Matthew 6:22-23
How many of you watched the Oscar Awards last Sunday evening? How many of you watched the red carpet pre-show? Question: What were you looking at and what were you thinking as you were watching the pre-show?
The question is, do men or women envy more strongly. Using the Oscars red carpet as an illustration, men are more envious of an offensively good looking man. The reason is not because of his looks, but what he can get with his looks--women. George Clooney shows up with a tall, super model looking blonde on his arm. But she is just one of a long line of stunning women he has had. He has never been married, and his self-infatuation with his own good looks, and what (or who) he’s been able to obtain with those good looks is probably why he’s never married. Most men would envy that.
We men seem to be able to to live with other men having grander possessions, but the thought of another man having a more interesting life with various women is, somehow, intolerable. We men don’t envy women for their money, beautiful objects, or power in the world. What we envy is other men who are able to attract the attention of these kinds of women.
Whereas men’s envy seems to be more generalized in this way, women’s envy is more personal and particular. It’s been said that truly beautiful women will have no genuine women friends. The reason is that women don’t generalize their envy about women; it’s that woman in particular they envy, which leads, a lot of the time, to a deep and personal hatred.
Like Angelina Jolie and her famous, evocatively shown off right leg on the red carpet at the Oscars,
which has now been photo shopped onto all kinds of people from the Statue of Liberty
to Darth Vader
and Napoleon Bonaparte.
And the thing about envy is it’s insidiousness. Women may say they just don’t get why Angelina would flaunt her right leg like that, and how stupid it appeared sticking it out of her high slitted dress. But in one article, by a woman, who was decrying the arrogance of Angelina’s flaunted leg, that leg was described as having “a toned and slender thigh.” Ah, ha--envy caught peaking around the corner. That’s one of the problems of envy: it comes all mixed in with other stuff, trying to make itself invisible. Envy goes so well with other sins: envy with jealousy on the rocks; envy tinged with regret; envy with a twist of anger; envy as a fuel additive to competitiveness. We mix envy in with other characteristics so people can’t see it. But it’s there.
Think about the Occupy Wall Street protestors. They’re mad at the one percent who apparently control a majority of the wealth and power in our country. The OWS people are mad they don’t have a job. They cloak their rants in the language of injustice and economic equality, or giving the little guy a chance. But how much of all the protesting is just envy, pure and simple? Envy being masked by supposed economic justice?
Some of the other Seven Deadly Sins are much more visible. It’s easy to spot Gluttony, or Sloth, or last weeks, Anger. Even Pride and Greed have a certain level of visibility to them.
Envy you can keep hidden. You can stick it in the closet of your selfhood, or throw it under your bed. But Envy, even from it’s hiding places, is peering through the crack in the closet door, or from under the mattress. Nobody can see you being envious. It all goes on in the privacy and luxury of your own head and heart.
Sam Varkin writes in his book, Malignant Self-Love:
Envy is at the core of my being: (my heart is) seething, foaming-at-the-mouth, destructive, morbid, and potent. I envy other people's happiness, possessions, accomplishments, status, spot in the limelight, contacts, you name it. I disguise my envy. I rationalize and intellectualize it.
Varkin gets at the heart of what envy is and does. Even though it is consuming him, no one knows it. No one sees it. He does everything he can to make sure of that. He expends a huge amount of energy keeping his envy behind the closet doors of his heart. That’s the destructive force of envy--it is an invisible, inner force that becomes such a compulsion, it destroys your humanity and your soul by stealth.
The power of envy is the power of comparison. It is a deep part of human nature that we compare ourselves to other people. There are upward comparisons and downward comparisons. In downward comparisons, we look at others whom we think are less than us. There’s nothing about them or about what they have that we envy. It’s sort of a reverse envy. It makes us feel good about ourselves that there are people who are, in our minds, totally unenviable. But we, by comparison, are.
The other kind of comparison is the upward comparison in which you focus on someone you think is better than you in some way. When you make an upward comparison, there are a number of different emotional reactions you might have.
Here’s how upward comparison works. One of my pleasures on Sunday morning is hearing Nick and Mike playing through a bunch of songs as they warm up for Sunday morning. They are excellent guitar players. I play guitar. One reaction to hearing them play would be to admire their skill. And I do. It’s not envy--just admiration, a mild form, perhaps of envy. A second reaction would be to wish that I could play as well--which I do wish for sometimes when I listen to them. I’m not doing anything about it. I’m not taking more guitar lessons. I’m just wishing. This kind of emotional reaction is an upwardly benign envy. I simply want what Nick and Mike have.
