The "Sin" of Envy

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, May 21, 1995

Robert Fulghum was in the area last week. More specifically he was down in Boston promoting his latest book called From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives. It's pretty good, and is written in a more serious tone than what has characterized much of his work to date. I'm sure you'll be hearing me use it now and again. Fulghum--which is the name he prefers to go by--also did a benefit fund-raiser for our Unitarian Universalist Association last Sunday evening at Boston's Berklee Auditorium. Having seen him do his "road show", as it were, at last summer's UUA General Assembly in Fort Worth, I'm quite certain a good and delightful time was had by all who were in attendance at the Berklee.

Last year, right around this time, I had a conversation with my wife about Mr. Fulghum that took me by surprize in terms of what it evoked. I was looking over my General Assembly schedule, in anticipation of going to Fort Worth, and said sort of half to myself and half to her, Well, I see Bob Fulghum is going to be appearing at this year's G.A. Michele has this hobby of collecting books signed by their authors. So, she immediately asked, Oh, could you take my copies of his books along with you and get him to sign them for me? I'm sure you know the ones she meant: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, and Uh-Oh. What I said in reply really was meant as a joke, a piece of light-hearted banter, one of those little witticisms that married couples are supposed to engage in now and then. But it didn't exactly come out that way. I can't recall my exact words, but they went something like this:

Hey, the guy is only a Unitarian Universalist minister, same as me. Just because he got lucky and turned some of his newsletter columns into runaway best selling books, and is now pulling down all kinds of big bucks, doesn't mean that I have to go around chasing after his damned autograph!

Whoa, all I meant to do was toss off a harmless little wisecrack--as in Hey, he's only a UU minister--and the next thing I know I'm trash-talking dear, sweet, grandfatherly, good ol' Fulghum.

This is a sermon about envy; and I have a hunch that Mr. Fulghum would like my lead in. Just for the record here, I did come back from Fort Worth with three books autographed by him. They are all prefaced with "To Michele," of course. (I don't need that sort of thing for myself, you understand.) Also, for the record, I think he is one of the best things that has happened to or for UUism in recent years. He's a very bright and creative guy, who is also showing us how to talk to and with a wider range of folk than we UUs generally manage to reach. His latest book, to which I just alluded, has more of a religious tone to it than do his others; but it is just as readable and should, I believe, reach much of the same audience as have his other writings. Most of my colleagues in the UU ministry share this positive sentiment about Fulghum. One of us has "made it big" as it were. But I've also noticed on occasion when he--or his writings--come up in conversation with colleagues there is this little undercurrent somewhere below the all the good words. It's like:

So, what's this guy have that I don't anyway, other than a good agent? And, gee, it must be nice flying around from city to city signing books for admiring readers, and being witty and charming and insightful, and even profound, in front of large crowds of people while using pretty much the same "schtick" from one place to the next.....And all the while here we are--poor little us/poor little me--trying to come up with one sermon after the other for the same group of people each week! So, hope you're having fun, Bob. (He probably is.)

It appears, then, that envy--like the other so-called "seven deadly sins"--actually sits right on a razor's edge between vice and virtue. Between, that is to say, a healthy kind of admiration and identification and emulation--and a self-destructive and self-loathing kind of envy or resentment.

This is the third in my seven deadly sins series--or seven deadly "vices" if the term "sin" is problematic for any of you. As those of you who have heard me introduce the topic on the two earlier occasions may recall, I got the idea for this sermon series from an eight week theme piece that ran close to two years ago in the New York Times Book Review Section. In it several contemporary authors were invited to give their commentary from a primarily literary standpoint on what the 6th century Church catalogued as the "seven deadly sins," with one sin per author. These sins were actually seven categories into which the Church fathers (and they were exclusively "fathers") of that day believed all human vices and transgressions could be slotted. The "Big Seven"--and I neglected to mention this in the two earlier sermons--are also featured in Dante's Inferno, which is part of his larger epic, The Divine Comedy.

Seeing that this catalogue of alleged vices is of such ancient and ecclesiastical origin, it's a fair question to ask why a newspaper like the New York Times would want to build a featured series around them in their Book Review section; and why a Unitarian Universalist minister like myself would want to use them as the basis for a sermon series. The Times is about as secular a publication as you'll find, and Unitarian Universalists are supposed to be emphasizing human goodness and positive human possibility rather than human sinfulness. Some of us would question whether there even is such a thing.

