Retreat Address on the Psalms 6 - Prayer and Happiness (Psalm 32)

Our last psalm is a song of gladness. It begins with a repeated ashre’, the happy Hebrew word we met at the start of the week in Psalm 65, Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts. It introduces the beatitude “happy” or “blessed” are those who... Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom Yahweh imputes no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit (1, 2). So our retreat has begun and ended on a note of happiness, which is good. 

It is not too much to suggest that happiness is one of the defining themes of the Psalter.  The opening utterance of the entire book is the first of 23 such ‘beatitudes’ that are found throughout the Psalms: ‘Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord’ (Psalm 1.1,2).  Psalm 1 is one of the latest in the Psalter.  We can safely assume that those who brought the Psalms together as a collection consciously placed Psalm 1 as a kind of introduction to the book by way of inviting readers to find in the Psalter a guide to happiness and contentment.  The message is: consider the Psalms, and discover in them the way of lived faith in Yahweh that is the safe path to blessing.  

Today’s psalm is in the same vein as that first psalm in the book, reflective in character, the fruits of the long experience of contemplating life and drawing lessons from its darker side.  Here it is sin and forgiveness that is the focus.  These are common themes in the wisdom literature where happiness is often spoken of as having a right assessment of human life, and in particular, recognizing where God is to be found in it. The New Testament takes up the idea of happiness sayings, like the makarioi, the Beatitudes with which Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”. If we were to translate these sayings as “happy those who…” as the Jerusalem Bible does, we would see their Old Testament roots more clearly.

The happiness of the believer in Psalm 32 is that of the forgiven sinner.  It is the thanksgiving of an individual who not only knows he or she has done wrong, but whose wrongdoing has led to the consequence of some unidentified suffering. My body wasted away through my groaning all day long; for day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer (3,4). It sounds as though it is some kind of sickness or injury. Then again, it could be hostility or persecution, or even, highly metaphorically, exile from home, family and temple. Or it could be a vivid picture of the misery we feel when our consciences are burdened by our sins and wrongdoings, the kind of inward distress the psalmist pours out in Psalm 51 which we recited yesterday. We don’t know, only that it was painful and deeply troubling. 

What’s clear is that the experience has been chastening, brought the psalmist to his or her senses. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity. I said ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’. That is a very thorough confession indeed. The psalmist uses three of the most important Hebrew words for doing what is wrong. Sin literally means missing the mark as in Romans, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. Transgression means crossing a boundary, not staying the right side of a line that defines right from wrong. It is a stronger, more conscious kind of word that represents deliberate rebellion against authority. Iniquity means that which is misshapen, twisted, deviates from what it should be. It’s the most inward of the three words. When you fall short or transgress, you are guilty. When you are distorted inwardly out of shape, you are more likely to feel shame. It’s worth noticing that these three words have already occurred in the psalm right at the beginning where the psalmist celebrated forgiveness and restoration with that double affirmation of happiness. 

The ‘naming’ of our wrongdoing is as characteristic of Hebrew faith as it is of Christianity.  I reminded us yesterday that Psalm 51 calls it “truth in the inward being”, that is, allowing our inner selves to be places of honesty and transparency rather than pretence.  We saw this when we looked at Psalm 106, that long psalm that rehearses Israel’s failure in history to live up to its covenant ideals. Integrity in the Bible is to accept our condition for what it is and allow God’s judgment and truth to do their purifying, healing work. And it’s this that led to God’s response. And you forgave the guilt of my sin. After the psalmist’s elaboration of sin in its many dimensions, the simplicity of that statement is striking. It’s like Nathan pronouncing to the penitent David, “the Lord has put away your sin”. It doesn’t take many words to describe a life-changing experience which this clearly was to the psalmist. But it takes a large and loving heart to be open to forgiveness, and to the transformation brought about by absolution. It’s a great reversal of the psalmist’s despair. Here is someone who thought they could never know release from the burden they were carrying. But now, all of a sudden, it’s lifted. The clouds have cleared. There is a deep and lasting gladness. For him or her, you sense that the words “go and sin no more” would have carried a lasting resonance.

The rest of the psalm reflects on this journey from sin to forgiveness. I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go. The poet is in wisdom mode now, determined never again to be found in that desperate and lonely place. What’s needed is to have understanding, not like a horse or mule that must constantly be restrained from blundering off the road. The only antidote to sin is to trust in the Lord. That way, not only will we avoid the torments of the wicked but we shall know the steadfast love of the Lord. The word is of course hesed, God’s tender mercy and loving kindness, the great covenant word that binds YHWH to his people and the to him. As another joyful psalm written out of the experience of forgiveness says, “the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments” (103). Our psalmist would have said amen to that. Which is why the psalm ends: be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart! When you are forgiven, you know a happiness like no other. For “whoever is forgiven much, loves much”. 

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Which brings us to Mary Magdalen, whose festival it is today. Or rather, it doesn’t quite, because the sinful woman whom Jesus forgave and of whom he spoke those words is not named in the gospel. But there’s no doubt at all that Mary Magdalen could have told the same story as the psalmist. We know she was healed of “evil spirits and infirmities”, and we know she was one “from whom seven demons had gone out”. Hence Psalm 32 is one of those proper to today, and it makes a fine commentary on the colourful career of this woman who is so central in all four gospel accounts.

It’s moving to find this most passionate of our biblical saints honoured here at Mirfield in the beautiful glass screens that mark the Chapel of the Ascension. I too feel a personal involvement with Mary Magdalen owing to our frequent visits to the hilltop town of Vézelay in Burgundy. The marvellous Romanesque Basilica stands at the summit of the medieval town. It has for centuries been the focus of pilgrimages to honour her relics in their shrine in the crypt; and of course Vézelay is still one of the four traditional starting points of the Camino to Santiago da Compostela. Her relics were contested in the late Middle Ages, but her spirit still pervades the town, especially today when there will  festivities all over the hill and a great procession through the narrow streets. My second grandchild is called Madeleine, perhaps to commemorate family holidays in this beautiful part of France. 

