1
For in one soul are contained the hopes and feelings of all Mankind.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Voice of the Master1
The flight from Cairo to Beirut is just under an hour. It was winter, and I was heading to Kahlil’s birthplace up in the Lebanese mountains. At the time I was living in Cairo working as the rector of the historic Episcopal church serving Egypt’s international diplomatic, business, academic, and NGO (non-governmental organization) communities.
My trip to Beirut was the envy of my American diplomat friends in Egypt who, due to the US State Department’s travel restrictions, were not permitted to visit Lebanon. Following the bitter fifteen-year Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, in the midst of rebuilding, the country continued to be plagued by political and religious strife. The rise of Hezbollah (“the Party of God”), the Shia Islamic resistance group whose political party and paramilitary wing had increasingly exerted their influence over the country, created an ever-present uneasy tension, a tension that at times exploded.
Several weeks before my visit, on the picturesque seafront thoroughfare in the predominantly Christian northern section of Beirut, a car bomb exploded in a US embassy vehicle, killing four and injuring sixteen. The State Department immediately issued a travel advisory: “We strongly advise you to reconsider your need to travel to Lebanon at this time because of the highly volatile security and political situation, which could deteriorate without warning and lead to widespread violence. In these circumstances, departure options may be severely limited. . . . Ongoing tensions could lead to retaliatory or opportunistic bomb attacks against a range of targets. . . . Random shootings continue to occur.”
Only a few years earlier, I had arrived in Beirut during what was called the Cedar Revolution, a series of mass demonstrations triggered by the Valentine’s Day explosion of eighteen hundred kilograms of TNT in the car bomb assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Hariri had been responsible for reconstructing Beirut following the civil war. Most accused Syria of the attack, and Lebanese people of all shades and stripes flocked to the streets to demand the expulsion of the Syrian troops that had been present for almost thirty years. It was an exhilarating moment to see tens of thousands of people from all segments of Lebanese society united. I joined the throng, walking down the streets of Beirut waving the Lebanese flag I’d been given, which proudly displays their national emblem, the Cedar of Lebanon. I particularly remember the moving experience of visiting Rafik Hariri’s gravesite (known now as the Hariri Memorial Shrine) near the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque on the infamous Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut. In reverent silence, amid the scent of thousands of lit candles, hundreds of Christians, Muslims, and Druze lined up in a spirit of oneness paying homage to this man whose death had inspired them toward a new hope and freedom.
I was in Beirut at that time conducting interviews and doing research for a book on the Syrian novelist Mazhar Mallouhi. As someone who calls himself a Sufi Muslim follower of Christ, Mazhar’s life and writings have uniquely served to bridge the chasm of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians throughout the Arab world. Regrettably, the atmosphere of hope and goodwill in the air during that visit did not last long. Hariri’s assassination marked the beginning of a series of assassinations that resulted in the death of many prominent Lebanese figures. Mazhar himself, just prior to my arrival, had been near the explosion of a huge car bomb, which ended in a spontaneous firefight, killing six.
On this visit Mazhar had graciously offered to host me and to drive me up to Kahlil Gibran’s hometown village. I arrived at Rafik Hariri International Airport, again noticing how relaxed security seemed in contrast to when Syria had been the shadow government there. However, one is always cautious to never have an Israeli entry stamp in one’s passport, since Lebanon is officially at war with Israel. Handing my passport to the immigration official, I watched him flip carefully through it page by page, searching for Israeli stamps. As I exited the airport, Mazhar was eagerly waiting for me, Muslim prayer beads in hand. In typical Lebanese style, expressing the warmth of his welcome, we headed straight to indulge in Lebanon’s renowned cuisine, which he duly informed me was awaiting us in a magnificent restaurant operated by Hezbollah in South Beirut.
The streets were lined the entire way with hundreds of posters, banners, and billboards of the stern, bearded face of Imad Mughniyah, the most wanted Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist, who had been assassinated by a car bomb while hiding in Damascus a few days earlier. Known as “The Fox,” Mughniyah had been hunted for more than twenty years by the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies for his alleged role in numerous bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings, most notably the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985. With a bounty of five million dollars on his head, he had eluded all attempts by operatives to capture or assassinate him until now. His funeral in Beirut had been held just a few days before my arrival, during which Hezbollah’s leader-in-hiding, Hassan Nasrallah, promised retaliation. Mughniyah, now seen as a martyr, was being hailed throughout southern Lebanon as a hero. It was a tense moment in Lebanon.
