A thought struck me the other day: As far as I know, the English language has no word that expresses the opposite of envy. There may be phrases or sentences that can begin to convey it, but we have no single word we can use to express the virtue that lies opposite that ugly vice. We can wish and pray that we would be less envious, but as we put off that sin, what’s the righteous behavior we ought to be putting on in its place?
Envy is a strange sin, in that it is a personal and often very visceral response to the success and failure of other people. It is a sin that involves comparing ourselves to others and forming our identity around that comparison. Just as we can be affected by our own success and failure, envy affects us through the success and failure of others. Envy is responding to the success of other people with resentment toward them and despair within ourselves, longing that their success was our own. Or, envy is responding to the failure of other people with joy, gleeful that their failure is not our own. At its fullest bloom, envy
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