Why am I telling you this? Because it has helped me to get to know the saint a little better and place myself under her patronage. I think understand something of how she was drawn to Jesus from a chaotic, wayward past in which her longings and loves had yet to find clear direction or focus. As I said earlier this week, St Augustine tells us that sin is not a failure of love but applying it to the wrong things. If ever this was true of anyone, it is Mary Magdalen. When I came to faith as a teenager, it was with a sense of relief I began to discover how to straighten out those idolatrous distortions, find purpose and meaning, aspire to purity of heart. I don’t want to dramatize it, but I can empathise with Mary when she came to the tomb in the half-light of an early morning and found it empty and something stirred within her and she knew that life had changed forever. 

So what can I offer you in my reflections as this week of retreat draws to an end and I say farewell? First, we need like Mary Magdalen to see ourselves as witnesses of the resurrection with an apostolic story to tell. This is one of those personal thanksgiving Psalms that chart a journey from desolation to consolation, from predicament to rescue, from the cry of distress to the shout of salvation. So it is full of the spirit of Easter. You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance. Here are psalmists who have seen the great work of a God who brings hope out of despair, life out of death and light out of darkness. When God arises, earth’s morning breaks and shadows flee away. That was Mary’s experience in the garden on Easter Day. It’s the heart of Christianity because it is all founded upon the paschal mystery. We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song. Above all here in this Community of the Resurrection. Today is one of those festivals where the name of this community comes into its own, I think.

So secondly, like Mary, like the believer in Psalms 116 and 32, we need to tell and retell the story of personal transformation through divine power and love. This follows from being a witness to the resurrection and telling an apostolic story, for if we have glimpsed the risen Christ, encountered him in our own experience, then Easter is more than a story of the past, a lot more. It’s a story about the present, about how Christ has, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ word, “eastered” in us. It’s a story about the future and how it is filled with the glorious hope for the creation and for ourselves that comes out of that encounter in a garden on the dawn of the first day of the week when the woman Mary, on behalf of all humanity, said to the man she had supposed to be the gardener, “Rabbouni”. 

The consequences of that dawn are nothing less than momentous for each of us as they were for Mary. For one thing, this transforming encounter, this life-changing experience gives birth to a profound sense of thankfulness, the gratitude that was the theme of our first address this week, Psalm 65, that celebrated the harvest and all God’s goodness to humanity and to the created world. Easter is at the heart of doxology and of the eucharistic life. For another, it brings home to us that we are witnesses of God’s continuing activity in human life, our own lives in particular. To bear witness and tell a story are the essence of evangelism. “Come and hear, all you who fear God” says another psalm, “and I will tell what he has done for me.” 

There is no substitute for faith-sharing in this personal way. It may seem naïve to reduce it to the revivalist chorus “this is my story, this is my song / praising my Saviour all the day long” but if we do not have a story to tell and a song to sing, we must ask ourselves how deeply our faith has imprinted itself on our character. If I learned anything in my distant evangelical past, it was that personal experience is what makes faith a living thing. Having your heart “strangely warmed” and telling a story about it to those who want to hear - the whole of mission is summed up in that. I have been young and now am old, but I hope to die professing the living, breathing faith that is to know and trust in God my light and life and love, that is to enter into the divine movement of incarnation, passion and resurrection, that is to have been forgiven much and therefore to love much.

Finally, we should cultivate truth in our inward being and renew our seriousness of purpose in our life together before God. Mary and the psalmist are mercilessly exposed in the texts. The flaws and ambiguities, the sins and offences are not hidden from us; and even if they were, they would not be hidden from God. That’s the fallacy of religious pretence because we know all along that God sees, and God knows, and it is only a matter of time before we shall be found out. We began with the ashre’, the makarios, the happiness of those who are forgiven, the blessings on those who are poor in spirit, pure in heart, who are merciful and who hunger for righteousness. These are the ones who will be filled, who will receive mercy, who will see God, who belong in the kingdom of heaven. And all because there is something transparent about these unrecognized, unsung nobodies, something that marks them as people of truth. Mary Magdalen is one of those happy ones.

I’m sure you agree that no other kind of Christianity is worth practising. In particular, you who have taken vows to live in this wonderful community did so because you were serious about following Jesus. Poverty, chastity and obedience, or as you now say, I think, stability, obedience and the conversion of life - those Sermon-on-the-Mount like virtues are signs that you are intentional about being Christians. For you, “truth in the inward parts” means there are no half-measures: all is given up for the sake of Christ. His yoke will no doubt not always feel easy, nor his burden light. But you believe in your hearts that this is to live according to the truth that is Christ himself, the truth to which you align yourselves in an ever deeper way hour by hour, day by day and year by year. This is what I call seriousness. Your witness is a treasure for all of us because it tells us that there is a more profound way of living than the superficial fantasies and illusions that crowd in upon us and seduce us, often against our better instincts, into dancing to their siren tunes.

And this retreat with its liturgy and lectio, its silence and its reflection is also a sign of wanting to embrace truth and always live in its light. The psalmist would tell us that while the light of scrutiny is not always comfortable because it searches us out and knows us, nevertheless it is at heart a kindly light that leads us on into truth and guides us in the paths of justice and mercy. So as people whom the psalm calls happy because we know we are reconciled and loved, we entrust ourselves to the Spirit of Truth to keep us faithful in the ways of God and to guide us in the imitation of Christ so that we find ourselves drawn ever closer into his wounded side where we find our rest and peace.

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I am leaving you today, so I want to thank you for your welcome, your kindness, and your hospitality this week, and especially for the privilege of daily prayer with you in your marvellous church. You have been wonderful companions to live amongst these few days.  

As for your meditations as your retreat draws to a close, I think we should link where we have ended up with where we began, Psalms 65 and 32 and on this festival day focus on happiness, gratitude and joy. I mentioned the General Thanksgiving at the start of the week. If you can unearth the text in the Book of Common Prayer, why not find an opportunity to pray it today, in thankfulness “for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life, but above all for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory”. And why not ask that we may always have “that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end”. To which we all say, Amen!

