Expect Less and Find Joy? An examination of our expectations

What do you expect?

“Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Alice Walker

Wicklow Mountains Ireland

“EXPECT NOTHING”

When I was in Ireland, about seven years ago, I took a bus tour of the Wicklow Mountains. It’s a beautiful, magical area south of Dublin. Our tour guide had a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey that he pulled out at each stop, and some little cups into which he poured a shot for anyone who wanted some. Besides the fact that we’d never get away with this over here, because someone would sue the tour company, it greatly enhanced the tour. He was a fun and funny guy. At one point, he asked us: ladies, do you want to have a good time tonight in Dublin? …Lower your expectations.  He may not get far with that over here, either.

Proof!

I didn’t want to have that kind of a good time in Dublin, so I have no comment on whether it works, but I think lowering our expectations is generally a good idea in life. Especially our expectations of others. And of ourselves, if we are too demanding. And, it may go without saying that our unrealistic expectations of others and those for ourselves are closely interwoven.

It has been noted that to expect too much of someone is to expectorate upon them. Surely this analogy is tempting, whether we have been the recipient of expectations or the disappointed expector. Not accurate since expect comes from ex-spectre, and expectorate comes from ex-pectoris, the chest. But it raises a question: in what ways can expectations be troublesome for us and burdensome for others? How do they impede our progress as human beings and how do they hinder our relationships?

Bill Bryson’s book (and now movie Wild) A Walk in the Woods tells you something about his expectations of backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. Since I’ve backpacked several sections over the years, I know whereof he speaks. At the time of writing, about 2000 hikers set out each year to hike from GA to ME and less than 10% ever make it. One hiker called home to be picked up after three days, saying this wasn’t what I expected. Two days later, he’s back, saying his wife made him return. Three days later, he phones again for a ride to the airport. “What about your wife?” asks the driver. His answer: This time, I’m not going home. The problem? Not the AT, but his projections, his expectations upon it.

Much of our expectation, of partners, of children, and of organizations, is built from the projections we carry. What if we practiced expecting those around us to be just themselves and nothing more? How might our relationships change?

In A Separate Reality, the sorcerer Don Juan tells Carlos Castenada that he must learn to reduce his wants to nothing. If we’d learn to reduce our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we’d get would be a true gift. For those of us who’ve lived with privilege, this is good advice.

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”

But there is a huge gap between letting go our expectations of others that come from our own projections and giving up hope altogether. So many people got off the trail of life when their hopes were dashed and became bitter or cynical. My father was one of these people. He once told me there was no use in my going to college, because I’d just end up married with children. We used to kid that when he was about my age, he stopped filling the gas tank all the way because he figured he’d die any day. (He lived to 87) He was, after all, proud of his Scottish ancestry, if not exactly a genius. The weight of others’ low expectations and cynicism can be as burdensome as their projections.

DON’T EXPECT TOO LITTLE (the other side of the coin)

It would not be good for communities of people who have been adversely affected by the low expectations of society and themselves to take Don Juan’s advice, which was given to a white UCLA Professor from affluent background. For African-Americans, Native Americans and indigenous people, other marginalized groups, and for that matter women, high expectations coupled with compassion are their due.

And the bigotry of low expectations is not just something George Bush said. In my extensive interviews with Black residents of Springfield KY, almost everyone who had started out in segregated schools recalled fondly their teachers and their experiences, before integration. They had Black as well as white teachers. Currently, there are ZERO teachers who are POC in Springfield, even though the city is 24% Black.

What about our expectations of faith and religious community?

Wendell Berry writes that making a marriage and keeping a farm are nearly the same. Called ministry has been compared with a marriage, and I think buying a farm might be another good analogy for community and church life.

When one buys the farm and moves there to live, something different begins. Thoughts begin to be translated into acts. . . . It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it.. . . Two human possibilities of the highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one knows.

Rather than coming to our lives each day like a disgruntled guest in an English cottage, expecting a “mean” meal, or like a petulant child disappointed and disillusioned, we might go instead as to a potluck meal, that wonderful mix of competition and cooperation, of contempt and compassion, where we bring the best we have to give, and choose from the offerings of others, TRUSTING that the meal will suffice and may even be complete, that joy may emerge. In fact something good is as likely to happen as something bad, especially in the warmth of human community.

