Friends of ours took their family to a resort over the Thanksgiving holidays and let everyone know how much fun they intended to have (and have been having since arriving) by emailing and posting photos of every part of the trip. I find there is nothing like a play-by-play account of the wanton spending of money to inspire envy in even the most enlightened individual, and so it was that I fell from the pious pinnacle of my stupa and became just human enough to adhere pejoratives such as “wanton” and “wasteful” to people whose integrity and good-heartedness I have heretofore had no reason to doubt.
I have never been to a resort over a holiday, you see; nor to Disneyworld or Disneyland or on a cruise or to a foreign country other than to adopt a child that we would then spend over $350,000 to raise, according to U.S. government statistics, while our friends all have the requisite 1.86 perfect children, none of whom came from countries that lack adequate resort facilities, much less require any sort of remedial help, orthodontia, or medical or psychological interventions.
My Facebook status that day stated that being jealous reminded me that I was human, and friends joked about how I needed to be reminded of my humanity. What I meant, though, was that I’m not much given to jealousy or covetousness, for I myself am regularly the object of other people’s projections of failure or success (as the case may be) and know that the reality of what it took to get here and what it takes to live here every day is not enviable or, on the other hand, regrettable because it’s my life: My life that I have chosen a million times and have built for myself over countless moments and which could not have been lived by anyone else.
What this means, of course, is that I chose to live this life. I’m not a victim of my own life, meaning that nobody put a gun to my head or isolated me in a cell or stretched me out for torture until I succumbed and agreed to marry my righteous but pig-headed husband, or have umpteen children, most of whom had already received life’s cruelest psychological, spiritual, and emotional wound in the first hours, weeks, months or years of life, or compelled me to do or be any of the things I regularly regret doing or being because the lives my neighbors live look so much more inviting for their novelty, ease, and ability to inspire envy in me.
It means, too, on a deeper level that when I say I am human, I mean that I’ve caught myself being human: fallen, falling short, less than godly, less than a goddess. I joked in my next Facebook status update that I am usually a goddess, but I wasn’t really joking, for, as St. Paul said, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from ourselves.” People tend to focus on the surpassing power of God part without noticing that Paul wrote that we have this treasure, we have this treasure of the very power of God, the godhead, within us–the same resurrection power that created the universe with a word, impregnated a virgin, and brought Christ out of the grave after three days and three nights. That very power: in me.
Having God ride shotgun in my life means that I was disappointed about the envy I felt, for I’m used to not feeling envious due to a typical lack of attachment to things that had me telling the cleaning ladies a few weeks back not to worry if they broke anything, for it was all destined to perish anyway, and there was nothing in my house that breathes or inspires life into its inhabitants except for the inhabitants themselves, at which they looked at me agape. I had, you see, forgotten that attachment to people is an attachment, too, and projecting my “wish I could’s” onto my friends or children is no less a crime than being attached to the objects in one’s house, for people are not possessions and it is not the job of anyone else to carry my unlived life.
What my jealousy meant, in part, was that I wished I could go to a resort but I couldn’t, because I have Too Many Children and Not Enough Money. But under cross-examination, the witness admits that she could probably afford to go to a resort, go to Paris, buy her 16-year-old a brand new car, or do any manner of things other people do with their money if that were her value or desire. The problem, she further admits, is that she chooses not to value trips to resorts as much as she values the life she has chosen for herself.
The other problem is, of course, that I need someone or something onto whom or which I can project my unlived life so that I’ll continue to have a handy excuse for not living it. Alternatively, I need something to focus on that will keep me from progressing in my career as a goddess who is more attached to the things of the spiritual world than those of this temporal one.
