“GLUCKSCHMERZ”

 

 

A post-homiletical discourse delivered by the Rev. Dr. James R. Beebe

Rector, St. Patrick’s Church, Incline Village, Nevada, October 11, 2009

 

 

     I envy Don McEwan.  He is 55 and retired from his job as Pioneer High School counselor and coach.  But when he was 20, he ran the two-mile run in nine minutes, 4.6 seconds, a college record at the time. 

 

     Thirty-five years later, he was invited to be the timekeeper for a dual meet between Ohio State and Michigan.  He witnessed a Michigan sophomore by the name of Sean McNamara beat his long-standing record by eight seconds.  Here’s the surprise:  he was genuinely happy for the kid.  “He ran well,” he said.

 

     That is to say, Don McEwan was not envious of McNamara’s new record.  Envy.  We tend to use “envy” and “jealousy” interchangeably, but they don’t mean the same thing.  To be jealous is to fear losing something that you have; to be envious is the pain caused by another person having something that you don’t.

 

     Or, to put it a different way (as Artistotle did), envy is the pain caused by the  good fortune of others.  In Dante’s Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low.  The Germans call is gluckschmerz – pain at another’s good fortune.  Apparently, it’s egregious enough to make the top seven of the Deadly Sins.

 

    And it may be getting deadlier.  There was a time in our evolutionary past when we would be competing against only 50 other people – the ones in our village who comprised our entire universe.  Nowadays, because of the internet and advertising, we are suddenly aware of everybody in the world who is smarter, better looking, more tanned…well, the list could go on…

 

     And humans may not be the only ones who harbor envy.  According to an Austrian study, monkeys often express resentful behavior when a partner gets a greater reward for performing an identical task.  Monkeys have been shown to stage strikes, refusing to participate and ignoring what they perceive as inferior compensation. 

 

 

     Your household pet may not be immune, either.  These same researchers conducted experiments with pairs of domestic dogs, accompanied by their owners.  While the partner and subject dogs sat next to each other with their owner standing behind them, each dog was prompted to put its paw in the experimenter’s hand, and upon complying, each given a piece of sausage.

 

     When one dog was given a reward, but the other was not, the unrewarded dog stopped putting its paw out.  Even so, the dogs never rejected the treats, which may suggest that we are much more evolved and do envy much more competently.

 

     Joseph Epstein has written a book on the topic.  He says, “Of all the deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.  The rich want to be beautiful or wish themselves wise; the wise, if they really are wise, know that wisdom begins with the acknowledgement that one knows nothing, so, really, what the hell good is that?”

One of his best chapters is called, “Under Capitalism Man Envies Man; Under Socialism, Vice Versa.”

 

     Well, it can get ugly.  He tells the story of an Englishwoman, a Frenchman, and a Russian who are each given a single wish by one of those genies whose almost relentless habit is to pop out of bottles

 

     The Englishwoman says that a friend of hers has a charming cottage in the country and that she would like a similar cottage, with the addition of two extra bedrooms and a second bath and a brook running in front of it.

 

     The Frenchman says that his best friend has a beautiful blonde mistress, and he would like a mistress himself, but a redhead instead of a blonde, with longer legs and a bit more in the way of culture and chic.

 

     The Russian, when asked what he would like, tells of a neighbor who has a cow that gives a vast quantity of the richest milk, which yields the heaviest cream and the purest butter.  “I vant dat cow,” the Russian tells the genie…”dead.”

 

     [Bradley Doucet]  At its best, writes Aristotle in The Rhetoric, there’s a kind of “good envy” that results in wanting to emulate.  It’s envying ending in admiration, and thus to imitate the qualities one began by envying.  It can lead to self-improvement.  Or, conversely, envy may simply be wanting to destroy “dat cow” your neighbor has.

 

 

 

 

     As previously indicated, we don’t seek to be wealthy; we seek to be wealthier than another.  We don’t seek to be intelligent; we seek to be more intelligent than another.  We don’t seek to be spiritual; we seek to be more spiritual than another.  See, that’s the problem with envy – it prevents us from appreciating what we do have.

 

     Will Wilkinson, in the Spring 2006 issue of Policy, writes that there’s no end to the number of ways in which we may gratify our need for position – from the sharpest dresser to the best bowler, to holder of the most encyclopedic knowledge of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  “If we are aggrieved by the rigors of the rat race,” Wilkinson says, “the answer is simply to stop being a rat.”

 

     The author of the book of Hebrews writes, “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”  In other words, you can run, but you can’t hide. 

 

     I think that’s also the gist of the “Collect for Purity” that we read just about every Sunday:  “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”  That’s fine, as far as it goes.  But that really isn’t the point, is it?  The point to the Collect for Purity should be that we be more aware of the intentions of our hearts so we can stop being rats.

 

     Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a man woke up one morning, opened the newspaper, and discovered that he had died.  Well, what he actually discovered was his obituary in the newspaper.  It read, “The inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before, and he died a very rich man.” 

 

     What they’d done, however, was to confuse him with his older brother, who had, in fact died.  The reporter had merely bungled the epitaph.  But the account had a profound effect on him.  He decided he wanted to be known for something other than developing a means to kill people more efficiently and for amassing a fortune in the process.  So he initiated an award for scientists and writers who foster peace.  His name was Alfred Nobel.

 

Hey!  Didn’t Obama win that Peace Prize just the other day?

 

Ah, he probably didn’t deserve it.