 

Good thing I didn't lower my expectations, because I inadvertently met Marky Mark (aka Mark Wahlberg)

EXPECTATIONS & Family

Here is the sermon from September 8, 2019

The Place Where We Are Right

by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

My maternal (Patton) 1954

          Murray Bowen, whose work on family systems I shall be pointing us toward, will say that to understand relationships, we have to look beyond the individual (child) to the nuclear family, the extended family, and the culture one is immersed in to begin to improve. To “do better” and have our kids “do better” is a modest but achievable goal.

When we think of expectations, we are almost inevitably thrust into thinking of our parents, guardians, and other family members, in addition to our own expectations of our children if we have them. It’s gratifying to know that we have tools to understand what’s going on, and perhaps to lighten up on ourselves or others. That’s why this work is a spiritual task.

As we approach the high holy days in the Jewish tradition, we are reminded that forgiveness of self and others is the most important spiritual task. We can probably agree that it is needed more now than ever.

(Here's a take on forgiveness shared by a GNUUC member: Taylor Swift on Forgiveness )

Bowen Family systems provides a tool and a lens. Allow me to begin by saying that to some extent, it is a Eurocentric and perhaps even North American-centric lens. Murray Bowen  (born in Waverly, TN: educated at UT; first practice in Crossville, TN) developed his theory in the 1960s and it was brought to congregations by Rabbi Edwin Friedman.  (Summary of Friedman on Leadership) Believe it or not, how you engage at work and in the institutions you join is largely determined by your emotional attachment to family of origin and your sibling position and birth order.

Further, he “believed that a major obstacle to scientific study of human behavior is that humankind has tended to consider itself a unique form of life, with a special pace in God’s plan. Such self-glorification precludes our seeing the myriad ways we act just like other forms of life,” he wrote.

Bowen systems is a rational, scientific way of looking at relationships.

The term Differentiation of self comes from biology. It can and should be understood through studying the development of cells; DNA; and evolution.

“I be you and you be me; or I be me and YOU be you?”

ANXIETY

It begins with anxiety.

My Maternal Granny Patton was chronically anxious. Even as a small child, I was aware of the tension and sense of doom in my relatives. Her anxiety was focused upon her husband, an alcoholic until he joined one of the first AA groups in the 1940s, in his seventies; her children, several of whom predeceased her: Mora, who died at 30; Wade Jr. who died of alcoholism, as did my mother’s sister Joyce, and my mother Marjorie who died at 44. These deaths mirrored the pattern in her family of origin, in which my great grandmother died in childbirth in her thirties, leaving my grandmother, two sisters, and a baby boy, who then died at 6 months.

Like the Kennedys, but less famous, my maternal family of origin was emotionally fused, and beset by tragedy. My cousin Wade the 3^rd died in his early 20s, while at a drive-in movie. His father and his aunt died of severe alcoholism. My nephew Jim died at 30 of a drug overdose. My twin sister’s other child, Jessica, (different father) struggles with addiction and instability, which is why I am raising her son. My mother, my nephew, two of my uncles all died within days of Christmas. These tragedies and untimely deaths create an anxious expectation of disaster. Numerous triangles form within such a family.

“Let’s you and Him/Her/Them fight!”

Triangles can be understood as the most stable building block of relationships. Whenever a 3^rd person or entity (food, alcohol, chronic illness, church, minister) is brought into the picture, you have a triangle. It serves to lessen the anxiety between the original dyad, but often creates unhealthy ways of coping.

“I will strive NOT to make my own salvation dependent on the functioning (no less the existence) of another.” 

What was missing in my Granny’s family, the Self and Patton crew, was self-differentiation. This is very simply, the ability to live from one’s core values and to reason out responses, rather than be jerked around by the emotions that surround us. The well differentiated person is provident, thoughtful and autonomous in the face of stress. Quite simply, less likely to freak out.

Take a moment and think about these “coincidences” and patterns in your family.

In what ways do I give away part of myself to connect with others?

“Wherever you go, there you are…”

Achieving self-differentiation is possibly the most important and most difficult task of maturation. Many people grow old and die without ever having done so. Whenever a member of the family is distancing and/or practicing cutoff from family, they are functioning under the mistaken assumption that by avoiding the family of origin, they can become more whole.

