ENVY "...aside the Devil turn'd For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Ey'd them askance, and to himself thus plain'd. Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two Imparadis't in one another's arms The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust, Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire, Among our other torments not the least, Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines..." Thus speaks the character Satan in John Milton's PARADISE LOST, in famous lines that capture the essence of envy. Here is this angel, brought low, now seeing what God has wrought, two lovely creatures who are able to share with one another their beauty, their innocence, their love, while he must live in Hell with "fierce desire" but "neither joy nor love." Envy eats away at his heart, fills his mind, tortures his soul, till he plots the undoing of those whom he despises because of their good fortune. Envy-the resentment of others for having what we do not have, for being what we are not-has long been a part of the human story. Twenty five hundred years ago, an unknown writer told the tale of two brothers torn apart by envy. Cain got less favorable attention for his sacrifice than his brother Abel. Envy of his brother drove Cain to murder. Christians called envy a deadly sin, deadly because it led to so many other acts of wickedness, malice and anger and cruelty and dishonesty, theft and even murder. The Buddhists are right when they describe envy as one of the 16 defilements that "darken the mind." Modern psychology has seen envy as one of the deeper pathologies of the human psyche. Willard Gaylin speaks for many in calling envy "a mean emotion. Unredeeming and unredeemable." Jealousy is closely related to envy, but they are not the same. Jealousy is the fear of losing what one has or what one is. It is an anxiety, for example, that our partner will compare us to someone else and find us wanting. Envy is a sadness at what we do not have or what we are not. Envy begins in comparing ourselves to others and finding ourselves wanting. Shakespeare captured both jealousy and envy in his tale of Othello. The play opens with Iago laying bare his envy of Cassio to his friend Roderigo. He is describing his frustration at not having been chosen by Othello as his lieutenant. He knows he is more worthy, but Cassio has been more richly rewarded. Envy fills him and he turns his wrath upon those who have deprived him of what he deserves, Cassio and Othello. By various deceitful and lying words, he injects jealousy into the loving relationships both men have until they and the women they love are undone. As Joseph Epstein correctly notes, "Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all." There is great joy in pride, and wonderful relief in expressing anger. Lust brings its own delicious delights and sloth can be quite pleasurable. Especially in a consumer society is avarice a joy and gluttony is enjoyable even if we pay a price for it in indigestion and excess weight. But envy has no aura of pleasure about it at all. Indeed, it is as Leslie Hunt describes it, "a painful ill-will" Painful, and shameful as well. Rarely do we admit to envy, though we may be more open about our indulgence in the other sins. We are not often going to admit that we are envious of another person's house or job or car or partner or life-style or body or musical gifts or athletic ability or wealth or power. Such an admission reveals too nakedly our own failure, our own inadequacy, our own weakness. Yet we are all weak, we are all inadequate, we all fail. When these truths are made clear to us, the temptation to envy is almost overpowering. Robert Coles writes tellingly of envy that it "comes naturally to us, since we are limited in our distinctive ways, and...others...can seem so strong, so lucky, so blessed; that we are bombarded so heavily...that we are bound to feel inadequate...Hence our wish to be those envied others, our shame at abandoning ourselves that way, our anger that such has come to pass." Envy is part of our humanity, driven by several forces. The first of these is a lack of something. That which we lack may be something we desperately need-like food, clothing, medical care, and other things required for life or for a decent life. I vividly remember returning from Europe in the hold of a troop ship in mid- December more than forty years ago. After the first night's meal, I did not eat anything but soda crackers until we landed 12 days later. I was not alone in my seasickness, but I did not think so much of my fellow sufferers as I did of the lucky ones who could actually enter the galley and eat food there. I do not think I have ever been so envious of someone else's physical condition. That which we lack may also be something that is merely desirable. I admit to a certain amount of envy regarding the talent some people have to play the one game I truly love, baseball, a talent I lack. No reason to bore you with tedious descriptions of my ineptitude, other than to say that I spent a little time in my senior year in high school as a coach. One of the players I coached had tremendous talent. I wished I had his talent. I acted on that envy by over-coaching him, finding fault with every little thing I could think of, when what I should have done is mostly let him alone. He was good beyond my ability as a teacher of baseball to instruct him in any helpful way. I am grateful now that I did not do him sufficient harm to keep him from later playing in the major leagues for a few years. Deprivation is one force leading to envy. Impotence in the face of difficulty, disparity, or despair is another. The impotence can be real or imagined. All that matters is that it is felt. We are all familiar with the Parable of the Prodigal Son. (Luke 15:11) It is the story of a man with two sons, one of whom demands his portion of the inheritance so that he can get away from home. He falls on hard times and decides to come home. His father welcomes him with open arms and arranges for a feast to celebrate his return. The older brother is enraged. He who has always done what his father has asked of him has never been given a banquet. Yet the wastrel comes home and is treated in royal fashion. The older son is envious of the love the father has given to his brother, envious because he is powerless