What about me?
THE result of a recent study conducted in Spain and published in the Science Advances journal reveals that the envious personality is the most common personality type among people of our time.That should not surprise us.
Envy has been a virtual mainstay in our contemporary culture. Our hearts cannot rest easy until we have acquired something that belongs to someone else.
The dictionary defines envy as a painful and often resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another. It begins with odious comparison of oneself with others. The envious person imagines that those who have more in life have received an unfair advantage over him. He asks: “What about me?” or “Why not me?”
This festering sense of injustice makes him desire the ruin and downfall of those he envies. While waiting for this to happen, he gets a temporary relief from his misery by criticizing, belittling, or trivializing the achievement of others.
An envious person is never happy, and he wishes the same for others. His thinking goes: “If I am unhappy, so should you.” Perhaps this explains the prevalence of crab mentality among us.
In today’s gospel reading, Herod personifies envy and its mechanics. When the wise men from the East told him that a child who was destined to be a king had been born, he thought: “Why would these wise men travel from afar and pay homage to this child and not to me?” Envy made him feel that the honor, praise, and glory which were supposed to be his alone, had been taken away by the child.
In his book How Good Do We Have To Be? the eminent writer Harold Kushner contends that what we call original sin is not actually the sin of disobedience, lust, or pride. For Kushner, the original sin is envy, and this is rooted in our wrong belief that there is not enough love to go around. So, when someone else is loved, we feel that he is stealing the love which is supposed to be ours.
Kushner narrates a story that helps us see the lethal effects of envy in our relationships. Let me modify the story a bit for our purpose.
A senator named Pedro tendered for a dozen local politicians a dinner which he described as “fit for paradise.” But at the start of the dinner, the waiter brought in a bowl of delicious and expensive soup only for Pedro. Then the waiter served a mouth-watering plate of appetizers with champagne, again only for Pedro.
The guests were puzzled because it seemed that they were only invited to watch the senator enjoy the dinner that he prepared. Every now and then, Pedro would exclaim: “This is delicious! I really enjoy this!”
One of the guests couldn’t stand it anymore so he shouted: “You invited us to this dinner but it seems you’re the only one enjoying it. What about us?”
Pedro stood up and said calmly: “Dear friends, what I prepared is really a dinner fit for paradise. But if you remember, in the Bible, our first parents experienced paradise when they loved each other enough to take pleasure in each other’s happiness. Paradise is knowing that the truly important things in life are present in this world in such abundance that there is always enough to go around, and we don’t need to envy, hoard, or steal from others, just to enjoy it. I thought that at least one of you would be happy to see me enjoy dinner without asking: ‘What about me?’”
Then he motioned the waiter to bring in the delicious food for his guests, although he knew in his heart that they had missed paradise because of envy.