I was well into my adulthood when I began to understand this. Like my Granny Patton, my own mother died when my twin and I were five and my brother was 7. Even now, my brother, who lives in CT and has become successful in his life and work, does not visit and communicates rarely with us. My first marriage was to a printer from a family of printers (as was my Grandfather Patton) who was also well on his way to alcoholism.

How has emotional cutoff/distancing influenced your current relationships?

“Every over-functioner deserves their under-functioner.”

Overfunctioning is present when one observes the OF:

·        Giving advice

·        Worrying about people

·        Doing things others could do for themselves

·        Feeling responsible for others

·        Talking more than listening

·        Having goals others don’t have for themselves

·        Going through cycles of “burnout”.

Underfunctioning one might see

·        Asking for advice

·        Getting others to “help”.

·        Acting irresponsibly

·        Setting goals but not following through

·        Getting sick mentally and sometimes frequently

·        Tending to be addicted to substances

On my father’s side, I never knew my grandparents. Not only did my father never speak about his parents, ( cutoff) he almost never talked about my mother after she died.  When he did, it was with a kind of reverence that left me feeling the weight of his expectation for me. ( anxiety)I looked like her and reminded him of her, and I carried these projections way into my adulthood. In fact, I named my own daughter Marjorie Lee, and she looks even more like my mother than I do.(triangles) (multi-generational transmission)

My great-grandmother Cain 

As an expert underfunctioner, one family member nearly always blames/sees herself as innocent victim/draws in other family members/creates a “crisis”. It is exhausting for me, even after studying and practicing FS for over ten years, to manage to remain self-differentiated in the face of sabotage.

“No one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slave holders cheering them on”. (Friedman)

Family systems is the Pilates of spirit and being.

We each have within us a core of self, and we can develop it through recognizing (identify & isolate) what is truly “myself” and then practice using these muscles so that we can stay centered in times of anxiety. Just as Pilates and core strength benefit many other systems: our internal organs, our spines, our balance, just so defining and differentiating self will have consequences we cannot imagine: all of our relationships  will improve, and so will our health, both mental and physical. We will become more fully who we are meant to be, more human, more whole.

ADDENDUM:

Link to Bowen Family Center

recommended reading: Extraordinary Relationships, Roberta M. Gilbert

A good resource for congregations, especially leaders, HERE.

UUA Resource on Family Systems and Congregations HERE

I Love You...Now Change!

Given at GNUUC 8/18/19

“The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”

― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Has anyone ever tried to evangelize you?

When I was in seminary, long, long ago, there was a young, earnest man named Stacy who wore a very large cross and carried a BIG Bible. He was as out of place in the progressive, UCC seminary as we UUs were in the Bible and Theology classes. Matter of fact, he seemed to derive an inordinate amount of joy from praying for UUs, especially, it would seem, me.

I just recall a few of our interchanges, but what I do remember is that the more he assumed Unitarian women were fallen Jezebels, the more annoyingly outrageous I was tempted to act (which, in seminary, isn’t very). I probably wore shorter skirts, laughed louder, and made more off-color comments.  And once, when he was telling me he’d pray for me, I said, Stacy by all means pray for me. But enlighten me: Why do you have to TELL me you are praying for me?

If he changed me, it was just to make me dig in even harder. I think those of us who are liberal/progressive in religion or politics can be a thick-headed as the people we like to complain about.

Have you ever tried to change the mind of a Trump fan?

My dentist, Dr. Flowers, which first of all, poor guy… right? His name is DON FLOWERS…. Is a raging conservative. Actually, he’s not much different than the majority of folks in Washington County. The big difference is that he starts talking about it while my mouth is full and I can’t reply. (If he only knew how many times I was tempted to bite his fingers!) I’ve reminded him numerous times that I’m a liberal. I did once ask him not to disparage President Obama. If he said anything racist or homophobic, I’d gently correct him again.