to do anything to attract that love to himself. He has done all he could do, remaining to work the estate with his father, never disobeying, never being profligate with the family wealth. Still, he can see clearly that his younger brother is the more loved. He is helpless to change that. Envy is the result. Impotence can stimulate envy in us. So can comparing ourselves to others. Max Ehrman wrote wise words in Desiderata: "If you compare yourself with others you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself." Of course, we all know that. And we all ignore it some or a lot of the time. When I compare my pianistic skills, limited at best, to Sarah Albright, I feel a great lack. I am envious of her nimble fingers and vast musical knowledge. I want her long years of practice and study and playing to magically be incorporated into my own hands and mind! To enjoy my own playing, I have to block out Sarah and all the other fine pianists I know, and just play, mistakes and all. Comparisons can be dangerous. They can lead us to feel that another's ruin is more important than our own welfare. A psychiatrist's patient once told him, "In order for me to be happy it is not enough for me to succeed. My friends have to fail." There is story told of a farmer who lived his whole life in the direst poverty. Over the years he came to focus his misery on an envious appraisal of his neighbor's relative prosperity. One day he found a strange bottle in his field. When he picked it up, a genie came out of the bottle and offered him one wish. The farmer thought for a moment about his own poverty. Then he thought of his neighbor, who had a goat that gave good milk and cheese. His neighbor's life was so much sweeter because of that goat. Every time he thought of the goat, he was reminded of his own misery. He told the genie, "As my wish, I want you to go and kill that goat!" Comparisons so easily lead to envy. Envy can cause a poor farmer to give up the chance to get his own goat-or a potful of money-in order to bring down a neighbor who is better off than he is. Envy grows out of deprivation, out of impotence, and out of comparison. It is, as Carol Huston has pointed out, largely a zero-sum game. Envy grows out of the belief that there is only so much. If someone else has a lot, I will have less. Having a lot is what life is all about, winners and losers. America is full of this mentality. Being Number One is a big deal in this land. Having a bigger house, a more powerful car, more fashionable clothes, a trophy wife or husband, more book sales, more of the latest gadgets that make our kitchens and computers run are things that matter in the culture of 21st century America. Indeed, without envy it would be very hard to run a consumer society. Peter Gomes writes trenchantly of the "power of mass advertising, notably on television, and the creation of a desirable, attainable, and steadily improving standard of living, together with the planned obsolescence designed to stimulate rather than to feed appetites...(means) that the good life...(is) no longer a philosophical abstraction upon which the leisured and the lettered... (can) contemplate, as Aristotle had assumed. Now it...(is) a social opportunity and an economic necessity. Envy...(is) no longer simply one of the seven deadly sins; it...(is) now an ingredient essential to the success of the consumer society." (tense change by KWP) Envy can take over our lives, becoming an all-consuming passion before which all else must bow. In one of his tales in the "Metamorphoses", Ovid describes how Aglauros, envious of her sister Herse, is turned into an image of Envy itself: "Her eyes are all awry, her teeth are foul with mould; green, poisonous gall overflows her breast, and venom drips from her tongue. She never smiles, save at the sight of another's troubles...unwelcome to her is the sight of others' success, and with the sight she pines away: she gnaws and is gnawed, herself her own punishment." The bitterness of envy can consume us. Yet envy can also point in the other direction, to a measure of salvation in our lives. Professor Coles puts it this way: "If envy brings the pain of knowing what we lack, envy can also lead us to reflection. Envious, we find ourselves asking the most important psychological questions: who we really are, and what we really want out of life. Envy can be part of our redemption." Let me suggest three paths out of envy into worthier attitudes. First, work for justice. A.S. Byatt observes, "All sins have their contrary virtues for which they are sometimes mistaken...The contrary virtue of envy is justice." Where there is justice, where every one receives a fair amount of the world's goods and society's benefits and honors, there is less likelihood that envy will disturb the minds and hearts of the citizens of that land. One of the points made by John Rawls in his highly influential text, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, is the importance of societal institutions that strengthen the self-esteem of the members of that society. Such institutions and system help to reduce the proneness to envy that may forever lurk in the human breast. The story of Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37, 39-50) is a story grounded in envy that turns into justice. Joseph's brothers despised him because he was their father's favorite. Their envy drove them to sell him to some Ishmaelites and pretend to their father that he had been slain out in the fields. Joseph is taken to Egypt, where he rises to a position of great power. After many years, a famine forces the brothers to come to Egypt seeking food. But what a different set of brothers came to Egypt from those who had sold him into slavery! They had seen the terrible hurt Joesph's supposed death caused their father. They became solicitous of him, anxious that he not be wounded again. When Joseph, not yet revealed to them as their brother, demands that the youngest son, the much beloved Benjamin, be brought with them if they come again, Judah promises his father he will guard Benjamin with his own life. He is prepared to do just this when Joseph plays a trick on them and threatens Benjamin. All the brothers are ready to give their lives rather than see further injustice done. They have matured from a petty envy of their brother to a courageous protectiveness of their