Carolyn DeCillo–Staff

Hard to imagine a pair of jeans could have that kind of power! 

Of course, it wasn’t an article of clothing that had any intrinsic ability to make me feel bad. It was simply the power I gave it when I decided what I had wasn’t nearly as good as what someone else had. And as soon as I gave into that corrosive conclusion, my whole world came crashing down around me.

Sound familiar? 

I think most of us have felt tugged by those temptations to compare and contrast with others and to find we’re on the short side of an equation. The basic assumption is that there’s just not enough good to go around. Some are going to get more, and some are going to get less. Somebody’s going to have the hippest clothes, and someone else isn’t. Or, equally as quick to pull us in, the thought that someone’s “more spiritual” than someone else—someone’s got a better sense of God in their lives. The more-and-less model always adds up to envy.

But a broader metaphysical perspective reveals the fundamental mistake in this kind of mental math. We can’t start with anything finite and hope to gain something infinitely satisfying from it. No matter how many ways we try to put them together, it just doesn’t compute. 

Finding all we really want

We need to calculate everything from an entirely different basis. It starts with the number one and gives us all. It’s the First Commandment. It pulls us right up and out of the depths and presents us with what we’re truly longing for—the completeness of good. To “have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) is to have a God who is the One and only, the All of everything. All good, all love, all truth, all intelligence, all power, all substance—all of it full of joy, and all of it spiritual, unlimited, inexhaustible, impartial, and all-inclusive. When you have All—God—there is nothing you lack. 

It is easy, then, to see the following commandments—or spiritual principles—as simply strengthening our sense of the divine completeness embracing our lives. We prioritize, honor, and value the All that God is. This in turn shapes and enriches our relationships with each other, keeping us fully connected with the richness of Spirit and free of anything that would disconnect us. 

So isn’t it natural that the final precept of the Ten Commandments—“thou shalt not covet” (Exodus 20:17)—is a beautiful summary of our innate completeness? As we wholeheartedly accept our spiritual heritage, we consciously possess everything good, everything satisfying. There is no gap in our joy, no void unfilled. When we look at what our neighbor has, we can’t help but rejoice with them and feel genuine delight in the abundance of blessings that includes every one of us. Truly, we shall not covet!

Love leaves no one out

Each of these ten spiritual rules or principles flows out of the infinite Love that is God. The Commandments keep us connected to God’s grace and to each other. They soothe and heal all the ways we may feel we’ve been passed by, or left out, and that someone else has it better.

Without this deeper understanding of our spiritual wholeness and connectedness, it can be easy to fall into that sense of inequity. In the parable of the prodigal son (see Luke 15:11–32), it’s the older brother who so heart-wrenchingly wrestles with it. He learns that his disobedient, disrespectful younger brother has just returned after squandering his inheritance in a life of excess and debauchery. And—what’s this?—their father is throwing a lavish welcome home feast for him! All this while the older son has stayed at home, worked hard, and obediently followed all the rules—and never had even a modest party with his friends. How is that fair?

The way the story is told in Luke, you can feel the older brother’s anger, resentment, and envy. It’s as if he believes his father loves the younger brother more and gives him more. We’re back to a sense of more and less. But the father gently, tenderly corrects this misconception. He reassures his older son, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). We’re right back to Allness that is all-inclusive. Not more to one than to another. 

What the father reminds his older son is that those rules that have kept him connected with his father and his father’s house, have kept him continually in the presence of all there is. A constant abundance of good had always belonged to the older son. He just needed to recognize and accept it—truly accept it—as his own. 

As we understand how doing the right thing keeps us right with God, spiritual principles no longer seem arbitrary, restrictive, or a burden of any kind. We see how they guide us straight to the heart of Love, and we find ourselves completely within, and satisfied with, the boundless nature of grace. 

Never deceived

This spiritual integrity is our best defense against the subtle and not so subtle temptations to feel we’re lacking what someone else has. It can feel as though we’re constantly bombarded with these images of deficiency. Virtually all advertising would fuel that endlessly unsatisfied sense of wanting, envying, coveting. And it’s not just juicy hamburgers, or slick cars, or trendier sneakers. It’s every new pharmaceutical or “pseudoceutical” promising the health and comfort that some have, but you don’t. 

But the more we try to acquire the comfortable material life, the more elusive it seems, and the less we’re satisfied. It only leaves us craving the substantial things of Spirit. This was the lesson for the younger son in the parable of the prodigal. The whole promise of human life as one grand, self-indulgent binge was an illusion. Recognizing the deception was the beginning of his journey back to the real abundance of divine Life. And it is for us as well. We come to ourselves as the prodigal did. We wake up to who we truly are and what we really have.

Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of the healing Science of Christianity, wrote to the Church she founded: “Wholly apart from this mortal dream, this illusion and delusion of sense, Christian Science comes to reveal man as God’s image, His idea, coexistent with Him—God giving all and man having all that God gives” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 5). We’ve been given all. No one can have more goodness, more health, more kindness, more friendship, more opportunity, or more success than anyone else. All of it belongs to man, to you and me, fully and equally.

Eyes open and the light on

Prayer brings us to this place of recognition. It opens our eyes to the spiritual abundance that surrounds and defines us. This is how we defeat envy. In medieval art, envy (one of the “seven deadly sins”) was depicted as a squinty-eyed fellow—his focus too narrow to see all that was really going on. By contrast, one of my favorite words in the Bible is behold, which is a bold word demanding: “Look here! Here it is! You can’t miss this!” What envy misses, prayer beholds.

Perhaps the lesser known but equally devastating face of envy is depression. It avoids the outright coveting of “I wish I had what she has,” and instead turns itself inward to an ever growing catalog of all that’s missing in our own lives. Then even that meager amount of good that we thought we had disappears under this growing mental shadow. We lose sight of our own blessings.

Whatever the darkness we feel we’re wrestling with, the activity of the Christ shines as the true light of the world (see John 8:12, John 12:46). It illumines all the ways divine Love is present in our lives, eliminating every mental shadow. This penetrating spiritual light invigorates our prayer with joy and hope and expectation to see more of what already is. And a single prayer of genuine gratitude that begins to acknowledge what we have is an important step toward gaining the true picture. We’re no longer in an equation of more and less, but more and more. 

Never a target

It’s just as important, if we have been feeling blessed by what’s going on in our own lives, that we recognize the inclusiveness of good for everyone. We draw everyone in with us, neutralizing any sense of either being the target of envy or feeling guilt for what we have received. We never have to consent to being part of an equation where someone is left out. Every news cycle highlighting misfortunes of poverty, war, disease, disaster, demands we respond by going back to the one God, always present and all-inclusive, to pray that those affected can see for themselves evidence of this divine allness meeting the immediate human need.

From the parable of the prodigal, we see that the invitation to all of us is to come to the feast. There is no excuse for going without. Whatever we may have done that would keep us from feeling we deserve more, or whatever would persuade us that we won’t get our fair share, we have the full response of infinite love from our one Father-Mother God. With God giving all, each of us has all that we could ever need. And All is more than enough.