My response to that is that if we are to truly and honestly explore among ourselves, here in this religious community, all that it means to be human--be it from the standpoint of a secular humanist, a religious humanist, or a religious liberal of whatever stripe--I don't believe we can ignore humanity's shadow or fallen side and our human susceptibility to those shadows. Keeping faith with the tenets of our Unitarian Universalist heritage, I do not believe that we are born into an inherently fallen or sinful state as the Doctrine of Original Sin teaches. But our disavowal of Original Sin hardly makes us immune from human failings, nor does it make us immune from those human attitudes, behaviors, and ways of being that can render us pretty small at times, or cause us to be quite harmful to ourselves and others as well, at times. We can reject the religious dogma that attempts to explain human shortcomings--and that is well and good and even liberating--but we are still left with the reality of those shortcomings themselves, and our need to somehow come to terms with them. I believe that is what the Times editors were attempting to do. They were looking to examine humanity's shadow side using literary metaphors rather than religious doctrine, while still using a centuries old religiously based catalogue of transgressions as a way of framing their series.

Unlike my earlier sermons on pride and anger, I didn't get much help from the Times article on envy. It was well-written enough by the novelist A.S. Bryatt (whom I've not read), but after awhile he seemed to be just piling one literary metaphor upon another to illustrate what envy is about in a way that I soon found tiresome. He did make the point which I've already noted; that vices and virtues do not exist in separate realms, but are actually at different ends of the same human continuum. As he puts it:

All sins have their contrary virtues for which they are sometimes mistaken: love and lust, prudence and avarice, self-respect and pride, righteous indignation and anger, caution and sloth, ...(etc.)

That's how I want to treat the subject of envy, by looking at how it wavers between vice and virtue.

So, leaving the Times on the shelf, I found a pretty good treatment of the subject instead in a book by Betsy Cohen called The Snow White Syndrome. Ms. Cohen is a therapist, and her book, like Dr. Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger, is written primarily for and about women. Cohen uses the Snow White fable--more as the Brothers' Grimm originally told it than does Walt Disney--as an allegory for how women deal with envy, and what happens when the "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..." says it's your daughter (or whoever else it might be) who is now the "fairest one of all," and not you. As I say, she treats this tale as allegory. She's not referring primarily to physical appearance, but to how women, as she has come to see and work with them in her clinical practice, rate and compare themselves to one another, and how that affects their self-esteem, self-respect, and the like. It's a "women's stuff" book, just like Robert Bly's Iron John is a "men's stuff" book. But I read it anyway, figuring it never hurts to find out what women are thinking (except for when it does).

But Ms. Cohen offers some insights into envy that clearly transcend gender. Her definition is straightforward enough:

Envy is the unpleasant feeling of wanting what another person has and feeling bad that you don't have it.
[Time out for a story. I was working on this sermon one evening at home last week when my son walked into the room, and asked what I was writing about. I replied, 'A sermon on envy.' 'What's envy?', he asks. It so happened that I had the Cohen book open to the page with the definition I just gave. I pointed to the line and told him to read it for himself. He did. Then he carefully counted the words in the sentence and said to me, 'Dad, you can say what envy is in 19 words, and you're still going to sit there and write ten pages about it.' He strutted out of the room laughing at me, and went off to share his joke with his mother. This kid is 11 years old. He might live to see 12.]
Okay, Envy is the unpleasant feeling of wanting what another person has and feeling bad that you don't have it.

I guess I could end on that note, but I'll expand upon it just a bit. To stay with Ms. Cohen's work for just a couple more minutes, she offers a vice to virtue continuum, in the manner to which I've already referred, with respect to envy. It runs from "Destructive" to "Positive" envy. As she sees it, "positive envy" is not an oxymoron. The stops along the way, on Ms. Cohen's continuum, are: The Wish to Harm, Self-Hatred, Resentment, Covetousness, Admiration, and Emulation. A very interesting configuration, let me run it by you again: The Wish to Harm, Self-Hatred, Resentment, Covetousness, Admiration, and Emulation. The wish to do harm and self-hatred, and then admiration and emulation are all a part of the same "envy continuum", with envy actually giving way to positive admiration and emulation at some point.

Where one comes down on that continuum depends much more on who it is that is doing the viewing, rather than what is actually out there to be seen. Anais Nin, a novelist, essayist, long-time friend and some-time lover of Henry Miller, once noted:

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I could argue with her a bit on that--were she still alive--when it comes to certain of life's difficult, painful, and fixed realities. Sometimes things are indeed what they are. But within the context of my thoughts for today, Ms. Nin's point is a sound one. Often what we see and how we see it depends more upon the standpoint of the viewer than it does what is viewed. This is what Ms. Nin's is saying. Our susceptibility to envy, then, is directly tied to the standpoint of our own level of self-esteem and self-respect, and to our own ability to believe in ourselves. One of Ms. Cohen's clients put it this way:

Envy is (either) a way to put myself and others down (or) a way to find out what I want more of.