At the Hezbollah restaurant, Mazhar, in introducing me to his friends, the Shia Muslim owners, explained that I had come to Lebanon to work on a book about Kahlil Gibran. Immediately they expressed their enthusiasm for what I was doing and their overwhelming love of Kahlil and his writings. They went on to share one of Kahlil’s short stories that was popular in their youth and told of their intentions to pass it on to their children.
Where is Kahlil Gibran in this modern-day Lebanon, this country that he loved so passionately and that so inspired him spiritually until the end of his life? In 1920, years after having immigrated to the United States, Kahlil expressed his love for Lebanon with these prophetic words:
You have your Lebanon and I have mine. You have your Lebanon with her problems, and I have my Lebanon with her beauty. You have your Lebanon with all her prejudices and struggles, and I have my Lebanon with all her dreams and securities. Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a place of conflict and deception. My Lebanon is a place of beauty and dreams of enchanting valleys and splendid mountains. Your Lebanon is inhabited by functionaries, officers, politicians, committees, and factions. My Lebanon is for peasants, shepherds, young boys and girls, parents and poets. Your Lebanon is empty and fleeting, whereas My Lebanon will endure forever.2
Kahlil’s Lebanon. This is what I had set out to discover. My starting point would be the small Christian village of Bsharri, high in the snowy mountains near the great cedar forests, Kahlil’s birthplace and the location of the Kahlil Gibran Museum, his final resting place.
A severe snowstorm had unexpectedly swept across the mountains overnight, breaking records and creating hazardous conditions as snow levels rose. Our journey up into the region would be precarious to say the least. The blizzard was steadily escalating as we drove, and the elemental blasts of pure winter winds made negotiating icy roads and sharp bends hugging plunging cliff drop-offs a sheer matter of faith. Twice we had to stop and dig ourselves out of deep snowdrifts. However, despite the frigid cold, the military checkpoints were in full operation. Soldiers diligently stopped our car and asked about our destination while taking furtive glances into our backseat. As our passports were being checked, I noticed a frozen waterfall, stopped in midflow, tumbling down toward the sea.
As we climbed along the edges of winding mountain roads, we drove past dozens of posters displaying a photograph of someone who looked very much like Kahlil. But it was not Kahlil. These were political posters of Samir Geagea, a Christian politician and leader of the Lebanese Forces. A controversial figure during the Lebanese Civil War, he was eventually convicted in 1994 for ordering various political assassinations and was imprisoned, held in solitary confinement for eleven years, before being granted amnesty in the wake of the Cedar Revolution in 2005. He grew up in the cedar forest region, as did Kahlil some eighty years earlier, and the resemblance was so striking that I thought they could have been brothers.
Finally the road signs indicated we were in the Bsharri District of North Lebanon, five thousand feet above sea level. We passed through the mountainous village of Dimane and by the beautiful garden of the summer residence of the patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church.
There were crosses everywhere: along the streets, on steep hillsides, on the mountaintops, and painted on houses. This was Maronite land, the heart of the Christian community in Lebanon.
The Maronites are an ancient church that traces its origins as far back as the fifth century AD, when the early Christians of Syria pledged their allegiance to a legendary monk, St. Maroun. Despite an allegiance with the Church of Rome, the Maronites preserve their ancient Eastern Syriac liturgy and the right of their priests to marry. Toughened from centuries of invasions and occupations, the Maronites are fiercely protective of their land and culture. They were brought to the world’s attention during the Lebanese civil war through the fighting of the various Maronite militias, most notably the feared Phalangists.
Passing by the patriarch’s garden, I was reminded of a photograph I have in my office, taken in the early 1900s. It is of a rotund Maronite patriarch, sitting in his rocking chair out in a garden dressed in all his ecclesiastical regalia, fast asleep. Regrettably, the peaceful image of the sleeping patriarch does not accurately reflect the tensions that exist in Lebanon’s deeply sectarian society. Yet life goes on, in the midst of conflict, war, and peace. I recall an image from a visit to Beirut’s “Green Line,” that infamous divide during the civil war separating Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut. Just a year after the truce was reached, amid shelled-out buildings and rubble, I saw two elderly men sitting on plastic chairs leaning over a rickety table playing backgammon, as though nothing else in the world mattered.