Retreat Address on the Psalms 4 - Prayer and the Memory of Failure (Psalm 106)

This psalm is the last of a sequence of long psalms which concludes Book IV of the Psalter. Psalm 102 is one of the penitential psalms which is answered by 103, a joyful song of forgiveness. 104 is a glowing hymn that celebrates the marvels of creation as God’s handiwork. Psalm 105 continues the theme of telling the story of God’s ‘wonderful works’ (105.2) by recalling how the Hebrews were delivered from Egypt, kept safe through the years of wilderness wandering and finally installed in their own land. Together, these four big Psalms encompass the whole of Hebrew faith in a God who has created the world and loves his people, who has redeemed Israel as his chosen and looks for a covenant relationship with them.  

Psalm 106 tells the same story as 105, but from a quite different perspective.  Its first few verses are deceptive.  The invitation to praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever’(1) is very like the start of 105.  We imagine that this joyful note of celebration will be continued through 106 as well.  But it is not to be. There are soon hints of a minor key: remember me, O Lord, when you show favour to your people; help me when you deliver them (4-5).  The sun may have risen in a clear sky, but it is not long before clouds begin to obscure it.  

The hues become rapidly more sombre.  Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly (6).  This is not simply some general acknowledgment of human frailty but the psalmist’s recognition of a specific strain of rebelliousness on the part of the people.  What made their unbelief particularly culpable was that it went right back to the founding events of their story, and this in the face of the clear evidence of all that God was doing for his people.  Our ancestors, when they were in Egypt, did not consider your wonderful works; they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love, but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea (7).  And this becomes the depressing theme of this long recital of Israel’s waywardness.  She had been redeemed from slavery, and set on the long march to freedom.  Yet inwardly there was no redemption and therefore no true liberation.  The message of the Psalm is that this people were as enslaved as ever in their hearts.  Freedom still lies in the future.  And the psalmist himself is part of this carefully crafted confession. both we and our ancestors have sinned.  

God however constantly acts in spite of the people’s unbelief and ingratitude. The “gets” and the “buts” of this psalm are striking. Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, so that he might make known his mighty power (8).  Faced with the signs and wonders of the Exodus, there is, to be sure, a period of obedience: Then they believed his words; they sang his praise (12).  But it doesn’t last long. They soon forgot his works (13).  Forgetfulness, or rather, the more blameworthy “not remembering” is the fundamental issue of this Psalm for which the people are both culpable and to be pitied.  To the psalmist this spiritual amnesia is not only hard to forgive but hard to understand, in stark contrast to how God himself does not forget his covenant but ‘remembers’ it, as the psalm goes on to say (45).  

This interplay of divine memory and human forgetting follows the way the stories are told in the Books of Exodus and Numbers.  The central section (13-33) is an indictment of the Hebrews for their failure of memory and their lack of faith in the desert.  A long sequence of episodes reinforces this bleak message.  No sooner have they crossed the sea than they ‘test’ God by demanding to be fed (14-15). Then envy sets in, represented by the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram (16-18) whose grumbling against Moses led to a spectacular display of judgment. I said yesterday when we looked at the wisdom psalm 49 that envy is so often the root cause of wrongdoing. So it is here. What follows is the episode of the golden calf (19-23) made by Aaron at the insistence of the people, an act of defiance not only of Moses’ leadership but of the covenant itself.  All this was tantamount to ‘despising’ what was promised (24) while they grumbled in their tents and did not obey the voice of the Lord (25). And then the wholesale collapse into idolatry, which is to give to a created thing the honour that is due only to God. 

However, God hesitates to treat the people as contemptuously as they have treated him.  Just as he saved them from the enemy despite their rebellion (8), so twice he restrains himself from executing the judgment that their behaviour merits.  On both occasions, this is at the behest of a human intercessor.  The first time it is Moses who after the incident of the golden calf stays God’s act of execution. Therefore he said he would destroy them – had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach (23).  The prayer attributed to Moses in Exodus 32.1-14 movingly asks God to ‘remember’ his promises of old, and not to bring himself into disrepute by appearing to be fickle in his treatment of the Hebrews.  The second occasion (24-31) occurs when the Hebrews have fallen into idolatry by engaging in the worship of ‘Baal of Peor’ and in illicit sexual activity. Thousands of Hebrews perish in the plague that follows.  However Phinehas, a grandson of Aaron demonstrates such zeal in acting against one of the transgressors that he earns for himself an everlasting memory as God’s favoured priest: and that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever (31).  

We would like all these events to be simply episodes in an otherwise blameless history.  We would understand it if the difficulties and challenges of extreme circumstances in the desert brought out the worst in the people. Surely things will get better when they arrive in a generous and fertile land!  Yet the final part of the story relentlessly drives home the lesson that nothing has changed when they cross the Jordan. Their desires remain as disordered as they always were.  When they should have purified the land of its pagan cults, instead they merely make its religious practices their own (34-39), its depravity symbolised by the practice of child-sacrifice (37-38), always in the Hebrew scriptures a mark of people who have sold out to the most corrupting behaviour imaginable.  In this way, he says, they not only pollute the land but themselves (38-39) in acts of apostasy that the psalmist, in common with prophets like Hosea, unsparingly calls acts of shameless ‘prostitution’.  

This is why the Israel finds herself in her current predicament.  Up to now, the psalmist has not mentioned the historical situation in which Israel finds herself.  But at the Psalm’s climax it becomes clear what this long recital is for.  It’s to assert that in a decisive act of history, God has finally done what he had intended to do all along: to punish the people for their unfaithfulness.  His prayer at the very end makes clear what this refers to: Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations (47).  The people are overrun and in exile.  And this time there is no-one to intercede for them.  They are on their own before God.  Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people… he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them (40-41).  We are in the 6^th century BCE when Israel is in the alien land of Babylon and crying out in despair, in the words of a more famous psalm, ‘how shall we sing the Lord’ song in a strange land?’ (Psalm 137:4).

