Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

June 6, 1999

Not a single one of us likes to admit that we are ever envious. Jealousy, envy’s cousin, we can understand: after all, it’s perfect natural, perfectly human, to want to guard, to want to keep, what is yours, so to speak. It could even be interpreted as a kind of perverse devotion to another. (That’s another sermon, though.) But envy—that’s something else. Envy makes us feel petty and small-minded, undermines our ability to celebrate another’s good fortune, makes us doubt our ability to care, brings into question our own self-respect. Envy has really no redeeming qualities. But we all fall into it from time to time.

Let me share a story with you. Editorial cartoonist Mike Peters and his wife and his little daughter Tracy had the occasion to spend a week one time with Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis. Davis was just dripping with success: he owned a Learjet, had a "gazillion assistants," a Versailles-like home, as Peters describes it. The Peters were impressed, but little Tracy was especially impressed. By the second day she was calling the hosts "Mom" and "Dad"—cute, everyone thought. They all laughed. But at the week’s end, when goodbyes were being said on the doorstep, Tracy was nowhere to be found. Then she appeared in an upstairs window. "Tracy, what are you doing up there?" her mother demanded. "It’s time to go!" But Tracy just waved to her parents. "Goodbye, Mr. And Mrs. Peters," she called to her parents. On the long drive home, a tense kind of silence prevailed, and then finally a voice from the back seat spoke up: "Why aren’t you a cartoonist, Daddy?" "I am a cartoonist," her father answered, through clenched teeth. The next day Mike Peters went out and started his own comic strip.

Perhaps this is the time to say that envy is not a gentle emotion. The first homicide recorded in scripture was rooted in envy, the envy of brother against brother--of farmer against rancher: Cain and Abel. "Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground," the scripture says. Both brothers, it appears, made an offering to God, and God accepted Abel’s, but not Cain’s, and the scripture continues, and "Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. . . . and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." The violent consequences of envy are still very much with us—I read a news article recently about a man who was killed for his gold hubcaps. Different story, same theme: I want what you have.

Envy starts when desire starts, and that is just about at birth. The earliest documented instance of envy on my part came when my baby brother was born. I was only a year and a half old—who was this newcomer who was getting all the attention? I do not remember this, of course, but I am told by trustworthy witnesses that I was found stuffing cigarette butts down my newborn brother’s throat. No, envy is not a gentle emotion.

Of course, one might say, what does a child know? As adults we grow out of such fiendish notions, don’t we? Then I remembered a letter I got last December from a dear friend. Now, I do not say "dear" lightly. We were friends all through graduate school and beyond. I went with her through her excruciating doubts about her marriage, through her even more excruciating divorce. I rejoiced with her when she won academic honors, and she rejoiced in my successes as we went along that perilous journey toward our Ph.D.’s. But this letter, this was something else. First of all, it was one of those Christmas letters in which the writer explains in full every detail of his or her perfect life and perfect family. I have to say that I hate and despise these letters. But this one was worse than most. She related how she had met the man of her dreams--that he shared not only her values, but her academic interests, that they were working together to set up conferences on world religion, that they traveled all over the world together to do their research, AND they were to be married in December, AND they would be flying to the South Seas for an extended honeymoon. It would be lovely, she said in a personal note at the bottom of this letter, it would be lovely if I could attend the wedding. Was I envious? Don’t be silly—she was one of my best friends. I did have the fleeting thought, though, that maybe their plane would crash. A beautiful wedding invitation came a few days later. Did I go to the wedding? No way. In fact, I somehow lost the invitation.

The problem with envy is that it separates you from others and makes you dislike yourself, at the same time. It is insidious, in that it raises desire and at the same time, yields a desperate discontent. We lose trust in our own goodness. We feel ashamed. Gee, if I feel this way about my best friend—or my sister—or my spouse, about someone who has done absolutely nothing to hurt me, what kind of ogre must I be? Our efforts to hide from envy by telling ourselves that the other person is pretentious, or that he brags on himself too much, or that she probably pulled strings to get that promotion—these efforts to hide are doomed to failure, and we are left sitting in the junkheap of our own broken wishes. "Hey, what about me? Don’t I get some candy, too?"