We continued the treacherous drive up the snowy roads, hugging the edge of the famous Qadisha Valley, known in Arabic as Wadi Qadisha, meaning “The Sacred Valley.” This deep gorge has sheltered Christian communities for many centuries. Looking out across the valley, we could see the ancient footpaths leading from the village’s parish church down to the bottom of the valley where the Maronites, often led by their patriarch, took refuge after the Arab Muslim invasions in the seventh century. The Lebanese writer Marun Abbud gives voice to the region:
All the peoples of the earth have passed through this land. They fought battles and then departed, leaving behind traces of their cultural heritage, which combine to form the fabric of our way of thinking. There is no other nation on earth that can claim such an interlacing of thoughts. . . . In Lebanon you can find convents and temples, fortresses and citadels, churches, cathedrals, mosques, amphitheaters, and stadiums. On each peak stands a convent, on each hill you can find a temple or a fortress, and in each valley a fortified refuge.3
While for the Maronites the “sacredness” of the valley has been inherently linked to the security it has provided over the centuries, to a visitor the magnificent and breathtaking views across the valley alone seem reason enough to justify its descriptive name. As we rounded the bend, I found myself totally unprepared for the scene that was to greet me. On the opposite side of the Sacred Valley, majestically perched below towering Mount Lebanon, sat the breathtakingly beautiful village of Bsharri. Blanketed in freshly fallen snow, the village was postcard-like, resting next to the great cedar forests of biblical renown. Balanced five thousand feet up on a narrow ridge between the edge of the Sacred Valley’s deep gorges and steep mountains, a spectacular church rose up out of the heart of the village. Its bells melodiously welcomed us, breaking through the muffled silence of the cold winter’s day.
Several feet of deep snow blocked the last quarter-mile of the road leading to the Gibran Museum, so I completed the journey by foot. At the top of the road I was greeted by a large ethereal sculpture of Kahlil, only partially carved out of the rock, emerging as if to say that he and this land were one. There was an innately spiritual atmosphere to the place.
During Kahlil’s childhood the museum was the Mar Sarkis (St. Sergius) Carmelite Hermitage, and he played throughout its grounds. Today it is a hermitage of a different sort, and the grotto is Kahlil’s final resting place, as requested in his will. The museum holds an extensive collection of his paintings, writings, letters, and many of his personal belongings: his library, furniture, and much of the art he collected.
On this day, because of the perilous road conditions, I was the only visitor. But from the sensations this place evoked, I fully understood how it attracted more than fifty thousand visitors a year. Standing outside the museum’s entrance, looking over the Sacred Valley, I heard the mystical melodies of the nay (Middle Eastern flute) echoing from the museum out into the garden. On a nearby hill I watched a young boy jumping around in the snow with his friends. The icy wind of winter seemed to be holding its breath, listening to the joyful shouts of the playing children.
While Kahlil was here more than a century ago, it was not so difficult to enter into his world; so little had changed. I was carried to a time when the world may have seemed less complicated. This storied setting formed the foundation of Kahlil’s lifelong search for spiritual depth, which was beautifully translated into his outpouring of art and writing.
At the dawn of a new year, during the heart of winter and high in this mountain village, Kahlil was born into a Maronite Catholic family on Eastern Christmas Day, January 6, 1883. Bsharri was then a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire and referred to as Syria. His mother, Kamila, was the daughter of a priest and his father, Khalil, was her second husband. Kahlil’s father initially worked in an apothecary, but prone to drink and with gambling debts rising, he went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. Around 1891 the administrator was removed and his staff investigated. Kahlil’s father was imprisoned for embezzlement, and the family’s property was confiscated. While his father was eventually released, Kahlil’s mother resolved to follow other relatives and begin a new life in North America, as many Lebanese were doing at the time. Kahlil and his mother, together with his three siblings, Peter, Marianna, and Sultana, left Lebanon in 1895. Although Kahlil spent only twelve short years in this magical setting, it was to serve as the foundation of his spirituality and worldview for the rest of his life.