Bleak though this landscape is, the psalmist is not without hope.  In a final act of remembering, he recalls how Yahweh heard his people when they were oppressed and saved them (43-46).  The cry for deliverance with which the Psalm ends is almost no more than a simple coda.  But how much poignancy and pain is compressed into the single verse in which the psalmist, taking up the mantle of Moses and Phineas on behalf of the people, beseeches the Lord to save his people (47).  There is no pretence that the story is other than it is, no pitiful excuses or self-justification.  There is simply the hope, reminiscent of Moses’ prayer, that a restored and grateful people will demonstrate God’s faithfulness to the world: gather us from among the nations, so that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise’. The last verse, a doxology of praise to mark the end of Book IV of the Psalter, also stands as the anticipated thanksgiving of a restored people who can once again say ‘amen’ to a final act of deliverance.

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This long catalogue of perversity and its punishment does not exactly lift the spirits. So what should we do with texts like this? 

Here are three reflections. First, the psalm reminds us that while there are times, many of them, when we need to tell our story in order to celebrate it, at other times we need to tell the same story as an act of contrition and lament.  I don’t think we are good at doing this, either as nations and communities, or as individual men and women. What this psalm makes us face up to is our propensity to deceive ourselves as to our true state before God and one another. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So it comes down to spiritual candour, making sure that when we hold up the mirror to ourselves, it tells us the truth. “Faking it”, as we might say, “play acting” as Jesus calls it in the Sermon on the Mount, inevitably leads in the end to disclosure and downfall. What we are in ourselves will always become plain to see in time, like the picture of Dorian Grey. Our desires always give us away in the end because they make it plain what we truly value. 

And, says the story, it all happens because of our neglect of God. St Augustine says that sin is to be “bent back into yourself”, that is, giving way to desire that is misshapen, distorted because its focus is on yourself, not on God. He says that it's therefore a failure of love, not so much a lack of love but applying love in a self-serving way.  This psalm gives us an anatomy of disordered desire, how we can and do give ourselves up to the wrong things which can never be ends in themselves. In the opening chapters of the Letter to the Romans St Paul takes up words and images from this Psalm and universalises them. He says in effect, this story of Psalm 106, of forgetfulness, envy and idolatry is us, all of us, at least in terms of our unreserved propensity. ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.20). St John urges us to keep ourselves from idols. You could say that “good” religion comes down to this, freeing ourselves from idolatry and acknowledging and worshipping the one true God. And this is the possibility held out to us in the gospel.

And that brings us on to my next reflection, which is about transformation. There lies in this psalm a profound impetus for change, for a new direction in the future. In one of his essays Thomas Merton says that “the Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration”. He means by this seeing “beyond the surface of things and events”, glimpsing “something of the inner and ‘sacred’ meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer. And if this is true of how we contemplate the created world, it's also true of how we tell the story of God’s mighty works. In that story, we need to learn like the psalmist how to discern not only our human frailty but the sacred and redemptive too, not only nature but grace.

This sacramental vision of life may sound altogether too rarified for the cut and thrust of life. But for Merton, it’s precisely in “ordinary time” that we most need to cultivate this contemplative, poetic attitude that glimpses possibilities in the banal, the dispiriting, the tragic stories of human life. He goes on: “There is no revolution without a voice. The passion of the oppressed must first of all make itself heard at least among themselves, in spite of the insistence of the privileged oppressor that such needs cannot be real, or just, or urgent. The more the cry of the oppressed is ignored, the more it strengthens itself with a mysterious power that is to be gained from myth, symbol and prophecy. There is no revolution without poets who are also seers. There is no revolution without prophetic songs.” Merton is thinking about human oppressors, but in the psalm it is corruption and vice that are the oppressing enemy from whose iron fist we cry out to be saved. St Paul describes this conflicted experience in Romans chapter 7 where he agonises about the good he wants to do but can't, and the evil he wants to shun but instead finds himself committing. Merton and St Paul tell me that the oppressor does not have the last word. And believing this is the motivation I need to act for change, or at least to pray for it. 

Finally we should notice the key role in this psalm that belongs to Moses and Phinehas. To “stand in the breach” and make intercession for others is one of the greatest gifts we can offer anybody in their times of testing and trial. The nation’s ordeals did not in the end get the better of them, though it looked as though they would. The psalm rightly credits these two men with performing nothing less than a rescue through acting as brave intercessors. It was an act of love on their part: intercession always is. So here is a direct message to you as a religious community. Among the many things you offer to the world and the church is your intercession. Maybe we secular Christians don’t recognise enough the contribution you make through your faithful prayers day in, day out, standing in the breach on behalf of so many people both within the church and beyond it. So I want to thank you for this “work” that you do as part of your celebration of the opus dei, for the love you show to the human race by your constant involvement in the prayer of the church. It's a reflection of how our Great High Priest bears humanity before the Father, interceding for us in our brokenness and exile and pain. 

Our hope, our conviction, must always be that the covenant has not failed. The psalm reassures us that it hasn't. Its concluding words turn this long text back from lament to praise and gratitude. Nevertheless he regarded their distress when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant and showed compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love. God’s wish, God’s only purpose is to mend humanity, put us back together again, apply balm to heal the grievous wounds that afflict our race, rescue us from the distorted desires that drive us into idolatry and remake us in his image as people of grace and mercy, truth and peace. This is how we prodigals find our way home again and are welcomed back by a loving Father. We are forgiven, reconciled, embraced. At the end of this psalm’s long and gloomy day, the sun comes out once more.  

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For reflection today, we may want to imitate this psalm and look back over the story of our lives. When and why have our desires become misshapen, when and why have we fallen prey to envy and idolatry? Are there patterns we can discern? And then, having faced the truth about that story, how can we retell it as a story of grace, mercy and forgiveness so that we end up where the psalm ends up, on a note of thankfulness? As part of this, can we identify and give thanks for those who stood in the breach and interceded for us? How does that memory help us in our own intercession for other people today?

On the Sin of Envy

When I agreed to speak to you tonight, we were probably at the lowest point of the recession.  At that time of despondency, it did not look likely that the economy would show signs even of the beginnings of recovery before the middle of next year.  Now, the financial environment appears to be a little less gloomy, and analysts are daring to talk about ‘green shoots’.  I am no expert, so I can’t judge whether such hopes are well-founded.  In north-east England, there has been considerable attrition as a result of this tsunami and I expect it is the same here.  It will be years before we see manufacturing industry in the north-east revitalised, if it ever is, employment levels back to where they were earlier this decade, and inward investment in our region once more flourishing.

