Expectation Attacks

This is it. This is the time of year for us to heighten our expectations. Like children in the last weeks before Christmas, we have all of our wants lined up in a row. We hope for a future different from our past. For that matter, we wish for a future different from the one we fear will come to pass. We wish that we could write a letter to Santa Claus that would lay out everything we want in order of expectation and ensure its delivery.

If only.

Sadly, the real Santa Clause died almost seventeen hundred years ago. While some of us enjoy constant travel, none of us can quite imagine parts of ourselves simultaneously in Bari, Venice and Morton Grove, IL. One of my expectations, having lived so close to the Morton Grove bone fragment, is that when I return to the Chicago area I will make a visit to St. Martha of Bethany Church.

People of wants and desires that we are, there’s always something in our lives that we desire to be different and, if it is changed, if life lives up to our expectations, of course everything will be better.

There’s only one thing. That is not true. We hold ourselves hostage with our own misconceptions.

In a very famous murder case currently covering the front of the media outlets, one of the items of interest is that the suspect had a very delicate operation on his spine to correct a vertebra that was out of place. As someone whose bones have hurt basically from the skull down for the last seven decades, I get it. I know what that’s like. I didn’t have…