Expectation

Is there Expectation about +Time blog posts? It will be incisive and spiritually enlightening? It will convey some profound grand vizierial wisdom? It will reminisce about St. Andrews or Panama City three generations ago? It will have a remarkable insight into some passage of scripture? It will comment glowingly on some local event, a gushing review? It will state some enraging, outrageous off the wall political view? It will show car pictures and ramble about automobiles? It will say something absurd and unknowing about football or other sport? It will disappoint?

This morning I will comment that we have just finished a magical weekend. A fantasticalistic musical production by HNES on stage at the Martin (it’s the Ritz Theatre, people) Theater. A delightful and very special birthday celebration, dinner, and visit. An extraordinary children’s service for Mothers Day at HNEC. With beloveds, a scrumptious Mothers Day dinner concluding with homemade Italian cream cake; followed by the normative, collapsive, clergy Sunday afternoon nap.  

Collapsive is the adjective form of the verb/noun collapse. Look it up. If it’s not there, which it is not, it should be. This is my first time using it, but if I wish to use it again, I shall do so.

Meeting expectations, living up to the expectations of others, is not a goal, not an objective of the elderly. At least, not of this elderly. As any living person, I have loves and likes and preferences and interests. The loves are people, some blood related, but if all my loves were to gather in one place they would stretch beyond the horizon, some only an idea and some beyond the veil. Likes and preferences vary but may be things to do, things to eat. For example, I didn’t know that I liked sushi until we lived in Japan and I watched with revulsion as people ate the raw fish dishes, only to reflect that I had been eating raw oysters all my life: try it, you may like it, Sam I Am. There was only one, squishy, dark tasting sushi dish in Japan that I did not like. Preferences are choose-amongs: large oysters that I have just opened myself, even over fried or steamed. Beef tenderloin. Lamb. Okra. Collards. White or yellow cars, or red. Eating what I damn well please for breakfast, though never that Conecuh County sausage that I love, I don't have a death wish. Mark and John over Matthew and certainly over Luke. Genesis. The interests are cars that grew up with me in the nineteen-thirties and forties up to the middle fifties. Bible study. Bible exploration without concern that where I go with it may shock, infuriate the literalists in the group. Theology, especially working through it alone, including boring myself to sleep with it if I wish. 

Theology is not Insanity, as I can prove. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results. Theology is doing the same things over and over again and finding that the results actually are different each time. Inconsistency is a good thing. It wards off certainty.

Don’t bother reading me expecting to have your beliefs and certainties and hopes confirmed. I don’t agree at all. Not at all. Not with anything anyone else has thought up for me.

W+