The day I was overcome with jealously, I read this in Jung’s Psychology and the East, and it made me smile with a smile that felt like a death mask because I could see my bias toward the temporal over the eternal:
The externalization of culture may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial, yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too clearly paid for with a loss of spiritual culture. It is undeniably much more comfortable to live in a well-planned and hygienically equipped house, but this still does not answer the question of who is the dweller in this house and whether his soul rejoices in the same order and cleanliness as the house which ministers to his outer life. The man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary, but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly, and he therefore laments his poverty if he possesses only one automobile when the majority have two. Obviously the outward lives of men could do with a lot more bettering and beautifying, but these things lose their meaning when the inner man does not keep pace with them. To be satiated with “necessities” is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes the source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness in the midst of living conditions whose outcome was expected to be entirely different. The externalization of life turns to incurable suffering, because no one can understand why he should suffer from himself. No one wonders at his insatiability, but regards it as his lawful right, never thinking that the one-sidedness of this psychic diet leads in the end to the gravest disturbances of equilibrium. That is the sickness of Western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness (para. 962).
As Proverbs 27:20 says, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied; nor are the eyes of man ever satisfied.” We’re made with the quality of Never Satisfied because Never Satisfied is in our deepest beings as a sign and emblem of the depths of symbolic spiritual experience to which we can go if we will only dare. Most don’t dare, but remain stuck on a sensual, temporal level that belies a commensurately cavernous spiritual emptiness, the likes of which I recognized in myself with surprise, dread, and awe the day I envied my neighbor’s good fortune.
References
Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychology and the East. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vols. 10, 11, 13, and 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
singer’s voice is, how magical this song she sings, but as beautiful as the singer’s voice, what gives this song its timelessness is what we know about blessings. We know about them because being blessed by someone who has the love and power to bless us is an archetypal event–something that is common to all people in all ages. Whether it conjures up images of priests and censers, or the trembling hand of a grandmother, laid on her new great-grandchild’s head, or that of a tribal elder passing his hands over the youth and blowing smoke all around the young man’s head, we know what a blessing is.
carries a unique code–like DNA–specific to the one being blessed. A blessing has the mass, weight, and substance of a boulder; people who have been rightly blessed carry the weight of that blessing with them their entire lives and have something of substance to pass on to others. Like a phallus, a blessing is generative and powerfully procreative. It has the masculine strength of the warrior with his spear, and like the warrior, a blessing is protective as well as defensive. Its phallic energy causes many scenes of blessing to be symbolically rendered through male figures, even though every person, male or female, carries this energy. Finally, a blessing comes from a place as dark as blindness, for it arises from the unconscious, from what we know without knowing how we know it. A blessing is prophetic, having deep spiritual and mystical origins arising from some ancient tap root with fructifying power.
A blessing is an invoking of God’s favor, an expression of approval and good wishes, and an act of praise verbalized over another human being. We do not write our own blessings; we wait sometimes our entire lives to be blessed by someone else. And because we externalize the need to be blessed and are always looking for the priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, or fairy godmother who will lay hands on us and bless us, we forget that, deep down inside, our own priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, and fairy godmother has a ready blessing.
Thinking that my own prejudice had brought Esau up in this thought-while-vacuuming, I concluded that I must be bitter. Though I wasn’t feeling bitter, I nevertheless diagnosed myself as bitter and unforgiving. A Bible verse from the book of Hebrews came to mind, one that warns Christians to “see to it that no root of bitterness spring up, and by it many be defiled.” I certainly didn’t want to be bitter, much less ‘defile’ everyone around me with my bitterness against our treacherous partners. “You’d better do something with your bad attitude,” I scolded myself. “You’d better get with the program!”
Temple, laws of cleanliness, laws of birth and death, giving and taking, working and not working. Along with Numbers and Deuteronomy, it is tedious and almost entirely uninspiring. I avoided reading Leviticus as much as I could as a younger Christian. For every one time I’ve read Leviticus, I’ve read Psalms or Song of Solomon or even Isaiah as many as five or ten times.
The year I saw that these ancient laws can have meaning here and now was a very good year, for one of the primary things I learned was from this law of witnesses: Facts come with two or three. What this means, among other things, is that whenever truth is welling up within me, or coming at me from the outside, it will come in two or three ways. I may miss it if it comes only once, and since the universe is bountiful and God is good and giving, He will give me more than one chance to get a clue.
