www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Prayer Trying to conquer envy

It is a risk posting this I'm sure ... but I'm down in life right now. I have a tendency to depression but my work life is absolutely terrible. I try to sell insurance and I can't sell my way out of a paper bag ... in the mean time I have relatives and friends and old classmates who are making $500K and getting advancements and living their dreams out.

I've tried to give it all up to God - and of course I'm Serbian descent so I fight the injustice of how some people get everything they want (it seems) and I suffer.

I tend to think God is willing this in my life.

Pray for me that I break this cycle of envy and find fulfillment in poverty and failure.

May our Lord have mercy on you and grant you peace as you struggle with this...

An old Baptist hymn goes: "Count your blessings, name them one by one - and you'll be surprised at all the Lord has done."

The upcoming feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross reminds us that suffering (the Cross) is present in everyone's life, even in the lives of people you envy. Maybe some of them are secretly envious of YOU! They have money but do they have confidence in God's loving providence? I hope so. I suspect you do, too.

what are we going to do with our participation in the Cross? Are we going to lapse into despair? Or are we going to look for a way to transcend our sufferings, our losses, our low self-esteem?

I believe the Lord will grant us the grace to go beyond these negativities. I bet that's His Will for us - not misery and "satisfaction" in failure.

I recommend reading the chapter on Envy in the little catechism of St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars.

Prayers to St. Lucy of Syracuse, patron of salesmen!

Insurance can be tough. I used to sell before getting a back office job.

Good luck!

Dear Pastor Thomas,

I was curious and did a google search, but unfortunately could not find this online. I am wondering, if you have it handy and have the time, if you might share some of the highlights of the saint's wisdom on this topic. You could post it in our 'Scripture and Patristic Writings' forum.

Respectfully,
Alice

PRAYERS

Prayers for you to, by God's grace, overcome this envy.

In His Name.

Dear Brother in Christ: May I recommend to you several portions of holy scripture which have been helpful to me. Memorize and meditate on these. God will give you direction.
Psalm 37
Proverbs 3:5,6
Jeremiah 29:11
Romans 12:1,2
And especially Luke 9:21-25 quoted here: [21] But he charged and commanded...
[22] saying, "The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected... and be killed, and on the third day be raised."
[23]
And he said to all, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
[24] For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.
[25] For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?"
Ask yourself the following three questions as you ponder these scriptures:
What does holy scripture say, here?
What does it mean?
And what does it mean for me?
I will be praying for you in your struggle.

I found this excerpt of +John Vianney on acatholiclife.blogspot.com:

Envy is a sadness which we feel on account of the good that happens to our neighbour.

Envy, my children, follows pride; whoever is envious is proud. See, envy comes to us from Hell; the devils having sinned through pride, sinned also through envy, envying our glory, our happiness. Why do we envy the happiness and the goods of others? Because we are proud; we should like to be the sole possessors of talents, riches, of the esteem and love of all the world! We hate our equals, because they are our equals; our inferiors, from the fear that they may equal us; our superiors, because they are above us. In the same way, my children, that the devil after his fall felt, and still feels, extreme anger at seeing us the heirs of the glory of the good God, so the envious man feels sadness at seeing the spiritual and temporal prosperity of his neighbour.

We walk, my children, in the footsteps of the devil; like him, we are vexed at good, and rejoice at evil. If our neighbour loses anything, if his affairs go wrong, if he is humbled, if he is unfortunate, we are joyful. . . we triumph! The devil, too, is full of joy and triumph when we fall, when he can make us fall as low as himself. What does he gain by it? Nothing. Shall we be richer, because our neighbour is poorer? Shall we be greater, because he is less? Shall we be happier, because he is more unhappy? O my children! how much we are to be pitied for being like this! Saint Cyprian said that other evils had limits, but that envy had none. In fact, my children, the envious man invents all sorts of wickedness; he has recourse to evil speaking, to calumny, to cunning, in order to blacken his neighbour; he repeats what he knows, and what he does not know he invents, he exaggerates. . . .

Through the envy of the devil, death entered into the world; and also through envy we kill our neighbour; by dint of malice, of falsehood, we make him lose his reputation, his place. . . . Good Christians, my children, do not do so; they envy no one; they love their neighbour; they rejoice at the good that happens to him, and they weep with him if any misfortune comes upon him. How happy should we be if we were good Christians. Ah! my children, let us, then, be good Christians and we shall no more envy the good fortune of our neighbour; we shall never speak evil of him; we shall enjoy a sweet peace; our soul will be calm; we shall find paradise on earth.