father's welfare. They learned from the consequences of deeds done out of envy how to pursue justice. We can all learn that same lesson. Envy those whose tables are laden with food, but then build a social system that enables everyone to sit at such a table. Envy those whose jobs are decent and well-paid, but then create an economy where everyone goes home satisfied from their day's labor with a good paycheck in their pocket. Envy those who receive good medical care, but then create a system of health care where no one is denied treatment and everyone is covered in a equitable system of insurance. Envy can become justice if we will work to make it so. Secondly, envy can be turned into gratitude. If we envy someone their possessions, then we can reflect on our own possessions and realize how very well off we are. In America especially most of us have an abundance of possessions. Even if we are not well off, we are likely to have enough of the things we need, and a little more, just because of where we live, in a land with vast quantities of things. In the early days of raising my children, when my income never came close to $10,000, our family was able to get everything we needed at garage sales, flea markets, day old bakeries, second hand sales, private transactions, and through bartering. America is amazing in this way. Perhaps we are envious of others' skills-on a basketball court, on the dance floor, at a computer terminal. Beyond a certain point, such envy is not only useless, it will also erode what skills we have. I am not very gifted at computer work, but in my most frustrating moments, I try very hard not to think about all the talented people who handle this technology with much greater facility than I do. I try to be grateful that I can handle it at all. I try to be grateful that I am able to communicate with far-flung friends and family members regularly and at great length. I try to be grateful for the wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. Perhaps our envy is for the relationships others have. That is an unfortunate envy. It fails to recognize that all relationships must be mutual, that every one of us will be shut out of some relationships by people who do not like us, and that sometimes relationships can look better from the outside than they really are if you are in the midst of them. Better to focus on the relationships we do have and be grateful for them. More than once as I have talked with people at the very extreme moments of life-a time of grave illness, the loss of good work, and other such grim times-I hear people say how much they have come to value their family members and friends. They feel this deep sense of gratitude at the way people have rallied round to help them, to cheer them up, to carry them through the transition period on a cloud of love and support into whatever lies ahead. Do you remember the old Irving Berlin song that begins, "When I'm weary and I can't sleep, I count my blessings instead of sheep, and I fall asleep counting my blessings." I find that counting my blessings can not only put me to sleep when my mind is weary and worried, it can also bring me to life. Counting my blessings makes me aware of how lucky I am and how I should use my energy not for envy-which is unproductive and bitter-- but for grateful and productive living. Thirdly, envy can be overcome by the spiritual gift of acceptance. Acceptance means that we take things as they are when there is nothing that we can do to change them. Acceptance means that we do not waste time regretting that we are not bigger, stronger, smarter, faster, wealthier than we are. Saint Paul wrote that "I have learned in whatsoever state I am in to be content." That is a good model to follow. If we are able to accept what gifts we have, what blessings are in our lives, what opportunities lie before us, rather than bemoan what we do not have, what we are not, what chances have not come our way, then our minds will be clear for focusing on what we can do, what we can enjoy, what we can contribute. Envy blocks us, in Thomas More's phrase, "blinds us to our own nature." Acceptance liberates us, enabling us to do the best we can with the resources at our command. Think of what Stephen Hawking has done with the limited resources of his physical body and the astonishing range of his mind. For 40 years he has lived with amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS) , Lou Gehrig's Disease. His body is ravaged, but his mind is lucid and sharp. Indeed, he is regarded as one of the most brilliant physicists of our times. Hawking was once asked if he was not envious of other scientists who did not have his physical limitations. He said he was not at all envious. Because of his inability to do virtually anything physical for himself, his mind was free to think all the time. He found that a wonderfully liberating condition. He accepted himself as he was, and transcended envy in the process. If we can accept the way we are, we are not likely to be able to think as brilliantly as Stephen Hawking, but we will be better able to think and to act as who we are and to do so fully and thoughtfully. When we accept who we are, what we are, how we are, where we are, we are freed to live life as well as we are able. It's sermonic round-up time now, the point in the weekly sermon where I briefly tell you what I have just said. This is done in order to reduce the envy among those whose minds drifted away during the presentation or who cannot remember what I said or who may have fallen asleep, envy for those who are chattering freely about my remarks in the coffee hour. The sermon had three broad sections, each of which had three sections of its own. In the introduction, I gave some historical background, spoke of the difference between envy and jealousy, and spoke about the peculiarity of this deadly sin in that it gives no pleasure. I then talked of three components of envy: deprivation, impotence, and comparison. I concluded with three suggestions on how to cope with and sometimes overcome envy: by following a path of justice, by learning gratitude, and by accepting life as it is when it cannot be changed. Envy really is a deadly sin, an insidious wickedness, a kind of "willful tyranny" over our lives. May we all be free of this sin, liberated into a life of enjoyment doing the best that we can. 1