Hope & Expectation

Over the past seven months, God has been revealing a lot to me about hope and expectation, and how my ideas about them permeate every area of my life. Just when I think I've got the concept down, He goes and opens another area and sheds light on the cobwebs created by my expectations... and shows me how He wants to replace them with living, breathing hope. As beautiful and helpless as a newborn baby (or a budding flower), hope needs our care, our attention. Grace when things don't go as planned. Trust in the One who loves us enough to prune us, who sees the bigger picture and is in control of every last detail.

This excerpt from Gerald G. May's book "The Awakened Heart" captures it... let it simmer a while:

"Efficiency breeds expectation; love nurtures hope. Can you tell the difference? In the abstract, hope is a wish for something; expectation is assuming it is actually going to happen. Expectations can be very efficient if they are based on real experience. It is useful to expect that two and two will make four, or to expect that the sun will come up tomorrow. But false expectations only breed trouble.

By contrast, there is no such thing as false hope. Hope deepens our love precisely because it does not have to be bound by experience. A child who has always gone hungry cannot expect the next meal to be full but surely and rightly can hope. Because hope always admits its uncertainty, it can be disappointed but never killed. It is always open-ended.

Expectation refuses to permit wonderings or doubt, and so it is closed off, final and frozen. When an expectation is not met, it dies. Sometimes, with grace, hope is born from the rubble of dashed expectations. More often, the death is simply denied, reality is ignored, and another expectation – just as rigid and just as impossible – is forged. Without some birth of hope, each remanufactured expectation is covered with a thicker coat of cynicism and paranoia. Expectation is brittle and can only be shored up by delusion, but hope is soft and willing to suffer pain.

In real-life situations, expectation can masquerade as hope. A young man found himself repeatedly hurt in his relationships with women. His psychologist told him that he was continually setting up relationships that would fail because he was looking for the perfect mother he never had. At the beginning of each such relationship, the man felt what he thought was hope. But underneath was an expectation, a demand that the relationship be exactly what he wanted.

The wife of an abusive alcoholic kept “hoping” her husband would stop drinking and beating her. But she took no action against him because what she called hope was really an expectation that he would change. She kept convincing herself, against all evidence, that it just would not happen again. But of course it did, repeatedly.

In both cases, false expectations had to be relinquished and true hopes claimed. The young man found healing when he learned that he could only hope for the mothering he desired, but not expect it. This allowed him to interact with women in a real, dynamic way. The woman found freedom when she realized her husband’s behavior was going to continue in spite of her expectations. This allowed her to intervene in ways that were realistically helpful for both herself and her husband. She continued to hope that he would change, and eventually, because she took action, he did.

Hope is flexible, willing to change or even to be given up if need be. But as the above cases demonstrate, true hope is not at all passive. Its very flexibility allows hope to be alive and active in response to all situations. It is expectation that is truly passive, frozen into paralysis or compulsive repetition. Once an expectation becomes solid, you cannot give it up. It digs into your spiritual skin like a tick, infesting your attitudes and behavior. Given the slightest opportunity, expectation will become addiction.

You can sense the entrenching quality of expectation by its ritualization, its unwillingness to encounter and be involved with life as it is, its rigid clinging to unreal belief. Compulsive gamblers do not simply hope to win; they expect it. I am like that with fishing. To put it kindly, I am an avid fisherman. When I tell this to spiritual people, they often say something like, “How nice. You can spend such quiet time there by the water, just enjoying creation.” I wish it were true, but I am addicted to fishing. I expect to catch fish. I expect to catch big fish. I expect to catch a lot of big fish. It makes no difference that I very rarely catch a big fish and never in my life have caught a lot of big fish. I expect it anyway. So my fishing is rigid, ritualized, and as superstitious as a sorcerer’s rite. Each cast will net the big one. I focus on the line as it enters the water with a concentration I once would have been proud of if I could have done it in prayer. I do not see the trees and the sky, or if I see them, they only speak to me of places where fish hide and of weather that affects their biting.

Sometimes when honesty catches me I think about hope and fishing. You know what? If I am really honest, I almost hope I won’t catch anything. I don’t really want to cause the pain. I honestly think I’d give up fishing altogether if I could honor my hope instead of obey my expectations. But I can’t, or I don’t want to. It’s an addiction all right. Since it is impossible for me to simply hope to catch a fish – I have given up hope for that – I can sometimes hope to enjoy the water and the trees, to really involve myself with the natural beauty of the lake. For this, though, I must leave my fishing tackle at home.

Expectation, like efficiency, looks at the end of things, for goals and accomplishments. Hope, like love, looks to the beginnings, for promptings, longings, urgings. A religious sister who lives most of her life as a contemplative hermit visited the Shalem office not long ago. We asked her about her life and travels. “Most of what I do,” she said, “is just follow my urges. I think I would tell people: if you want to find God, just follow your urges.” Her eyes twinkled as she said this, as if she knew how radical it might sound in some religious circles. We did not need to ask her, for we knew that urges to her were not whims and fancies. She meant real desire. Real desire, the deeper prompting of our hearts, is where hope finds its continual beginning.

In building the foundations of consecration, immediacy helps us be honest. Honesty helps us sift through our mixed motivations and chip through our expectations to find our real desire. Desire births hope, and it is our hope that we offer for grace in consecration. In some African and Native American tribes, the ritual for blessing a newborn baby involves a parent holding the infant up to the sky. It is something like that, I think, when we embrace our hope and lift it in consecration."