A disaffected public continues to ask why so little regulation has existed to check reckless speculation and the cynical exploitation of the markets.  We all hope, though we do not necessarily expect, that out of this debacle will emerge a more disciplined, more accountable culture that will begin to restore trust.  But a better managed economy will not necessarily address the underlying causes of this crisis.  These are, I am sure we agree, human, moral and spiritual in character.  Religious leaders are right to ask for some serious reflection on what the recession is teaching us about ourselves and our society.

One book to do this is remarkable for having been written by the chairman, formerly the chief executive, of one of the major world banks.  So it is an insider’s view on the crisis and a refreshingly honest analysis of its roots.  But its author, Stephen Green, is also a non-stipendiary priest of the Church of England.   He is not ashamed to identify what he sees as the underlying malaise in western society that he describes as its Faustian deal with Mephistopheles.  To simplify, this amounts to the selling of our collective soul for the sake of short term material gain.  There is nothing new in this, as the power of the Faust legend down the centuries illustrates.  What is new is the global scale on which this age-old drama is acted out in the world’s financial markets.  The near-failure of the world banking system last year was as near a miss from global disaster as the Cuba Missile Crisis.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has focused on the erosion of public values and regretted that there have been few signs that the powerful financial institutions and their leadership have begun to reflect on the moral and spiritual causes of this financial debacle.   He has called for repentance.  Repentance, as we know, means a change of mind.  It is close to what the third Benedictine vow calls conversio morum, the conversion of life.  It looks for a new way of living, a new set of attitudes and ambitions, a life that is focused not on our own selves but on God and what he looks for in humanity.  In a renewed, God-fearing society, there would still be accidents and they might be damaging, even catastrophic, but perhaps there would not be economic crises so patently traceable to basic faults due to the relentless pursuit of self-interest.  Such a society would be marked by caritas, generosity, mutuality, collaboration, self-giving and service.  The church is called to model precisely this vision of human beings living together in genuine koinonia.

But what are the sins which we should repent of, and from which we should want to be delivered?  The usual candidates among the seven deadly sins are gluttony (which is over-indulgence) and
avarice or greed (which is the inordinate hunger to acquire and possess).  These are both, like lust, sins of excess.  There is a long Christian tradition that understands these in relation to acquiring wealth.  What makes greed sinful, says Thomas Aquinas, is that it is the abandonment or collapse of spiritual desire for what is material and temporal.  Dante illustrates this in the Divine Comedy by depicting the greedy as tied up and laid face down on the ground because they concentrated too much on earthly things. (It is a good example of what is called contrapasso, literally ‘counter-suffering’: you are punished by the very thing you practise.) Stephen Green’s book suggests that the Faustian bargain so many wage their futures on is a symptom of precisely this symptom.

However, I want to suggest that Green doesn’t go deep enough into the human spirit.  All the sins of excess are disorders of desire, as Augustine so profoundly understood: it is not that we don’t love, but that our love is wrongly directed.  And if we ask where the origins of disordered desire are to be found, the answer is in the two fundamental sins of all.  The first of these is, of course, pride.  Pride is usually regarded as the worst of all sins because it is the most far-reaching in suppressing or perverting the love that should be directed outwards to God and to our neighbour.  It is, as Augustine says, ‘turned in on itself’.  And this obsession with ourselves is, says the tradition, nothing short of idolatry because there is no place in it for God.  (There is another graphic example of contrapasso in Dante where he shows the proud condemned to wander round for eternity bent double under the weight of their gorgeous copes which are made of lead.)

But there is another perversion of love which is turned outwards, or at least looks as if it is, and that is envy. I want to focus on envy this evening because I believe it is the besetting sin of our age, and because apart from texts on moral theology, it is not given nearly enough attention in Christian reflection on our human state.  I don’t know, for instance, when you last heard a sermon on envy or when I last preached one.   But the Bible focuses on it a great deal as I shall illustrate, possibly more than it does on pride.

What is envy?  It is an inward state of mind and heart.  I am careful not to say it is merely a feeling or emotion, though of course we experience it that way.  We could say that the seedbed of envy is our awareness that we lack something that someone else possesses.  This could be their material possessions, their human qualities, their successes or status in life, their religious faith, their personal relationships, their happiness.  All these can be the focus of envy.  But envy is not by itself knowing that someone else has something we do not possess.  Our chairman has the name Richard.  I do not have that name myself.  I recognise this lack.  But it does not make me envious of him.

Envy is born when I want what the other person has for myself, or simply wish that the other person could be deprived of it (which they would be if I took for myself what belonged to them).  

We need to be clear about the difference between envy and jealousy and resolve that we shall use these words accurately.  Jealousy is the fear of losing someone we love or who is important to us to another person.  Envy is the frustration caused by another person having something that I do not have myself. So envy involves simply two people, myself and another, and is focused on a thing, while jealousy involves three (or more) people and focuses on a threat posed to a significant relationship.  We use that word accurately when we say, ‘I love her jealously’, meaning ‘I will not let her go to another person’.  It is exactly in this sense that Yhwh is a ‘jealous God’ according to the Second Commandment, because he will not ‘lose’ his chosen people to the worship of idols and graven images but shows ‘steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’ (Exod 20. 4-6).  Try substituting ‘envious’ for ‘jealous’ in that command, and it ceases to make sense.