Last week, he was replacing a crown  a few days after the mass shootings. Ignoring the evidence that the Walmart shooter was clearly racist and clearly indoctrinated by Trumpish rhetoric, he started talking about the Dayton incident by announcing that he’d been in the very same shopping center earlier that day with his son who is living in Dayton. At least they can’t blame that on Trump, he proffered. The guy was a Warren/Sanders supporter and involved in Antifa. But you won’t hear THAT in the mainstream media.

You may wonder why I don’t find another dentist. Well, first of all, he’s a very good dentist, he’s extraordinarily kind and considerate, very gentle, asks me if I’m ok so many times that I get tired of it, and second, he’s one of two dentists in our small community, and the other wasn’t taking new patients.

Last time I was there, he mentioned that he, like Seth, had been in marching band, and all of the geeks and less-popular kids were there too, and how much it had meant to him. He was very concerned about how Seth was doing. I won’t say he changed any of my beliefs, or my politics, but he helped me see that he was a complex and unique human.

I’d like to make a few suggestions about change.

I do not agree with the old saw, The only thing you can change is yourself.

I understand its purpose. Trying to willfully and forcefully change others is pretty fruitless. It is sometimes our way of avoiding the truth that what we detest in the other is very present in us. It may be only a smidgen present. But it’s there, and we don’t like it. We want to get rid of it. For example, there’s a part of me that is self-righteous, indignant, and obnoxious when it comes to injustice. Very similar to Dr. Flowers and his right wing rants. That, I learned by studying Jung, is my shadow.

Second, trying to change others forcefully does not work. My husband’s brother is an ardent Trump fan, gun person, pro-lifer, born again Christian who has goaded and taunted my husband for years (thankfully this happens less than once a year since he’s in CA). But last time Eric went out there, when his dad was dying last fall, he stayed with this brother and things got very heated. It ended with Eric leaving and staying at a hotel, and with his brother calling him a snowflake. I realize this is happening in families, churches and workplaces all over this land.

It's as if we are all reading from scripts and making the same useless arguments! Are they or we changed? Rarely. What seems to happen is that we dig in our heels., becoming even more polarized.

We, as Unitarian Universalists, we represent this faith tradition. We can all do better. I know I can.

At General Assembly this summer in Spokane, a ruckus broke out over something called The Gadfly Papers. It’s self-published broadside by the Spokane minister, Dr. Todd Ekloff. Subtitled Three Inconvenient essays by one pesky minister, it’s described as a critique of the “emerging culture of political correctness, Safetyism, and Identitarianism” and their negative effect on “America’s most liberal religion.”

Ekloff starts by discussing this culture in public life outside of religion, for example on college campuses, which has been well-documented. Then he moves to detailing some events and issues that have come to pass in our denomination. I won’t go into the book in detail, because you can either read it or read about it online. There are parts I agree with, and parts I do not. What I struggle with almost 2 months later is that about 500 of my colleagues signed a letter of condemnation and disavowal of The Gadfly Papers. Many acknowledged they hadn’t read it when they signed. But that didn’t matter, they said, because POC and other marginalized people had said it was harmful.

The challenge for me is that I know Todd Ekloff. He was serving a congregation in Louisville during the 14 years I served in Lexington. Among other things, he lost a good job with a state agency because he took a public stand on same sex marriages. He refused to perform any marriages until same sex marriage was legal. He and his family suffered economically for years. I know he’s not racist, homophobic, transphobic, or any of the other labels that have been hurled at him. Or, no more so than I or you.

Here’s the point: not only are the people from the left or right not succeeding in changing others for the better, they (in this case) actually provided a real life example of what he was talking about in his essays, and, they made things way, way worse.

Scott Alexander: You don’t change anyone by “should” ing all over them.

Rev. Dr. Eklof will be fine. But I sincerely wonder whether Unitarian Universalism will be. We are shrinking, albeit more slowly, in our numbers and in our influence in the public square. “This is how the left is eating its own,” is a phrase I read in one article, and something I see happening in our institutions and our politics far beyond this denomination.

As Wendell wrote in our meditation about topsoil,

 It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness.

We are changed by life and by living with open, questing hearts and minds. We do change one another, the same way we garden, fertilize, plow and tend the soil. Gently, thoughtfully, aware of all that makes us human and that connects us. We change and are changed by Love.

And that is why we return to community, again and again, with curiosity, humility, and receptiveness. So may it be.