As concerns the second principal commandment, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," obviously, to carry out this commandment what is necessary first of all is to love oneself in the right way. Do we love ourselves? To this, at first seemingly naive and even strange question, most people will answer in the affirmative. But in reality who among us does not desire good for himself? Each desires for himself health, happiness, material prosperity, and success in all his endeavors, the satisfying of intellectual inquiries, and peace in his family, as well as peace, concord and love with all his neighbors. Most of all, each of us desires for himself salvation of soul, the beatific life in eternity. However, each of us, despite a constant and unsatisfied desire for what is good for himself, continually causes himself an unbelievable number of evils! Only think about how many evils, in the spiritual sense, we cause ourselves through pride, malice, envy, injustice and countless other sins, not to speak of our grievous and deadly sins and falls. Truly there is no such malefactor in the world who might cause us as much evil as each of us causes himself! And this happens because we have substituted for a real love for ourselves a self-love which inspires us to an unscrupulous fulfillment and satisfaction of all the sinful desires and lusts of our fallen will, which is guided by a false and wicked reason and a beclouded conscience. Thinking that we are satisfying love for ourselves, we are instead satisfying our self-love, and by this we do evil to ourselves, we destroy ourselves, we prepare for ourselves a grievous fate in eternity... Truly we have ourselves fallen among soul-destroying thieves and are in need of the lovingkindness of God!

Proper love for oneself, like love for God, lies in the labor of carrying out the commandments of Christ. If you bless those who curse you, you are loving yourself. If you do good to those who hate you, you are loving yourself. If you are meek and guileless, longsuffering toward your neighbor, and if in general you live by the commandments of God, you are properly loving yourself, and he who has properly loved himself can love his neighbor in a God-pleasing manner by fulfilling, in his regard, the all-holy commandments of the Lord.

However, the doing of good and the showing of love must be in Christ and for Christ's sake, i.e., we must look upon the love we show our neighbor as love given us by Christ, just as we must see Christ in our neighbor. Love is from Christ, through Christ and for Christ. But if we do good, even without hope of reward, merely for the sake of good, and are guided only by humanistic ideals, without Christ, this will, step by step, thought by thought, lead us to pernicious self-opinion and pride. Do we imagine that we are able to do anything without the help of Christ, given that He says "Without Me ye can do nothing" [Jn 15: 5]. This self-opinion and humanism divorced from Christ has already led the heterodox world to the dry, self-confident derangement of mind so fashionable in our times, which consists not only of a notorious co-existence with evil, but even of a collaboration, and perhaps even a concord, with it...This is why, already forty years from the time our homeland fell among cruel thieves, the whole world, having wrapped itself in the black shroud of humanism, in prideful self-intoxication, with icy indifference, like the priest and the Levite, passes by our homeland, which is wounded and suffering in body and soul, and does not want to deliver it from these inhuman sufferings, failing to understand that by this criminal indifference it is preparing destruction for itself.

And do not we, by our own indifference, to some degree share in this evil? Let us come to the sense that we are children of the Church of Christ and of our despised homeland! And if we find ourselves under conditions which do not now permit us to stand up for our homeland as we would like, still, within the realm of what is possible for us, we are obliged to reveal to the citizens of this country the holy truth of Holy Russia, as well as the wisdom, nobility and love for peace of the Orthodox Russian of the Tsars. We must pray for the deliverance of the Russian land from the yoke of those who fight against God, to pray as we pray for ourselves when we find ourselves in misfortune, to pray as ardently as we pray for our mother or our sick child in danger of dying. We are obligated also to lay bare the satanic essence of the Bolshevist regime which fights against God, under the yoke of which our homeland is oppressed, and to show clearly that it [that regime] by its demonic nature is able to make progress only in evil.

Within ourselves, in our hearts, let us preserve, cherish and strongly guard the only treasure left to us‹the Orthodox Faith and the Orthodox Church of Christ. Let us keep them pure, like the apple of our eye. Here and everywhere, in our personal, family and social life, let us be Orthodox and Russians, with capital letters. Let us labor in the doing of good deeds, in the light of the commandments of love, calling for help upon our Lord and Savior, and never forgetting His most sweet words: "He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me: and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him" [Jn 14: 21].

Amen.

+Nektary of Blessed Memory

Dear Pastor Thomas and Alexandr,

Thank you for sharing the thoughts about envy from two holy men of Christ...

I pray that they will be helpful to those struggling.

Let us also remember the most basic discipline of all...to recognize envy and jealousy and to stop it in its tracks by saying the Jesus Prayer. Sin like envy, is a sin which as humans, as a priest I spoke with once said, we all may feel a little or alot, at one time or another, but the key is that it should not be entertained by our minds.

Alice

BACK to praying for haydukovich --Praying that God will help him find his lot and purpose in life...something that will make him happy and fulfilled. No one is a failure to God! The world and its standards of success are going to fade away, but God and His Kingdom are eternal. Please Lord, have mercy on our brother in Christ...Amen.