Aquinas says that envy as sorrow on account of another person’s benefit or good, drawing on Aristotle’s definition of it as the pain caused by other peoples’ good fortune.  In this tradition, Dante says that envy is the love of my own good and resolve to pursue it perverted to a desire to deprive other people of theirs. In his Purgatorio, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. This tells us straight away that the other side of envy is Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get at other peoples’ misfortune.  They belong together because the usual way of dealing with envy is to damage or destroy the object of my envy, or to deprive the other person of it (possibly, though by no means necessarily, by taking it for myself).  In the last of the Ten Commandments, the prohibition against coveting what belongs to my neighbour is not forbidding me from admiring his house or his wife, his slave, his ox or his ass, nor acknowledging that I am not as well-endowed as he is.  It prohibits any
action of mine that could spoil his enjoyment of them, what the French call jouissance, a legal term meaning the ‘proper enjoyment of possession’, either by stealing them, damaging them, violating or abusing them, disparaging them, or (and this is the inward attitude the torah wants absolutely to guard against) becoming so fixated on my neighbour’s fortunes that I lose sight of him as a person and destroy myself in the process.  The moral and theological point is that envy dehumanises.  It degrades the image of God in us.  It robs us of our dignity and worth because it deflects us from a person-centered relationship with God and with other people, which alone is the way towards human flourishing, into an idolatrous concern with what is material and impersonal.

This dynamic of envy as emptiness or need allied to the instinct to ‘spoil’ the good that others have is studied extensively in the Bible,.  I should like to explore this theme in three Old Testament texts, the third of which begins to suggest how envy can be addressed as a spiritual problem.  I shall then comment on some New Testament texts that develop these themes before returning to our own day and asking what these biblical insights might suggest to us as we try to read the signs of the times and understand the human hungers and longings that permeate our society.

My first text is a locus classicus of envy, the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21.).  It is a simple enough narrative.  Naboth has a vineyard up against the royal palace.  King Ahab wants it: when it comes to real estate, location is everything.  Naboth will not sell his patrimony, whereupon Ahab goes to bed and sulks.  Jezebel devises a scheme whereby Naboth is accused of sacrilege for resisting the royal, and therefore divine, will.  Naboth is stoned to death and Ahab takes possession of the vineyard, only to find Elijah already there to pronounce judgment for his contempt of his subjects and of his God.

This looks like a story of avarice, inordinate desire, and so it is.  Ahab wants something so desperately that it occupies all his waking thoughts.  In his emptiness of spirit, the ennui that so many rich and powerful people know, he obsesses about something he does not need.  But there is an important clue about his deeper mental state.  ‘Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it as a vegetable garden”.’  In other words, the wanting is accompanied by a destructive impulse.  The vine, like the olive and the fig tree, symbolises the best and most productive that the land is capable of.  To degrade a vineyard into a vegetable patch is to spoil what has been handed down in an ancient family for centuries. What is spoiled is not simply a vineyard.  It is part of a family’s sacred geography.  It is terrain that holds long-cherished memories that are not transferrable to another place.  It is the patrimony not only of a man’s ancestry but of a people to whom the land was a divine gift and the charter of their freedom from tyranny.  Tyranny, always deeply implicated in envy, is precisely what Naboth resists.  A tyrant’s envy costs him his life, though as the story goes on to relate, the envier meets an altogether more ignoble end.

My next text is more complex.  It is the story of Saul and David in the First Book of Samuel, one of the finest tales of the ancient world.  Its greatness as tragedy comes from recognising the need to ‘speak what we feel; not what we ought to say’, as Edgar puts it in the final speech of King Lear.  Like Lear, Saul is ‘every inch a king’: not ague-proof, but for all that, a man whose flawed dignity elicits our compassion and even our regard.  He starts out so well, the young, charismatic hero whose prowess with the sword wins him acclaim from the tribes of Israel longing, in their fragile bond, for some unifying symbol of their kinship that will offer stability in the chaotic, uncertain world of the 11th century BC.  But Saul’s problem is that he is never given the space to develop as king and as human being in his own right.  The scenery is always populated with others who surround him, in particular Samuel the prophet, Jonathan his son and heir, and David the bright-eyed youth whose magnetic looks and personality pulls all three of them into his orbit and whose sunny presence casts Saul into ever deepening shadows.  We have only to recall how Saul takes a rash oath to kill anyone who breaks a needlessly imposed fast, only to find that it is his own son Jonathan who is implicated, and how the people turn against Saul so that Jonathan may live; or how Saul is bowed down with melancholia and is soothed by David’s music; or how he frets about David’s absence from the feast, inventing every kind of reason why he has not come, then hurling a spear at his son because of his friendship with David; or the exquisitely crafted scene in the cave where David calls to Saul and delivers a long self-righteous speech, to which Saul listens and simply replies, ‘Is this your voice, my son David?’ and weeps; and at the emotional climax of the tragedy, the worn out king going in disguise by night to the woman at En-dor and learning from Samuel’s ghost that the coming day will be his last.

Tragedy, in the strict sense, is a story told about greatness that is brought down by some failure in character, some ‘basic fault’.  What is Saul’s?  I propose that it is envy.  His obsession is not his own grandiosity (this was Solomon’s fault).  It is his preoccupation with what others have that he himself does not (or, if he has had it, he becomes deprived of it).  Again, we sense the void in his life, the emptiness that gives birth to envy.  He is envious of Samuel (even after he is dead) because of his direct access to the word of the Lord, something Saul has once enjoyed but now lost: ‘Is not Saul also among the prophets?  He is envious of first of his own son Jonathan and then of David for their military success and popular acclaim, qualities that fitted them so well for leadership, an art in which Saul for all his good beginnings, progressively fell short of Israel’s aspirations for what was required in a king.  There is a telling moment in the story when David returns from killing Goliath.  The women turn out (‘to meet Saul’, the text says carefully, not to adulate David directly) dancing and singing: ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands’.  It is meant, I think, as a celebration of them both, with the thousands-ten thousands comparison meant simply as a dramatic figure of speech to intensify their adulation: common enough, in Hebrew poetry.  But Saul takes it literally and is ‘very angry… “They have ascribed to David tens of thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands; what more can he have but the kingdom?”  So Saul eyed David from that day on’  (1 Samuel 18.6-9).  This malevolent ‘eyeing’ (or, we could say, the ‘evil eye’) is envy in its purest form, with all its destructive intention laid bare.