Annie Lamott knows about these desires and the conflicts they introduce into the psyche. In her book Bird by Bird, written at a time when she was not so well known, and low on money, she says that she went through a very bad bout of envy in regard to a writer friend of hers. This is how Lamott tells it: "It felt like every few days she’d have more good news about how well her book was doing, until it seemed she was going to be set for life. It threw me for a loop. I am a better writer than she is. I would sit listening to her discuss her latest successes over the phone, praying that I could get off the line before I started barking. . . . . I tried to will myself into forgiving both of us, and so when my friend called with her latest good news, always presented humbly like some born-again-Christian Miss America contestant, I’d say, "Isn’t that gright <great>, huh, isn’t that gright?" She would say, ‘You are so supportive. Some of my other friends are having trouble with this.’ I’d say, ‘How could I not be supportive? It’s just so darn gright.’ But I always wanted to ask, ‘Could I have the names and numbers of some of your other friends?’ <Once she actually called and said>, ‘I just don’t know why God is giving me so much money this year.’ Sometimes I would get off the phone and cry. My therapist said that <my problem> came from age-old feelings of being excluded and deprived. She said that this writer was in my life to help me heal my past. I tried to get her to give me a prescription for Prozac."

The pervasiveness of envy pulled me more deeply into a search for the causes. I concluded that it is perfectly understandable how envy creeps into our lives, unwanted though it is. The Cain and Abel myth is not the only myth of envy—the Greek myths are full of one God envying another and carrying out revenge. I would venture to say that no society, no religious tradition, is free of it. So there must be a universal thread here. This is a very primitive, a very deeply rooted impulse, and ultimately relates to survival needs. "I’m going to be left out, I won’t have enough, and I might die."

Psychiatrist Melanie Klein sees the impetus for these thoughts in our earliest relationship with mother, when our literal survival depended on having our desires met—our desires for food, our desires for love and nurturing. I agree with Klein, that we learn envy at our mother’s breast—psychologically, we all ask the question, "Will I have enough of what I need to survive?" It is the instinctive response of all creatures. We don’t need to be ashamed of this feeling, any more than we should be ashamed of our anger or fear. It is part of being human.

Another one of the roots of envy is loss, and who can prevent loss in this world? Listen to the opening lines of Joyce Carol Oates’s story "House Hunting," a story about a young couple who have lost a baby: "How subtly the season of mourning shaded into a season of envy. To their knowledge they had never been envious people, but suddenly they caught themselves staring at families, young parents with their children . . . strangers whose happiness grated with the irritation of steel wool against the skin." Or what about the widow who remembers the days of companionship and love, and can’t help but feel pangs of envy as she sits in the movie theater alone and sees the couple in front of her steal a kiss in the dark. Again, there is no reason to feel ashamed of these resentments—these feelings that spring up unwanted when we are so vulnerable.

Even so, it is fair to ask, how is this natural human response elaborated upon, encouraged, by the culture in which we live? We live in a hierarchical, competitive, highly individualistic society—can we then expect to go through our days without pangs of envy? Our culture is a set-up for envy. Social critic Christopher Lasch says that our culture’s emphasis on mass consumption encourages narcissism—in his words, "not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent." In fact, Lasch goes so far as to say that perhaps our dependence on goods and services recreates the helplessness of the infant. He says that "the consumer experiences his surroundings as a kind of extension of the breast, alternately gratifying and frustrating."

Consider the social climate which has been developing since the 50’s and on into the promises of the ‘60’s when times were good, and anything was possible. Not only were we going to change the world and make it free of sexism and racism and poverty and of course war, but certainly everyone figured that he would have a higher standard of living than his parents—that was a given. And of course that attitude was encouraged by the massive amount of advertising coming at us, especially through television.

Unfortunately, this sense of entitlement comes up against a very competitive society in which people’s dreams fall by the wayside: not everyone is going to be able to own a home, not everyone will be able to pay college tuition, not everyone will achieve her career ambitions. And this generation is not one that has been schooled to cope with limitation. Those of you who went through the Depression understood the concept, "I can’t have everything," and people still talk about the sense of community that developed then, as people shared what little they had. Not that I want to have another depression or a Y-2 K disaster so we can learn to care again, but we should think about what kind of society results when we have the attitude "I should have everything. Why not? I deserve it."

So given the "givens"—the instinctual piece of this feeling called envy and the cultural elaboration and encouraging of it, what are we to do? Envy is destructive of relationship, destructive of spirit. We just want it to go away. We want to be the nice, loving people we always imagined ourselves as being. When envy begins to worm its way in, we might simply accept the feeling, simply not deny it. Tell someone you know—or tell the person you’re envious of—not in a craven, ashamed fashion, but boldly. If I had not completely and irrevocably lost the telephone number and address of my friend who got married, I could call her up and say, "I can’t believe you have found a guy like that—you’re so lucky! And by the way I hate you." I mean, it would be funny, not morose at all. And we would be connected again.

