Envy—holy and otherwise—and Interfaith Dialogue

In case you didn’t know, sale “envy” is one of the seven deadly sins—a categorization that has been around in the Christian church for millennia, sovaldi sale and also gets lots of play in popular culture.  [Did you see the movie “Seven”?  Some of those images still play in my head at night!]  Envy is more dangerous than it sometimes appears at first glance, because of its insidious nature:  you start by wanting someone else’s job, then you want her life, then you get mad that she has that job and that life [certainly, she is undeserving and ungrateful], and finally you start wishing ill on her and taking pleasure in her missteps.  Envy gets ugly fast.

However, there is another use of “envy” that I actually really like, and that also is relevant to the discussion around interreligious dialogue, and learning about our interreligious neighbor.  The concept is “holy envy,” and it appears in my forthcoming book, Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative Praxis, written with Mary Hess and Christy Lohr Sapp.  It’s actually Christy who talks about this idea in the first chapter.

That chapter is devoted to an examination of four contemporary examples of interreligious engagement that many people in the United States have come across—even if they don’t necessarily think of them that way.  The examples are: the practice of yoga; the inflammatory [and media-seeking] practice of Qur’an burning; Buddhist meditation; and the growing trend of “Christian” Seder meals. I chose those topics primarily to introduce and discuss more thoroughly some of the different aspects involved in interreligious dialogue/experience, and also to demonstrate how critically important it is in our contemporary context for colleges, universities and seminaries to engage in interreligious education.  And, along with that, how that kind of education can strengthen one’s own religious perspective and practice.

So, in the course of that conversation Christy Lohr Sapp brings up the idea of holy envy—let me quote her here:  “Krister Stendahl, the late Swedish Lutheran bishop, New Testament scholar, and pioneer in Lutheran-Jewish relations, encouraged people to develop “holy envy” for others’ traditions. By this, he meant that we each should find something in the others’ traditions that we wish we had in our own.”  Isn’t that a lovely idea?  So often, we approach other religious traditions with lots of fear and trepidation—and we’re very protective of Christianity, wanting to make sure that we’re “the best” in every way!  However, that attitude prevents us from seeing and appreciating the gifts and beauty present in another tradition—in their own context, in their own light, in their own unique expression—and certainly from being able to learn and grow from them.  By contrast, developing a sense of “holy envy” enables us to view with appreciation and gratitude the way God is at work in another tradition, and the various and wondrous ways different people reflect their own experiences of the divine.  We don’t have to agree with them, we don’t have to disprove them, and we don’t have to adopt them:  we can simply enjoy and marvel at the rich diversity present in the religious lives of all the people God has created.

However, there is another side to this, too, where holy envy slips back in to envy, in my view:  when we are not content to simply celebrate another religious tradition’s gifts, but we want to appropriate them for ourselves—feeling like we are making them better in the process.  Here’s how Christy describes that reality:  “This holy envy is a beautiful thing when it helps us to see the poetry of another’s text or the piety in another’s actions, but it crosses a line to misappropriation when we take that envy and turn it into imitation. While some say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, others know that imitation can actually result in just the opposite—irritation and offense. It reminds me of sibling rivalry. Nothing can annoy the older sibling more than when the younger sibling copies what she does. The younger simply wants to be like the older, but the older finds the imitation to be insulting. That is what inappropriate uses of yoga, meditation, and Seders can be. When we take elements of other traditions and try to ‘Christianize’ them, this at its most innocent level fails to recognize the deep history of the traditions behind the elements, and, at its more sinister level, strips them of the elements of their inherent worth—suggesting that they do not have value in and of themselves as Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and other traditions but, rather, that they need to be ‘validated’ by Christian patina.”

So, what to do?  Christy Lorr Sapp concludes by making a great point:  she emphasizes that all Christians—and certainly Christian leaders—are called to “walk the line between holy envy and misappropriation—to draw inspiration from others without needing to claim or own those enviable aspects for themselves.”  That’s great advice—not only for interreligious dialogue, incidentally, but all kinds of things—and gives us a nice guideline for how we might deeply engage other religious traditions and walk away not limping, like Jacob, but transformed, like Paul.

 

Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative Praxis  is part of the Seminarium Elements book series. Look for it November 1, 2014.

Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com.

Photo Credit: “Mind the gap” by Thank you for visiting my page.. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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