Most powerfully of all, in the way the story is told, he envies the love between David and Jonathan.  It is true that here we are dealing with a story about jealousy as well as envy, for both David and Jonathan pose a threat to Saul’s own attachment to each of them: each of them, he thinks, is taking the other away from him.  There are shades of Othello in this sad and beautiful tale.  But I think we can safely say that overshadowing his jealousy of his double attachment is his hard-edged envy of what existed between Jonathan the heir, and David, Saul’s friend turned (as he supposes) supplanter.  Such a friendship is what he does not have, and imagines he can never have.  And this, reinforced by his envy of David’s military success, is what he is determined to spoil by killing David and thereby destroy the very thing that animates and gives life to both his son and to himself, the love David is prepared to offer to them both.  There is only one way the mental distress of despair can end.  Saul falls on his own sword on Mount Gilboa, defeated by his own demons.  Who is to say whether, in the complex mysteries of the human mind, envy is the symptom or the cause?  But the symbolism is clear.  Envy always has the tendency to destroy.  In the end, say both the stories we have looked at, it visits destruction at home, in the very seat of the human soul.

I spoke about the symbolism of Saul’s mental collapse and suicide.  This is a layer of the story we should pay attention to.  I said that envy always has the propensity to spoil.  In the psychoanalytic literature, this insight is associated with Melanie Klein whose work Envy and Gratitude (1957) proved ground-breaking in post-Freudian theory.  She says of envy that it entails an attack on the ‘good’ object because of its goodness, because the awareness of being separated from the ‘good’ which arouses envy becomes intolerable.  So acting out envious impulses is to relieve the tension between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.  Klein develops this theory in the light of her observation of infant behaviour at the mother’s breast, and the tendency of the infant to ‘split’ the ‘good breast’ from the ‘bad’.  What I want to stress is her insight that envy attacks the good object because it is good.  And this perfectly explains Saul’s erratic behaviour towards David.  The good that is ultimately spoiled by his own envy is not external but internal, his love for David and the wholesomeness that comes from it.  More than that, the clarity of his moral vision, the integrity of his own motives and attitudes becomes increasingly clouded and compromised through his envy.  In this sense, Saul has already ‘died’ as a human person long before he throws himself on to his own sword.  The seven sins, of which envy is perhaps the most potent, are rightly known as ‘deadly’.

My final text from the Hebrew Bible is one of the psalms.  Envy is a frequent theme in the Psalter, particularly among the wisdom Psalms.  Psalm 37 warns the feverish complainant against the destabilising effects of envy: ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly, neither be thou envious against the evil doers’.  The antidote here is a calm and equable spirit, for the evil doers will soon be cut down like the grass.  Psalm 49 is more probing.  ‘Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich: or if the glory of his house be increased; for he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth; neither shall his pomp follow him.’  There, the argument turns on human mortality: there is no point in being consumed by envy when death is the great leveller of high and low, rich and poor.  It is a bleak way of dealing with envy, though undeniably potent.

However, the Psalter’s most searching anatomy of envy is to be found in Psalm 73.  It is unique in the Old Testament for its acute psychological and spiritual perception of human envy, not least as a meditation that autobiographically charts the landscape of the psalmist’s own life.

The Psalm begins with what looks like an orthodox statement of belief: ‘truly God is good to the upright’ (or to ‘Israel’ depending on how we read the Hebrew) (1).  Statements like this (perhaps meant to be read in implied quotation marks?) are very easy to make, but the theme of the Psalm is to test whether the credal assertion matches experience.  So, without further ado the psalmist launches out on his story.  ‘As for me, my feet had almost stumbled… for I was envious of the arrogant’ (2-3).  Psalm 37 may warn against futile worry, but here the psalmist could not help himself.  The prosperity of the arrogant is described with striking imagery as if the psalmist has personally had his nose rubbed in their graceless affluence.  He sees them gliding around ‘sound and sleek’ (4), wearing their pride like a necklace and violence like clothing (6), a kind of second skin.  Porcine eyes  bulbous with fat (7), mouths gaping open to the sky and tongues greedily scouring the earth for fodder (9) build up the unpleasant image of a grotesque self-inflated beast – for such people, to the psalmist, have forfeited their right to be called human.  And this is the symptom of their deadly underlying disease, the functional atheism we have already met in Psalm 14.  Like the fool who says, ‘there is no God’, the arrogant proudly defy their Maker with the question that most characterises the arrogant: ‘How can God know?  Is there knowledge in the Most High?’  What does a remote, transcendent deity know or care about anything (11)?

After this graphic and colourful portrait of hubris the psalmist returns to his testimony.  If the arrogant are so favoured, what is the point of being wise or good or religious – this is the heart of the psalmist’s dilemma.  ‘All in vain have I kept my heart clean, and washed my hands in innocence.  For all day long I have been plagued and am punished every morning’ (13-14).  The inward struggle between the faith of verse 1 and the experience of the following verses is an unbearable burden, for there is simply no answer to this conflict (15-16).  The circle of theodicy cannot be squared.  Until, that is, the great turning point of this Psalm.  ‘I went into the sanctuary of God’ (17).  In this life-changing moment, illumination happens; there is a sudden disclosure of how things truly are.  ‘Then I perceived their end’ (17).  It’s as if the psalmist has been given spectacles so that where previously there had only been hints and nudges of reality, now at last everything comes into focus.

Something very striking happens to the psalmist’s discourse here.  Up to now, the story has been told in the 1st and 3rd person: this is how it is with them; these are the consequences for me.  But no sooner has he experienced this sudden reorientation of perspective than he turns to address God himself.  ‘Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin’ (18).  Narrative turns into prayer, and remains in that mode for the rest of the Psalm.  In other words, it is as the psalmist turns towards God that everything else begins to make sense and his envy begins to subside.  He understands now the truth already sketched out in Psalms 37 and 49.  Above all, he recognises that good fortune is a chimera, an insubstantial dream (20); once seen for what it is, those favoured by it are to be pitied, for it blinds them to the infinitely better, more lasting rewards the psalmist has now discovered.

