Puritan Prayer

Researchers call it “Facebook Envy.” Looking at your friends’ exotic vacations, beautiful children, and fabulous social lives can leave us feeling lonely, self-critical, and depressed. Social media-induced envy is but a new twist on an old human malady. Envy was targeted for special mention in the Ten Commandments and lethal enough to be included in Evagrius Ponticus’ fifth century list of Seven Deadly Sins. Cain killed Abel out of envy, Saul became insanely envious of David and Jesus was turned over to Pilate by the religious authorities of account of envy. Basil of Caesarea preached a sermon, “On Envy,” to catechumens preparing to join his church in Caesarea in AD 364. He defined envy as “the pain caused by a neighbor’s prosperity.” He observed that envy does more harm to the envious than the envied. While those envied are often oblivious to it, the envious suffer from envy’s deleterious consequences. We read in Proverbs, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones” (Prov. 14.30). Envy saps our core strength, upsets our digestion, distorts our thinking, and disrupts our sleep. In Shakespeare’s play, Iago warns Othello to guard against jealousy, even as Iago is doing all he can in his sinister role to feed it, “O beware, my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock the meat it feeds upon.” Envy is a killer sin, and so we join with our Puritan forebears in praying for deliverance from it: