THE SUPREME GIFT

Meditation on a familiar Scripture passage.

Originally published in Brazil in 1991, this brief book by the author best known for The Alchemist (1988) expands on and adapts a sermon that Scottish evangelist and natural historian Henry Drummond delivered in 1884. “The Greatest Thing in the World,” as Drummond titled the sermon, takes as its subject a passage—frequently used at weddings—from First Corinthians in which Paul advises his readers that, among other things, “Love is patient and kind.” The sermon, and Coelho’s book, go on to analyze the excerpt from Paul’s letter, breaking down love into what Coelho calls “nine ingredients”: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, guilelessness, and sincerity. This analysis tends to descend into greeting card sentimentality: “It’s so easy to be kind. The effect is immediate, and you will be rewarded forever,” Coelho explains, for example. While innocuous enough, platitudes like “There is no happiness in having or getting, only in giving” leave themselves open to disagreement. What is essentially a long essay is stretched into book length with the use of wide margins, plenty of blank pages or parts of pages, and fewer than a dozen sentences on most pages. The volume is padded, with a brief synopsis of Drummond’s actual sermon misleadingly labeled “The complete sermon text by Henry Drummond,” as well as “previews” of Coelho’s The Alchemist and Maktub, both already in print. But even as brief as the book is, it’s soporifically repetitive, with multiple variations on statements such as “Love above all else in life. Nothing else matters” or “The most important lesson we can learn is how to love,” and little in the way of explanations on how to put this advice into action.

Best for Coelho completists.