What are these rewards?  The psalmist likens his earlier, pre-enlightened state to that of a ‘brute beast’ (22).  So while the arrogant had become bestial through their pride and avarice, there had been a comparable risk to the psalmist: that he too would be brutalised through the sin of envy (3).  But what he now describes is how the corrupting effects of envy are transfigured by humanising desire.  This is no longer the destructive envy of others’ wealth and success but the life giving hunger for God.  Where envy had poisoned his vision, desire for God transforms and renews it.  And so the Psalm rises to a magnificent climax of faith: ‘Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.  You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will receive me with honour.  Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever’ (23-26).  So the journey ends with an elaboration of the opening credal statement, but this time without quotation marks, for the conventional rewards-and-punishment formula he had trotted out has become his personal confession of a lived faith.  ‘But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge to tell of all your works’ (28).  He has made the pilgrimage from the words of religion to the inward experience of it, the most important journey a human being can ever make.

Melanie Klein’s work was entitled Envy and Gratitude.  Her thesis was that gratitude is the polar opposite to envy and the antidote to it.  She defines gratitude as our response to what we experience as the true ‘good’.  She means by this that when we experience something as gift, our response is not the envious instinct to attack and destroy but the loving instinct to care, appreciate and give in return.  It awakens a life-instinct that is generous and transformative and that is the antithesis of the death-instinct that gives birth to envy.  This is because contentment is the hard-won realisation that we are not empty after all: the good permeates our lives, if we can only see it.  And the recognition that our cup is, so to speak, full of what is good, and the gratitude that flows from it, drains the poison out of our propensity to envy.  I think we can see this transformation happening in Psalm 73, which provides us with a happier ending than the stories of either Naboth’s vineyard or King Saul.  The psalm’s turning point marks the threshold at which the psalmist crosses over from envy to gratitude, from destructive impulse to the opening up of the self to all that will be integrative and healing.

For a Christian theologian, this Kleinian language has strongly eucharistic overtones.  Eucharistia, thanksgiving, is of course a liturgical act commanded in the gospel in memory of Jesus on the threshold of his passion.  However, the eucharist is what it is in the larger sense that it expresses the offering of all of life to the Creator and Redeemer of the world.  To be a disciple is to live eucharistically.  To be the church is to be the community of disciples who are shaped by gratitude as the fundamental Christian virtue, and who are thereby being humanised by the transformative gift of grace.  So I want to say that in a fundamental sense, the antidote to envy is the eucharist, because it is in the eucharist that the human race does what it was created to do, to offer God its praise and thanksgiving, to ‘glorify God and enjoy him for ever’ as the Westminster Shorter Catechism has it.  And the consequence of this is as the broken, disordered fragments of our lives are gathered up, like the broken fragments of the eucharistic bread, and put back together again and healed.  Eucharistia is the answer to envy because it takes us out of our narcissistic self-absorption with our own envious desires, and instead invites us to gaze on larger things until, as the hymn says, we are ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.  This integrative, individuating journey into divine lostness is envy’s ultimate anthithesis.

There is one passage among many in the New Testament that encapsulates this perfectly.  Writing to the Philippians, Paul constantly underlines the life-giving, transformative effect of gratitude and joy on the believer and the church.  Towards the end of this most beautiful of his letters, Paul captures his major themes.  His final chapter reiterates the command to rejoice in the Lord always, and promises that because of God’s goodness, believers do not need to worry about their needs (‘fret’, in the language of Psalm 37).  It is the peace of God, passing all understanding, that will guard against anxiety.  Therefore, believers are to focus on the ‘good’: ‘whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’  Paul elaborates on his own circumstances.  ‘Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.  I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty,  In any and all circumstances, I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me… My God will satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.’ (Philippians 4)

The key word here is contentment.  Autarkeia literally means ‘self-sufficiency’, being able to support oneself without being dependent on others.  By extension, it came to mean in Stoic philosophy being free of my own inner desires, a state of equilibrium in which I am no longer driven by my needs and drives and envious desires, in other words, ‘contentment’.  We could say this equates in a theological sense, to not being empty. This is, I think, what Paul means here.  He is saying that only when we have begun to transcend our envy with all its destructive tendencies can we experience true liberation.  In Stoic philosophy such a state is achieved by the discipline of living contemplatively.  It would be tempting to say that for Paul contentment is God-given, arising spontaneously in the heart of the believer because of his or her free justification by faith in Jesus Christ.  It is, of course, but not in a simpliste way that excludes the contemplative way we have explored in the Hebrew wisdom literature.  It is I think a subtle marriage of gift-and-response: gift, because salvation cannot be earned by anything that we do, even contemplation; response because the gift is nothing until we do the lifelong ‘work’ of making it our own and inhabiting it. ‘I have learned to be content’ he says.  It is spiritual askesis, part of the artistry of being formed in the image of Christ that is both God’s and
ours.  It begins with gratitude, for contentment means, theologically, that state of spiritual balance (to use a Benedictine idea) that comes from knowing that we are loved by God and are on the way to salvation.  Only then, as Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, can we offer our lives as as ‘living sacrifice’ (Romans 12.2).  With gratitude, it is an act of grace.  Without it, it is merely Pelagian effort.

Envy infiltrates every aspect of modern life.  The reckless competitiveness and bonuses on a scale that beggars belief that have driven our financial institutions to the brink of ruin are a clear symptom of it.  On a smaller scale (but not always so small in the context of modest domestic finances) the advertising industry cleverly plays straight into our envious propensities, and largely encourages them in the young, whether it is electronic games, fast cars, must-have gadgetry or the cult of youth and the body beautiful.  It is perhaps futile to expect society to change very much, for its values have been formed now over many generations.  I do not think we should be too quick to blame post-Enlightenment economics for this: Christians flourished in the 19th century market place by developing the virtues of thrift, prudence and an ethic of hard work.  Is it too much to ponder whether this was because our forebears had a deeper awareness of the importance of gratitude and contentment than we?  If so, then the cultivation of these virtues would seem to be a high priority if our society is, like the prodigal son, ever going to come to its senses and understand the life of a human being in a larger context than simply the gratifying of needs and desires.  I have argued that if envy is the besetting sin of our day, its greatest need for moral and spiritual health is to recapture the life-enhancing generosity of eucharistia and autarkeia, of gratitude and contentment.  With these given house-room as fundamental values in our society, we might perhaps lose interest in even considering, let alone embracing, the Faustian bargains that put our souls in such danger.

October 2009