Photo: Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens, public domain, Wikipedia.
In 2017, a team of scientists working at the University of Zurich’s Neuroscience Centre doled out 25 Swiss francs to 50 test subjects over four weeks. Half were told to spend the money on themselves; the other half were told to buy things for other people. At the end of the four weeks, the happiness of participants in both groups was measured using a standard test. Participants in the second group reported a greater increase in happiness than those in the first.
I always find it both fascinating and, in a way, delightful when science seems to support the truths that have been given to humanity through faith. Something like that seems to be going on here—“It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)—even though admittedly the worldly and clinical happiness that these scientists are attempting to measure seems far from the eternal blessedness the author of Acts had in mind. But science now seems to be discovering what religion has long taught—that giving is good for us.
I’m thinking not only of the celebration of giving among Christians at Christmas. There’s also, for example, the ritual, central to so many religions since the dawn of history, of giving back to gods and ancestors through sacrifices and other offerings; the importance of almsgiving in traditions around the world; and, in our own land, the importance of gift-giving among celebrants at the potlatch, the festival traditionally practiced by Indigenous peoples along Canada’s Pacific coast (and banned by the assimilationist Canadian government from 1885 to 1951).
I think it’s natural that giving should be central to religion. In fact, I think there’s something mystical about heartfelt giving. It raises us to a higher life. The everyday world is the one in which we need to figure out what to do, and then do it—a world in which we must necessarily be focused on our own objectives, and, sometimes, competition, conflict, tension or negotiation with others.
Humanity’s great sages and mystics, however, have perceived that this isn’t the only way of being human. It is possible to transcend, even if just for a moment, this world in which self and other stand apart from one another. This higher life, of course, is what we experience in prayer and love. It’s also what gift-giving embodies—especially the sharing of the most precious things, the immaterial ones, the things of the heart. In freely giving to others, we are saying their happiness is our own. In these moments we shed, for a moment, the burden of obsessively trying to save our lives through the pursuit of worldly goals—and get a glimpse, perhaps, of eternity. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25)
It’s a riddle of human existence that there’s another universal tendency at work here—one opposed to our yearning for transcendence. Even the Zurich scientists realize that something makes us lose sight of the path to happiness that lies in giving. “In everyday life, people underestimate the link between generosity and happiness and therefore overlook the benefits of prosocial spending,” their paper states. “When asked, they respond that they assume there would be a greater increase in happiness after spending money on themselves.” It’s as though somehow a wicked spell of forgetting has been cast on us and, in the frenzy of daily life, our deep desire for transcendence somehow slips our minds.
If the problem is forgetting, then the solution, surely, must be remembering. And it’s surely this—remembering where our true happiness lies—that holy days like Christmas are for, above all else. On these occasions we’re blessed to have tradition and the presence of loved ones to jog our memory of what’s most important. Perhaps we’ll spare a thought, or more than a thought, for those less fortunate. We may then find a happiness that even science is now starting to shed light on—as well as, perhaps, a joy it may never be able to entirely explain.