Picture these scenarios: Someone is an expert bread maker. As anyone making bread knows, the dough process takes time, patience. At the very last point of the process the loaves have to come out of the oven at the right time. A family was asked to take them out. Normally for a task like this, you set yourself a timer. This time, no timer was set, and lets just say, that after the loaves were long overdue and had turned a deep black color, the house wasn’t burned down.
Someone is a researcher delivering a lecture in another town. The train system is promising to carry the researcher after the lecture home – for another appointment the next day. But the train, for undisclosed reason, is being cancelled, another one is delayed, after finally two different trains carry our researcher home, way past midnight.
Someone is lending her apartment to a friend. Another friend will be needing this apartment and there is an understanding of arrival times and of the way the key changes hands. The morning comes, the apartment door is closed and no key in sight. After much back and forth the friend is arriving one hour and a half late while the friend is waiting on a bench, early in the morning, after a red eye, to be relieved and offered the safety of a bed and home.
What do these three scenarios have in common? A broken promise. In each scenario some given promise was not kept, and what had initially started as a routine operation morphed into one individual being a victim.
I have been on both ends of situations like this, and each have their learning curves. Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend time with a pastor of another faith tradition in our car. I had volunteered to helping out and as it happened, this pastor was sitting right next to me. I took the opportunity to ask her take on broken promises.
She looked at me an said: Let me tell you a story. Some time ago I attended a kiln firing. You might know that this is a process of heating clay in a highly insulated oven to turn soft pieces into solid ceramics. Potters gently position their pieces into the kiln, and than the heating starts. This might take up to 14 hours and another at least 12 hours of cooling. Once the pieces are in the kiln, there is no way you can control the outcome. Many pieces break, the glaze turns out to be different color than expected or the glaze has cracks.
The master potter is also a spiritual teacher. The group of potters was an intentional mix of excellent professional potters and hobby potters, some of them with disabilities or a history of abuse behind them. He felt it was important to prepare the group for the opening of the kiln. What he said in essence was this: Expectation is preemptive disappointments.
Wow, I thought. Broken promises are about expectations. and lowering our expectations is a way to look at lives’ most wonderful ways of teaching us glorious things. I gave it a lot of thought, and I realized: The time spent with clay, f.e., preparing a new design for pot, is valuable and a good learning moment, even when at the end the pot is broken or has turned into a different hue than expected.
A wider perspective revealed even deeper truths: Good, the very essence of God, prevents anyone from becoming a victim. Good is always present. This truth stands in the presence of broken pots, burned breads or missing keys, the innate goodness of Life is present, all around us. I remembered this Bible verse which has grown on me the last year:
“The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.” (Prov. 18:10) I understand this to be: LOVE is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. LIFE is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. TRUTH is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. PRINCIPLE is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. MIND is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. SPIRIT is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe. SOUL is a strong tower: The righteous runneth/runs into it, and is safe.
The three scenarios had this outcome: The bread baker received a bouquet of roses and a heartfelt apology. The researcher had a productive next day. The individual with the key/apartment problem apologized and an encounter of strangers turned into a warmhearted meeting of new friends.
Any victims around? Just people having experienced something of the goodness of Life. Lowering expectations is a thing. You might say, the lowering expectations is actually turning up the volume of the beautiful song that Love is singing for you and with you. You find yourself being grateful, in the here and now. And I am starting to see: Life is not about expecting that your pots might not break nor your loaves burn. It is about something different.
An ode to low expectations by James Parker
o there i was, staring at my mug of tea.
It was 1993. I was sitting over a plate of eggs in the New Piccadilly Café in Soho, London. Things were not going well. As a man, as a person, as a unit of society, I was barely functioning. More acutely, I was having panic attacks, in an era when people didn’t yet say “panic attack.” They just said Oh, dear. As far as I was concerned, I was going insane.
I took a despairing slurp from my mug, then put it back down. As I did so, the side of my hand touched the Formica tabletop, and I felt the radiant heat from where the mug had been resting a second before. Or, more accurately, I registered it. I noted energy, life, jiggling molecules, the world. A message from the fire of generosity at the heart of the universe. And the message was this: One day, you’ll be able to simply appreciate what’s in front of you. The tea, the café, London, the little lens of warmth on the table. One day, this will be enough.
(…)
“Reality is B-plus,” says my friend Carlo. I’d probably give it an A-minus, but I take his point. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. But there also lives the dearest shoddiness. We’re half-finished down here, always building and collapsing, rigging up this and that, dropped hammers and flapping tarps everywhere. Revise your expectations downward. Extend forgiveness to your idiot friends; extend forgiveness to your idiot self. Make it a practice. Come to rest in actuality.