And then consider the possibility that you might learn something from your experience of envying someone else. Without resorting to Prozac, or healing your childhood wounds—which, let’s face it, will never be completely healed--you might simply ask yourself, "What are these feelings telling me about my desire?" Not your desire for a new Jaguar or a winning lottery ticket—but what are you really looking for that you don’t have? Think of envy as a kind of reaching for the good. When we face the emptiness, we begin to define our truest and deepest wants. Do you need work that is creative and challenging? Do you need a deeper connection with other human beings? Do you need to examine your values and be truer to them? Do you need to deepen your spiritual faith, because spiritually you’ve been skating on thin ice all your life? Reflect, and then lean into your deepest desires. Actually do something to fulfill them. Take the first little step, then more will come, and you will find your stride. I began by saying that envy has no redeeming value, but in this way, envy can be redeemed.

I want to tell you another story—this one is about "house envy." Have you ever had house envy as you walk the streets of your neighborhood at dusk and notice the elegance of another’s home—or the friendliness of it? Have you ever imagined the lives of the people inside, as you glimpse them through lace curtains?

Writer Susan Ager tells about her childhood trips in the family car. She writes: "On Sundays we climbed into my father’s car and headed for neighborhoods better than our own. . . . <We drove to> where houses were far apart and inconspicuous sprinkler systems spritzed water onto lawns as big as golf courses. . . . I don’t remember ever seeing people. I came to believe that rich people with big houses stayed inside, happy to be there. They were never out futzing over their petunias. Even their children did not play scruffy hide and seek in the shrubs around their houses like we did at ours, but were, we figured, occupied with marvelous toys spilling from closets full to the ceiling with more.

"We didn’t talk in the car about these homes except to murmur our awe. My father did not direct us: ‘Work hard, so you can have a home like this.’ My mother did not ask: ‘When, dear, might we acquire a home this fine?’ The envy was implied. Why else would we spend a Sunday afternoon winding so slowly down these beautiful streets? Thirty years later, I still suffer from a variation of house envy. I don’t allow myself to actually want someone else’s bigger, better home. I just try to convince myself that mine surpasses theirs in some way. . . . . The light is brighter in my dining room, for example. . . . . And, yes, they have a very comfy screened porch, but it doesn’t get the sun our deck gets. . . . . Sometimes I win this game and sometimes I lose, but I admire people who refuse to play it. Who do not hold everything they own up against better things, or tarnish with foolish regret what fine things they already have. Who are smart enough to know the perfect house won’t mean an end to wishing."

She is right—there is no perfect house, and there is no end to wishing. We imagine that someone else’s life is idyllic, free from want, free from loss. But that is mere fantasy. Everyone experiences pain and loss and discontent. This is what it means to be human. You do not know what lies behind the seemingly charmed life, the ready smile. The question is not, how can I find the perfect life, but how do I live the life that is mine, the one "wild and precious life" that I have been given? This is my life, mine and no other’s, and I will live my life freely, giving my talents, my love, my knowing, as no one else can--this, rather than spending useless energy imagining my living someone else’s life. How useless! How fruitless!

Personally, I am the happiest and the most fulfilled when I experience myself as given over, given away. And I don’t mean necessarily to some lofty endeavor, some great enterprise, but simply giving myself in a way that connects me with the common good. It may be sharing food with another. It may be a mere touch of the hand. On the contrary, when I ask, "Who has it, and how can I get it?" I fail to see, I fail to be present to the love all around me, to the multitudinous invitations of the Spirit to create and to give. These words from the Tao I keep at my work station: "By yielding, I endure./ The empty space is filled./ When I give of myself, I become more./ When I feel most destroyed, I am about to grow./ When I desire nothing, a great deal comes to me."

When we feel so given over, we will also feel loved—it’s the old paradox: losing yourself and thereby finding yourself. And then there is no place for envy. Then we can look on another’s good fortune and smile, knowing that in some deep human sense we share in that joy. Every wedding is my wedding. Every child born is my child. Another’s destiny is not ours, our destiny is unique--and to be honored for what it is. What matters is that we are true to who we are, that each step along the way, we turn not to the clamoring voices of the world, but to our inner voice, and we ask, "What next? What next?" And when we hear the whispered answer, we obey.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, one who is sufficient to all our needs, give us thankful hearts. Help us to see our own goodness, our own beauty, and to desire nothing more than to be ourselves and to live our own lives in their fullness. Let us be joyful when others receive good gifts, and when we cannot be joyful, let us redeem our wanting with new understanding and new devotion to the good.

So be it. Amen.

BENEDICTION

"And what will you do with your one wild and precious life?" Go in love and in peace. Amen.

OPENING WORDS

From the poem "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Copyright 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.