One of the first stories of humanity in scripture is one of resentfulness and depression. Cain was envious of Abel and felt slighted by God. Envy is one of the classic seven deadly sins. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that envy shows itself as bitterness, hypercriticalness, and incapacity to praise someone else or feel the same empathy for the fortunate as for the unfortunate. This can be a substantial spiritual challenge, for in heaven, scripture tells us that we will “offer unending praise” to God. For many, then, one of the significant spiritual tasks is to come to grips with the bitterness that comes from envy to move from criticism to praise, from anger to mellowness, and from the desire to possess to the desire to admire. Fr. Rolheiser notes the most important thing is learning how to forgive ourselves, our parents, our culture, our church, our teachers, our mentors, those who have wounded us, life itself, and God for the state of things and the state of our lives. To fail at this is to die in bitterness, having never known the true happiness God had always desired for us.