Open the Route to God for your Opponents
Don’t ever hurt one of your neighbours by using words in two senses. He could reply in the same way and you would both be wandering off the path of love.
Go to him and warn him with affectionate sincerity. When you have between you removed the cause of your unhappiness, you will both of you be free from anxiety and bitterness.
Don’t recall to your memory anything your neighbor may have said in a moment of acrimony, whether he insulted you to your face, or spoke evil of you to another and that person has come and reported it to you. If you let yourself become angry, it is but a short step from anger to hatred.
Christ wants you never, in any way, for any reason, to cultivate a spirit of hatred, bitterness, anger or ill-feeling. The four gospels proclaim that on every page.
Only God is good by nature. The imitator of God is only good by intention, insofar as he wants to reconcile sinners with him who is good by nature. Therefore, when they offend the imitator of God, he blesses them, and when they slander him, he prays for them. In short, he does everything possible not to stray far from the path of real love.
Maximus the Confessor
Centuries on Charity, 4, 32 (SC9, pp.159ff.)
I Suggest a Different Kind of Envy
Nothing is so divisive as envy, which is a deadly evil, in a certain sense more deadly than greed.
A greedy person is happy when he gets something. An envious one is happy, not when he himself gets something, but when someone else does not. He sees his own personal profit, not in the good that comes his way, but in the evil that happens to someone else.
You are like that. What right have you to expect forgiveness, what justification can you claim for your actions, when the success of a brother or sister of yours causes you to fret and turn pale, when you ought to be rejoicing?
You want to be jealous? By all means be so. But be jealous in the sense that you imitate others in what is praiseworthy, seeking their aggrandizement, not their diminishment.
This is a jealousy worthy of praise: to imitate, not to despise; not to disparage other people’s good deeds, but to realize your own faults.
Someone who is envious does the opposite. His own faults make no impression on him, but other people’s good deeds upset him. He chafes at the sight of success that is not his own, and, like a worm, spoils the fruit of a neighbour’s work.
He takes no trouble to improve himself, but if another person makes improvement, he does all he can to ruin him.
John Chrysostom
Homily on the First Letter to the Corinthians, 31, 4 (PG61, 262)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
