In the early 1880s, evangelist and professor Henry Drummond began his famous sermon “The Greatest Thing in The World” by asking a disarmingly simple question: “You have life before you. Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object of desire, the supreme gift to covet?” The rhetorical question required no reply. Everyone knew the answer: Love. Self-giving love is the ultimate good. It lifts us outside ourselves. It helps us see beyond the normal range of human vision — and over walls of resentment and barriers of betrayal. Love rises above the petty demands and conflicts of life and inspires our spirit to give without getting. As the famous “love chapter” of the Bible says, “It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. ...” When you set out on a consciously chosen course of action that accents the good of others, a deep change occurs in your soul. Pretentious egoism fades and your days are punctuated with spontaneous breathings of compassion and generosity. Your life is given to the summum bonum — the supreme good. The noblest of human qualities becomes your new compass on this “most excellent way” (I Corinthians 12:31b). Sound sappy? Science doesn’t think so. Recent studies find that the ability to practice appreciation and love is the defining mark of the happiest of humans. When people engage in self-giving love by doing something for others, they use higher-level brain functions and set off a series of neurochemical reactions that shower their system in positive emotions. Perhaps you’re wondering if this kind of happiness is triggered just as readily by having fun as it is by an act of love. Dr. Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wondered the same thing.
Dr. Seligman gave his students an assignment: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity and then write about both. Turns out, the “pleasurable” activity of talking with friends, watching a movie or eating a delicious dessert paled in comparison with the effects of a loving action. Time stops when we lend a helping hand, nurture a hurting soul or offer a listening ear. We love the story Mary Ann Bird tells in her article for Guideposts titled “The Whisper Test.” It’s about a little girl who was different ... and hated it. She was born with a cleft palate and, when she started school, her classmates made it clear to her how she looked: “a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth, and garbled speech.” She was convinced that no one outside her family could love her. When her classmates asked, “What happened to your lip?” she would tell them she had fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. “Somehow,” she writes, “it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different.” Mrs. Leonard, a second grade teacher, administered a hearing test to everyone in the class each year. Here’s what happened when it was Mary Ann’s turn: I knew from past years that as we stood against the door and covered one ear, the teacher sitting at her desk would whisper something, and we would have to repeat it back — things like, “The sky is blue” or “Do you have new shoes?” I waited there for those words that God must have put into her mouth — those seven words that changed my life. Mrs. Leonard said, in her whisper, “I wish you were my little girl.” Mrs. Leonard had a lock on love. You can be confident that she enjoyed the deepest levels of emotional satisfaction and connection in her life. Her tender care clearly embodied the summum bonum, the supreme good, the most excellent way.
DR. LES PARROTT ’84, is a psychologist and No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including his latest book with his wife, Dr. Leslie Parrott ’84, Healthy Me, Healthy Us. For more information, visit HealthyMeHealthyUs.com.
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