Kahlil was a retiring and pensive child. Recognizing his need for solitude, his mother helped facilitate this for him. Later in life he recalled, “[S]ometimes she would smile at someone who came in . . . and lay her finger on her lips and say, ‘Hush. He’s not here.’” He was also innately creative and at an early age would draw and sculpt objects. When he was alone he would draw with a pencil, if he had one, or with a piece of charcoal, on paper or stones. Observing her son’s artistic inclination, his mother gave him a book of Leonardo da Vinci’s collected works. For Kahlil it was a profound revelation. In admiration of the great power of the Italian painter, he later reflected, “I never got over the feeling somewhere in the recesses of my soul that part of his spirit was lodged in my own. I was a child when I saw the drawings of this amazing man for the first time. I will never forget that moment as long as I live. It was as if a ship lost in the fog had suddenly found a compass.”4
Naturally inquisitive and imaginative, Kahlil loved to build toys and kites and to collect things, with a particular love for stones. The story is told of how, at the age of four, he planted bits of paper in his garden and waited patiently for a harvest full of paper leaves. Together with his half-brother and two younger sisters he intermittently attended a one-room school led by a visiting priest, learning the elementary basics of Arabic, Syriac, and math.
The strongest influence on Kahlil was undoubtedly the splendor of nature all around him—the valleys, waterfalls, rivers, rugged cliffs, cedars, and mountains—which absorbed him fully. He was known to escape into the hidden monasteries in the deep gorges of the Sacred Valley, finding needed solace in the wonder of nature. Profoundly moved by these symbols of God’s love and the wonders of the natural world, he recalled much later his early impressions:
The first great moment that I remember was when I was three years old—a storm—I tore my clothes and ran out in it. Do you remember when you first saw the sea? I was eight. My mother was on a horse, and my father and I were on a beautiful large Cyprian donkey, white. We rode up the mountain pass, and as we came over the ridge, the sea was before us. The sea and the sky were of one color. There was no horizon and the water was full of the large Eastern sailing vessels with sails all set. As we passed across the mountains, suddenly I saw what looked like an immeasurable heaven and the ships sailing in it.
I remember when I was taken to the ruins of Baalbek—the most wonderful ruins in the world. I was about nine then—my father was on a horse, and my mother was on another. I was on a pony, and our two men on mules. We stayed about four days at Baalbek—and when we left I wept. I have a notebook of the sketches I made there.5
All his life Kahlil drew inspiration from the majestic beauty of that enchanted setting and was filled with nostalgia for his homeland. His writings would celebrate the dignity and freedom of animals, birds, the seasons, oceans, and clouds. The scenery, and power of its ancient lore, became a part of his being. As Kahlil once wrote to his cousin:
The things which the child loves remains in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remember those places regardless of time and place.6
Years later, in reflecting on the beauty of his sense of oneness with all of God’s creation, Kahlil wrote:
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.7
In contrast to his peaceful surroundings, Kahlil was born into a period of political and interreligious strife, as well as corruption by religious authorities, during the later part of a four-hundred-year-long Ottoman occupation. Prior to disputes that led to the massacres beginning in 1860, the intermingling of religions was typical of Christians and Muslims in the nineteenth century. The story told of his maternal grandfather’s origins provides a glimpse into this interaction. Two Muslim horsemen were said to have entered Bsharri one day and, liking what they found, converted to Christianity, abandoning their Islamic faith, settling in the town, and marrying into his mother’s clan.8 Although childhood friends from his village were of Christian background, Kahlil enjoyed Muslim friends in the summers when they left Bsharri to visit the farm his father owned, not far from the ruins of ancient Baalbek farther east.
