Envy of the Saints

I read Gustavo Gutierrez's The God of Life recently which commented briefly that every Christian ought to wish they were a saint. And then today we had a lecture on Kleinian psychology that talked about envy as a primitive part of our human nature. Klein's viewpoint is that envy is not necessarily bad because it can motivate us with ambition. Together these two lessons comprise what I want to talk about here.

I use the term saints not in the Catholic sense, where a small few are approved as saints, but in the more general sense of anyone with a very mature spirituality. I believe that the qualities of sainthood - including deep connection with the divine, concern for the poor, personal integrity, joyfulness, etc. - are qualities that nearly all people respect as good and thus are envious to have. But we can handle our envy for these qualities in a number of ways.

The first way is to idealize the person who has those qualities, as if they were a different species. This is an unhealthy manner of negotiating our envy because we necessarily demean ourselves in the process. By stating that some person is an amazing saint also implicitly says that we are not constitutionally capable of being such a person.

The second way is to cut down the saint. We are hypersensitive to their faults and criticize them for failing. By doing so we are managing our envy through denial and rationalization - we distort reality. (This happens to be my favorite way of managing my envy)

Finally, the healthy way to have envy for saintliness is to simply acknowledge that we wish we had their character. By doing this we are being honest with our own feelings of envy, maintaining a healthy view of reality, and fostering a desire for growth.

We should always be careful around pastors (though not all are to be respected) and people of strong faith that an overly critical or overly praiseworthy attitude are both manifestations of unhealthy management of envy. We should be able to see people as whole beings, with both good and bad, and try to gain objectivity enough to see the whole view of their character.