is our expectations of others.  I suppose that my greatest suffering I have caused myself because I have not been able to let go of the expectations that others have of me.  Your expectations often frighten me.  Those early expectations of our parents can sometimes be quite destructive, and sometimes the expectations we place upon our children can cause us so much grief.  I remember when our sons were teenagers and the expectation we had that they would keep their rooms clean – hah!  Eventually we learned to just close the door.  But we create for ourselves and for others so much suffering, suffering for our husbands or our wives or our partners, because of the expectations we place upon others.  We set ourselves up and we set them up for failure.  These expectations that are disappointed cause us so much sometimes anger and stress.  If we could simply let go of those expectations that we place on others that cause them suffering and cause us suffering.

There’s another subtle kind of expectation that causes us suffering, and that is the kind of expectations that are often unconscious that we bring to situations and to encounters.  Last week I went into a bookstore and unconsciously – well, consciously I was expecting some books that I ordered to be there.  But those books were not on the shelf.  The sales person told me they had several boxes of books in the back that they hadn’t opened, and I had an unconscious expectation that she or somebody would go open those boxes and see if my books were there.  And when that didn’t happen, I became unpleasant both to her and to myself, not in a gross way, but in a way that I knew that I was not being very pleasant.  And it created that stress for me and that stress for her.

When you come here to church, it is appropriate that you bring expectations, but if you hold too tightly to your expectations, it means that you cannot be present to what is actually here.  So when you come here, can you let go of your expectations of what ought to be so that you can actually be present to what is?  There is something in all of us that really does want to control how life and grace comes to us, but we can’t.  And sometimes, in those encounters that don’t go the way we expected, there is the lesson that we most need to learn.  And if we can let go, to loosen our grip, then we can be open to the lesson that life brings us at this moment, unexpectedly.

We also have expectations of God.  My dear friend, who is dying, is a minister. And his wife said she is so angry with God, because she has so often taken the back seat to the church, and their kids have so often taken the back seat to the church, and Mark has lived his life a faithful servant of God and the church, and God ought not to let this kind of thing happen to Mark. 

To the degree that we hold too tightly to expectations of God and life, we create such stress and anxiety for ourselves.  But the terrible thing that happens, the terrible thing that happens by holding too tightly to all the expectations is that when we hold so tightly to what we think it ought to be, we cannot be present to what is, we cannot love what is in our life as it is this moment.

So let us be conscious of our expectations and of how these bring suffering to us and to others, and let us be open to the possibility of opening our grip and being present to life as it is and loving life as it is.