It feels good … to do good.

That’s what a young woman named Stephanie Hagyard has discovered. Every Monday night, after a long day at an insurance brokerage in Boston, she serves dinner at a drop-in center for people with AIDS. Although she works hard in the kitchen, she leaves this volunteer gig feeling refreshed. "I feel better if I'm doing something good," said Hagyard to The Boston Globe (November 28, 2003). Although feeling better is not the main reason she volunteers, it sure is a satisfying side effect.

“Helper’s high” — that’s what some people call this feeling of euphoria. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself after an act of sacrificial service. I know I felt it, along with a number of other hypothermia volunteers, when we housed the homeless in our building last December. Although very little scientific work has been done to uncover the biology of good deeds, some researchers are now suggesting that positive social contacts have a physical effect — they release feel-good hormones called endorphins.

“Love your neighbor,” said Jesus to the Pharisees (Matthew 22:39). He might have added, “It will give you a ‘helper’s high.’”

To fill the gap between the words of Jesus and modern science, an institute has been established to examine the source and impact of unselfish love. Located in Cleveland, it’s called IRUL – short for the Institute for Research into Unlimited Love. It is directed by a bioethicist named Stephen Post, and its board of directors includes do-gooders such as Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity, former First Lady Rosalyn Carter, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of St. Christopher’s Hospice in London. Since 2001, IRUL has doled out a cool $2.5 million to 33 researchers in a variety of scientific fields.

Lou Major and the hypothermia team — I bet you’d like to get your hands on an IRUL grant!

This institute has an important mission: To make a scientific investigation of the value of love and selflessness. Its researchers are looking at why some people become surprisingly kind and generous — not only to family members, but also to strangers. IRUL is probing whether a belief in divine love translates into positive action. And it is studying how good deeds affect the doer — in other words, what kinds of joy, richness, and “helper’s highs” can emerge from acts of altruistic love.

I’m so glad that this kind of research is finally being done. Did you know that over the past 40 years, there have been about 100,000 scientific studies on depression. Do you know how many have focused on happiness? Seven.

The value of IRUL is that it gives us some guidance on how we are to obey the great commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God [and] You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (vv. 37-39). As much as we might have a desire to follow this commandment of Jesus, we need a map that shows us where this love of God and neighbor will take us. The problem, you see, is that this rule is clear in its sense of obligation, but it is somewhat unfocused on its day-to-day implementation. We need some clarity about the meaning of Christian charity, some muscle and skin on the bones of this law of love. This is not a matter of sentimentality or sweet emotion – what we’re talking about here is steadfast love, a love that is all about commitment and action. What this institute can provide us is a clear picture of what this love looks like, and what shape its benefits take.

A picture of love and its benefits. Full color. High definition. Maybe even 3-D. That’s what IRUL can give us.

Stephen Post, the director of the Institute for Research into Unlimited Love, has discovered some stories that can show us the way. We can start with the Anglins, a family made up of a mother, a father, and fifteen children -- seven of whom are biological, and eight of whom are adopted. All of the adopted kids have special needs, ranging from cognitive deficits to the absence of limbs. They describe their family as “a sort of mini-United-Nations, with children from a myriad of ethnic and racial backgrounds.” Patty Anglin, the mother, grew up in the missionary fields of Africa, and she and her husband now live on a farm in Wisconsin called “Acres of Hope.” Their mission is to spread God’s love, one child at a time.

Does this mean that you have to adopt eight kids to fulfill the great commandment? Not at all. This picture of the Anglin family reminds us that love of God and love of neighbor can be done right here at home, in our own community, in our own corner of the world. It shows us that the power of love is seen most clearly when average people do small things – caring for a child, visiting the sick, helping a neighbor, or offering to step in for a caregiver. These small things, done in the spirit of love, are precisely the acts that add up and cause real change in the world.

There’s also the story of an Irish girl from the slums of Dublin. Her name is Christina Noble. She had a dream, one that ended up taking her all the way to Vietnam — a vision that inspired her to work with the street children of this poor, disease-ridden country. “You might laugh at that,” she writes in her book Bridge Across My Sorrows. “You might say it was nothing but a dream and that only someone who was Irish would act on a dream as if it were a message from God. And you could be right.”

But she acted on that dream, and moved to Vietnam as a middle-aged woman with no education, no money, and no real idea of what she was going to do. In Ho Chi Ming City, she saw two little girls dressed in rags, playing in the dirt across the street. She thought they were playing, but found out that they were actually “grubbing for ants” and eating them. One of the little girls reached out to her, wanting the touch of another human being, and when Christina embraced her she realized that she was making a life-changing connection. She discovered that God was calling her to work with children who lived in poverty, children who were suffering as she did when she lived in the slums of Dublin. “This poor and crippled country would be the place of my salvation,” Christina realized, “the place where I would regain hope and rebuild my life.”

By discovering exactly what God wanted her to do, Christina gained the confidence she needed to create a center for the care of street children, one that is both a hospital and a social center. Christina is making a real difference in Vietnam, because she acted on a dream that she believed was a message from God.

Love of God and love of neighbor – the two come together when we discover what God is challenging us to be and to do.

So, what’s your dream? What’s your vision?

Maybe you are dreaming of joining me and the Midlife Men on a Mission on our next trip to Honduras.. Or signing up to spend the night in Fellowship Hall the next time we host the homeless. Or volunteering to join the youths on one of their summer mission trips. Or becoming a foster parent. Or a study buddy. Or a cook in the FACETS kitchen.

The key is to discover what God is challenging you to be and to do. And then to take action … in a way that shows love of God and love of neighbor.

One of my favorite stories of the power of love comes from history, and centers on an 18th century American Quaker named John Woolman. He was one of the most effective practitioners of tough love who ever lived. After discovering that he could not bear to be involved in the slave trade, Woolman traveled to Quaker meetings all across the colonies, and talked with people one by one about the evils of slavery.

This was not an easy sales job, especially since many Quakers in the colonies were slave owners at the time. But Woolman succeeded through quiet one-on-one conversations, visiting his fellow Quakers individually, in farm after farm, for most of the two decades of his adult life. He did not criticize people or anger them, but was clear and consistent in his message, and by the year 1770 — almost a century before the Civil War — there was not a single Quaker in the colonies who owned a slave.

You could say that the American anti-slavery movement began when John Woolman discovered, and started to practice, the commandment of Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself” (v. 39). And if there had been a John Woolman in every religious denomination, the institution of slavery could possibly have been eliminated without the Civil War. “A single visionary individual,” says Stephen Post of IRUL, “committed to change under the power of unlimited love, can make a difference in the world.”

The law of love is a powerful force. When it is embraced, and put into practice, personal relationships are affected and entire societies are transformed. It doesn’t really matter whether the love is being expressed in a large family in Wisconsin, among the street children of Ho Chi Ming City, on Quaker farms in colonial times, or in our congregation today. In every time and place and situation, the practice of love of God and love of neighbor is going to have an impact on the world.

So let’s continue the work of IRUL, seeing ourselves as being called by God to perform ongoing research into the power of unlimited love. We can do it in our friendships. In our families. In our schools. In our workplaces. In our communities.

By practicing love, we can make a powerful difference. And we can feel good while we’re doing good.

There’s no better feeling than a “helper’s high.” Amen.


Source: Stephen Post, “Unlimited Love and Ultimate Reality,” Metanexus Institute Website, http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article.asp?8271. Retrieved April 5, 2005.