Thanks to his mother, Kahlil was taught the biblical stories, which captured his imagination at a young age. In her company, he went to church every Sunday, attended Mass, and tried to learn the liturgy in Syriac.9 His friend Mikhail (Mischa) Naimy recounted that on one Good Friday, Kahlil was found at the village cemetery with a bouquet of cyclamen flowers in his hands. He was too young to go with the other village children to gather flowers to place at the crucifix in church during the Mass. Left to his own devices, he mysteriously disappeared, causing his parents much anguish. Kahlil later explained to his mother that when he arrived at church to place the flowers, which he had himself picked, he found the gate closed, so he went to the cemetery to look for Christ’s tomb.10
Later in life Kahlil recalled an impacting event that occurred shortly before the family sailed for America:
When I was ten or eleven years old, I was in a monastery one day with another boy, a cousin, a little older. We were walking along a very high place that fell off more than a thousand feet. . . . The path had a handrail, but it had weakened—and path and rail and all fell with us—and we rolled probably one hundred and fifty yards in the landslide. My cousin fractured his leg, and I got several wounds and cuts in the head down to the skull, and injured my shoulder. The shoulder healed crooked—too high and too far forward. So they pulled it apart again and strapped me to a real cross with thirty yards of strap and I stayed wrapped to that cross forty days. I slept and all sitting up. I was not strong enough to take ether when they broke the shoulder again. If it had hurt less, I should probably have cried out. But it hurt too much for me to cry. My father and mother were with me talking to me.11
Even as a child Kahlil drew from strong reservoirs and processed this childhood trauma through the symbolism of biblical imagery. His splint became a cross, and he languished in pain for the same period Christ spent in the wilderness.
Throughout his life Kahlil’s writings would resound with biblical imagery. His familiarity with the Bible became a bridge in his writings between East and West. These early religious experiences became the wellspring that watered his inspiration and from which the language of his soul flowed forth.
Influences from Kahlil’s childhood spent in the Sacred Valley resound throughout his first published book, appropriately titled Nymphs of the Valley. Published in 1906, it is a collection of three short stories originally written in Arabic for an audience of Arab immigrants in America. His fresh approach to storytelling—the sardonic tone, the anticlerical critique, a focus on peasants and those from the working class—was markedly different from the formal classical Arabic style and genre of his day. And his work immediately appealed to the émigré writers in America.12
One of the stories in Nymphs of the Valley is titled “Yuhanna the Mad.” Kahlil had only just emerged from his adolescent years and gives us at the outset of his writing career a glimpse of the wealth and depth of spirit he was drawing from, both from his own childhood and from the natural bent of his contemplative personality. The roots of Kahlil’s own childhood infuse this tale with life. He crafted this story around the life of a child, a quiet simple shepherd boy who lives in the rugged hills of Lebanon. We see themes emerging that he will explore for a lifetime: his innate bond with nature and the cycle of its seasons, his fascination with the person of Jesus in the Gospels versus Jesus of the “Christian,” and appreciation for an empathetic mother who understood him and guarded his soul with her own.
The story opens:
And in the summer Yuhanna went out every morning to the field leading his oxen and his calves and carrying his plough over his shoulder, the while listening to the songs of the thrushes and the rustling of the leaves in the trees. At noontide he sat beside the dancing stream that wound its way through the lowland of the green meadows, where he ate his food, leaving unfinished morsels of bread on the grass for the birds. In the evening, when the setting sun took with it the light of day, he returned to his humble dwelling, which looked out over the villages and hamlets of North Lebanon.13
Although written years after immigrating to America, Kahlil gleans inspiration from these rich images of life in the setting of his childhood home.
During long winter nights Yuhanna
would open a wooden chest and take out of it the book of the Gospels to read from it in secret by the feeble glow of a lamp, looking stealthily from time to time in the direction of his slumbering father, who had forbidden him to read the Book. It was forbidden because the priests did not allow the simple in mind to probe the secrets of the teachings of Jesus. If they did so, then the church would excommunicate them. Thus did Yuhanna pass the days of his youth between that field of wonder and beauty and the book of Jesus, filled with the light and the spirit.14
Whenever he went to church he returned with a feeling of sorrow because the teachings that he heard from the pulpit and altar were not those that he read about in the Gospel. And the life led by the faithful and their leaders was not the beautiful life of which Jesus of Nazareth spoke in His book.15
Kahlil’s admiration of Jesus of Nazareth, in contrast to what he saw as Jesus of the “Christian,” became a lifelong passion, culminating several decades later in his book Jesus the Son of Man. He rejected the hypocrisy of what he must have observed at some level as a child, and although he did not adhere to the traditional religion of his forefathers, he chose to embrace the divine essence in all and became a lifelong pilgrim toward the depths of spirituality.
