Expectations

By accident this evening, I found a quote in a facebook note I posted some time ago and it resonated with me because I see and struggle with many of the expectations listed. In the quote the author, Daniel Borsten, gives his description of current American culture. I think it is very revealing:

"When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast we expect, we even demand, that it will bring us momentous events since the night before. And as we turn on the car radio driving to work we expect news to have occurred since the paper went to press. Returning to our homes in the evening, we expect our house not just to shelter us, but to keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer and to dignify us. To relax us and to encompass us with music and interesting hobbies. To be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. And if we go somewhere far away we expect the atmosphere to be just like our own hometown. And we expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, and a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, but yet everybody remain loyal. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion and yet not think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge, but we expect our national purpose to be clear and simple. We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious. We expect luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active yet reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to eat a lot and stay thin. To be constantly on the move and yet somehow ever-more neighborly. We expect to go to the church of our choice and yet feel its guiding power over us.

Never have a people been more the masters of their environment, and yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed."

Not to be an alarmist, but this Borsten quote parallels well with a description by a cultural anthropologist Charles Kraft in which he contrasts cultures that facilitate well-being and those that do not:

"A well-functioning culture provides its people with a high degree of physical, psychological, and spiritual security. Such security results in what I call human well-being. Just how much of such security needs to be provided by a culture for the people to be in a state of well-being is not known. Perhaps it differs from people to people. Nor do we know for sure how much of that security can be sacrificed before people begin to break down and their lives fall apart. Perhaps this, too, differs from people to people.

What does seem clear is that a point has been reached in many societies where large numbers of people cease to obey many of the rules of the culture, where psychological illness and breakdown increase dramatically, where people lose hope and become demoralized, where individual selfishness and crime increase, where people dramatically decrease their rate of reproduction."

Again, I am not attempting to be a "doom and gloom" prophet or something of the sort here, just drawing parallels with things I encounter pretty much on a daily basis (that is, many parts of my life connecting and referring to each other). I will say though it reminds me that no culture or society is perfect and that although a culture of a respective society answers many problems for those in it, it does not fully answer all of them.

Jesus, may you use your body by your Spirit to integrate Kingdom paradigms into the cultures of the world, not throwing cultures away, but redeeming them for your Name's sake. Amen.