On Saturday, at the Christian Wholeness seminar, Jono Andrews got Keiyeng to read a powerful quote from Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image”. I found it striking (I’d never heard it before). What made it especially striking is that it was written in 1961. It was a quote that made me think about how I live, and if I live with extravagant expectations.
Here’s the quote:
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect –we even demand–that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred. in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, to keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theatre, and a bar.
We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place.
We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night.
We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to 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; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars to be spacious; luxury cars to be economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellences,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “Church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God, and to be God.
Never has people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
We are ruled by extravagant expectation.
Source: Daniel Boorstin – “The Image: a Guide to Pseudo Events in America” (page 1)
What do you think? Do you live with extravagant expectations?
As most of you know, Keiyeng’s Granddad sadly passed away last Friday morning. He is much loved, and will be greatly missed. His funeral is being held tomorrow (his 91st birthday) in Ottawa, Canada. We have been mourning, because death is a horrible intrusion – an unnatural enemy. We were made to live and love, and death breaks this intimate connection. So we mourn.
. Registration details coming soon.
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