Eventually Yuhanna finds spring in the air, and the symbolic theme of a river makes its debut, an image that Kahlil repeatedly turned to throughout his life and revisited in many of his future writings:
On the mountaintops some snow still remained until it in turn melted and ran down the mountainsides and became streams twisting and winding in the valleys below. Soon they met and joined one another until they were swift-flowing rivers, their roaring announcing to all that Nature had awakened from her sleep.16
One day toward the end of Lent, Yuhanna
carried his Bible under his cloak so that nobody should see it, until he reached the meadow that rested on the shoulder of the valley near the fields of a monastery which stood up grimly like a tower in the midst of the hillocks. There his calves dispersed to pasture on the grass. Yuhanna sat . . . down against a rock, now looking across the valley in all its beauty, now reading the words in his book that spoke to him of the Kingdom of Heaven.17
The negative foreshadowing of the looming monastery soon gives way to a dramatic tale. Young Yuhanna’s calves mistakenly wander into the gardens of the monastery and a sad series of events unfold, in which self-righteous monks berate him and threaten him with insurmountable fines, heedless of his pleas for mercy. The boy musters the courage to question their hypocrisy, as they in turn attempt to discredit him with claims of insanity. Only his mother believes in him and comes to his rescue, as the story powerfully unfolds with writing full of symbolism, echoing the sufferings of Christ and exploring deep questions at the heart of life.
The early years Kahlil spent exploring the Sacred Valley of his childhood were especially formative ones. As he grew into young adulthood, the fruits of those experiences began to take shape and search for creative ways of expression. His natural gifts in both art and writing emerged as opportunities to give voice to his inner journey, already deeply spiritual.
On my return flight to Cairo I sat next to a middle-aged man who asked why I had been to Lebanon. When I shared about my visit to Kahlil Gibran’s birthplace, he went on to share with me how as a child he had learned Kahlil’s poetry through the songs of Fayrouz, the most widely admired and respected living singer in the Arab world. From Lebanon, her songs are heard throughout the Middle East. She sings about Lebanon—the beauty of its mountains, snow, and sun, and the indomitable free spirit of its people. Also of Maronite Christian background, Fayrouz frequently uses Kahlil’s poetry in her lyrics. My seat companion began to spontaneously hum the tune of one of Fayrouz’s most popular songs of Kahlil’s poetry. Then he began singing the words in Arabic for me. When those sitting on the other side of the aisle heard him singing it, they spontaneously joined in. Soon the row in front of me and the one behind me were also enthusiastically singing the song, which now surreally and joyously echoed these words through the cabin:
Bring me the flute and sing, for song is the secret to eternity. . .
Have you taken the forest, rather than the palace, to be your home?
Have you climbed up the creeks and the rocks?
Have you sat alone at dusk among the grapevines?
Among their clusters hanging like chandeliers of gold?
Have you made the grass your night-time bed?
Have you wrapped yourself in the evening air with the sky for a blanket?18
I think Kahlil would have been pleased, for his first piece of published writing was about music, written when he was just twenty-two years old and longing for the Sacred Valley of his childhood. In this essay titled “Music” (Al Musiqah), he wrote these lyrical words:
I sat by one whom my heart loves, and I listened to her words.
My soul began to wander in the infinite spaces where the
universe appeared like a dream . . .
This is Music, oh friends . . .
My friends: Music is the language of spirits. Its melody is like
the frolicsome breeze that makes the strings quiver with
love. When the gentle fingers of Music knock at the door
of our feelings, they awaken memories that have long lain
hidden in the depths of the Past. The sad strains of Music
bring us mournful recollections; and her quiet strains bring
us joyful memories. The sound of strings makes us weep at
the departure of a dear one, or makes us smile at the peace
God has bestowed upon us.
The soul of Music is of the Spirit, and her mind is of the
Heart.
Our souls are like tender flowers at the mercy of the winds of
Destiny. They tremble in the morning breeze, and bend
their heads under the falling dews of heaven.
The song of the bird awakens Man from his slumber and
invites him to join in the psalms of glory to Eternal
Wisdom that has created the song of the bird.
Such music makes us ask ourselves the meaning of the mysteries
contained in ancient books.19