To wrap this piece up, we are, as I've said on numerous other occasions, relational beings. We form and reform our identities and our self-concepts as we relate to and interact with the larger life around us of people, events, and nature. While we are each unique personalities, no one's personhood is created and shaped in a vacuum. From our infancy, and onward throughout our lives, we look to others for cues and for clues as to who and what we want to be, and what we want to strive toward. There is hardly anything wrong with that. I know I became a minister because at a pretty young age I saw something in the minister of my hometown church that I admired and respected and wanted for myself, and wanted to emulate, and I probably did envy him a little. But we--you and I and all of us--slip to the wrong end of the spectrum when we allow our shadow side or those less than healthy aspects of our being to turn what could be positive regard into resentment, or self-hatred, or even a desire to be destructive

At the destructive end of that spectrum envy can get pretty ugly. It hasn't happened all that often, but I have on occasion conducted weddings or funerals where certain members of a family will be going to great lengths to avoid each other, or some will not even be showing up at all, as a way of making some kind of statement with respect to some long-standing resentments that probably could have been long resolved. Envy at its very worst is actually wanting to see another person suffer and come to harm because of what they have, or wanting to wreck what they do have. It is taking a certain perverse delight when someone falls from a lofty perch. On a less destructive level, but still on the shadow end of the continuum, envy helps us to find ways to criticize what we actually admire and desire. Ms. Cohen one more time:

I envy my close friend Kathy, who works out with weights and had 'defined' muscles in her arms and legs. I critically say, 'Look how she wastes her time on her body when she could be helping others.'

Maury Silver, and expert on envy, tells us that if a criticism is designed to undercut rather than be constructive, it comes from envy.

Again, we are relational beings; and that which is the best in us and that which is the worst in us, is brought forth in relationship of one kind or another. What we have here is a relational community, and a community that is committed to upholding and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I really believe it is the validation of a person's worth and dignity that is the antidote for the more destructive forms of envy. We need our communities of acceptance for this reason, among others of course. I believe that part of our calling, part of our mission, as a liberal religious community, is to be that accepting place, where if comparisons are to be made they are for the sake of the enhancement of each and all. Having your self-worth affirmed both by others and by yourself does not mean that you still won't see things that you want; it does mean that you'll have no need to put yourself down for not having them.

I'm going back to Fulghum to wrap this up. I mentioned his latest book, subtitled "The Rituals of Our Lives." His contention is that our lives are a series of rituals, whether they are consciously celebrated or not, and whether they are observed in a so-called "religious" setting or not. One such ritual is the class reunion--a setting that is rich with possibilities for comparisons, contrasts, and even a little (and maybe a lot) of envy. He writes here not of his, but of his wife's college reunion:

My wife has just returned from the twenty-fifth reunion of her college class. When she came home she talked for two days and is still working through the experience. She's going with a friend to a Grateful Dead concert--something she would not have done before the reunion. Revisiting the music of one's youth is part of the reunion with self.
My wife's moment of truth at the reunion was the memorial service for the members of her class who had died. Twenty of them. She's a doctor, and she knows about death. But this was different. Twenty people her age--people she knew, people like her--had already come to the end of their lives. Finitude. Life is short.
And like most of those who go to such occasions with their eyes open, she came home with a revived sense of what is consequential and who is significant and what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. A new set of hopes and dreams tempered now by the view from the middle of life and the experiences of the road taken so far.
She compared her life to her peers' and saw what there was to like about herself and what she still might become. And in seeing how time and experience had molded some seemingly confused ... college students into pretty fine and serviceable human beings, she felt good, knowing she was one of those.
And I am the beneficiary of her reunion, even though I did not go. She saw the men she might have married. And is glad she waited for me.

She compared her life to her peers' and saw what there was to like about herself and what she still might yet become... That's as good a statement as any I've found about what it means to be on the positive end of the envy spectrum--to see in your peers what you like about yourself and what you might yet become. And what she brought back from her reunion is something I hope we can each and all find here:

...a revived sense of what is consequential and who is significant and what we want to do with the rest of our lives. A new set of hopes and dreams tempered by the experiences of the roads taken so far.

That's not bad writing, Fulghum. Maybe next time I see you I'll get you to sign this book for me.

For all of their rather bizarre theology, the Shakers did have it right about one important thing. It is a gift to "come down where one ought to be" and "find ourselves in the place that's right." May their words today inspire us to find peace with ourselves.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

The "Sin" of Envy