His Love Endures Forever- Your Weekly Catholic Reflecton from CMMB

Perhaps because gratitude does not always go unopposed, Psychoanalysts have often seen gratitude as having an emotional opposite, envy. Sometimes a flash of envy can be a helpful sign, a spur that tells you, “You know, you really want this- try for it.” But very often, the envious person sees something wonderful in the world, and instead of appreciating it, attempts to make the envious feeling go away, by devaluing or denying it’s worth (those grapes were sour, anyway); or he or she may try to spoil or destroy the envied object in reality.

If one does this enough, one ends up feeling starved, because one finds oneself living in an emptied world. The envious have a particularly hard time growing old and dying. They cannot tolerate the fact that the young, and not they, have their lives before them.

They feel pain, and emptiness. We speak of people being consumed with envy- but filled with gratitude. It’s paradoxical that, by acknowledging that there are wonderful things in the world, and that we are incomplete, we can feel filled up- even as we bid the world farewell.

When I think of Oliver’s last days, I think of a biblical sentence that I’ve always found instructive in the twofold art of living and dying. It reads,

“And Abraham died… full of years.”

Not emptied of them; filled by them.

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