A third reaction would be to feel a more destructive envy in which I recognize that Nick and Mike are much better guitar players than me, and then wishing that something bad would happen: like a truck driving over their fingers--and maybe I would even be at the wheel of that truck--so they can never play ever again. The church would have to look for a new guitar player--me! That’s sick envy. Again, they would never know I was harboring such enviously destructive thoughts. It’s all internal, and I could be just as pleasant as pie to them both. But I’m letting my upward comparison create a kind of envy that is hateful, destructive, and evil.
“The eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus said. “So if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness.”
An unsound eye, is like an envious eye. Looking through the eyes of envy darkens the whole self. Again, here is more from Sam Varkin’s book, Malignant Self-Love:
My pathological spite drives me to extremes of behavior: I plot and provoke and collude and spread malicious gossip and strive to damage my opponent and reduce him. I imagine his downfall in great detail and revel in his forthcoming misery and humiliation. I spend inordinate amounts of time, resources, and mental energy on nurturing my envy and mollifying it.
That’s the darkness. That’s the unsound eye of envy that lets in no light. It clouds your vision. It distorts your idea of relationships. It sees people, not as people, but as objects, maybe at first, to admire. Then envy. Then licking your lips while seeking the destruction of another for your own purposes of self-elevation. A sick, and hidden delight in another’s failure, defeat, or fall. Envy is a gradual slippery slope. Insidious. Undermining. Slowly letting in less and less light from God, darkening the soul.
If we are to take Jesus at his word, the way to deal with envy is through the eyes and the light that comes through the eyes. We take light for granted, because there are a lot of functions that light provides.
First is visibility. Light gives us the ability to see clearly. If our visibility is hampered or darkened, we don’t see things clearly.
There was a minister who went to visit a woman one day. As they sat and chatted in her living room, he was looking out the window at her wash on the clothes line. He thought to himself, “What a dingy and dirty wash. It looks like she hasn’t even cleaned them. The sheets look dirty--everything looks dirty.”
They continued their conversation, and then it was time to go. When walking out to his car, he looked back at the wash on the clothes line. It was clean and bright. Then it hit him. It wasn’t the wash on the line that was dirty. It was the windows he was looking through. They were grimy and filmy, and it made the whole wash on the line look that way.
So the way to deal with envy is to make sure the eyes we are looking through are clear and clean. That way they will let in the greatest amount of light, and everything we look at will have the same kind of visible clarity.
Another quality of light is to create shadow. In stage and movie productions, this is called modeling. It’s using intense light and shadow to reveal three dimensional form to what’s on stage. You can’t have shadow without light. The light provides the true shape of that which we are looking at. With light comes perspective. So, if we are seeing right--if our eyes are full of light--that means we are seeing the true form of things. We are seeing the shape of our envy for what it is. With light comes the proper perspective of what we’re looking at. We are seeing how envy might be forming, and the kind of space it is taking up in our spirit. That wouldn’t happen without the light--without sound eyes.
A third quality of light is focus. A lighthouse puts focus on the rocky shore. A spotlight pinpoints a certain performer on stage apart from the other performers. A flashlight illuminates specific places you are looking at. A laser pointer can let an audience know what they should be looking at on the screen during a presentation. This quality of focus has to do with pinpointing attention. If our eye is sound, and the light of God is getting in, then it will focus attention on those areas of our life that need attention. Like envy. And, if our focus and attention are pointed in the right direction by the light, we will be seeing what we’re supposed to see, and not what we’re not to focus on.
And a fourth and final quality of light is to create mood. Certainly a few lit candles will have a different effect than a blaring search light. In a movie, if the characters are bumping around in a darkened or dimly lit house, there’s certainly a different mood then when someone comes in and turns the house lights on.
I think the same happens with the amount of the light of God that we allow in through our eyes. That was clear from the two quotes I read from Sam Varkin’s book. His mood, taken over by envy and darkness was clearly distorted. His eyes were not good, the amount of God’s light coming in was negligible, if there was any at all. The mood of his life suffered for it. Interesting to think that your outlook can be shaped by the amount of Godly light coming in through your eyes. Envious or non-envious eyes.
So envy has to do with the eyes. How we see what we see. How what we see is connected to our spirit. If our eyes are not letting in the light of God, we will be unhappy. And when we are unhappy, we cannot bear the sight of someone who is happy. That’s when envy starts knocking at the door.
With eyes that are not seeing clearly, in our unhappiness we ask, “Why me?” Then we see someone who is happy, and we ask, “Why not me?” That’s how envy begins and grows. In our sight. Out of the light. With a lack of visibility, perspective, focus, and finally a darkened mood. We are tricked into thinking we can get out of the darkness through envy. But it only takes us deeper into the darkness.
To avoid this deadly sin, keep your eyes full of the light of God.
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