3
All these things shall love do unto you
That you may know the secrets of your heart,
And in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet1
He taught me how to see,” I explained to Britelle, my daughter, as we looked out over the elegant expanse of the Jardin des Tuileries toward the Louvre. With our backs to the giant Egyptian hieroglyphed obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the jardin was alive with springtime. It was early May. This was a view that Kahlil undoubtedly saw numerous times during the two and a half years he spent in Paris—every Sunday, when admission was free, Kahlil and his high school friend, Yusuf Huwayyik, would visit the Louvre. Kahlil described themselves “as pilgrims visiting a holy shrine.”2
Growing up in French-speaking Senegal, formerly one of France’s West African colonies, I was surrounded by many people who considered Paris the ultimate dream place to live. Our family often flew through France when we returned to visit the United States. Paris seemed to be a part of my world from my first remembrances. It was a place I knew quite intimately. However, it was not until I moved to Paris the summer after graduating from university that I was taught “how to see” its beauty. The city came to life for me when my flatmate, an artist, took the time to teach me to “see”—to observe the depth of colors, the distinctive shape of things; to detect the way light falls at different times of the day; to focus on that which others commonly do not notice. No city in the world could have been a better classroom for learning how to see than the City of Lights.
While there together, my daughter and I discovered Kahlil’s Paris. We visited the homes of the writers Kahlil saw as role models, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. We explored the Left Bank’s winding streets, strolled down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, had a café crème at the Dome Café in the Latin Quarter, discovered where Kahlil’s last studio was on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and walked the banks of the Seine at night—all important to his time in Paris. Standing in front of Kahlil’s studio apartment at 14 Avenue du Maine, we read the plaque in French commemorating his time there: “Here lived from 1908 to 1910, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, 1883–1931, Painter and Poet, Lebanese-American.”
Later in the day, as we dined at La Closerie des Lilas, where Kahlil used to sit with his fellow artist friends, we talked about that important learning time in my own life. My daughter quite wisely observed that learning how to see can be another way of learning how to love, for seeing things for their innate beauty and depth, whether people, places, things, or experiences, results in loving them most fully. Perhaps this is what Vincent van Gogh meant in a letter to his brother Theo in Paris in 1880, when he wrote, “I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something—whatever you like—you will be on the way to knowing more about Him. . . . But one must love with a lofty and serious sympathy with strength, with intelligence.”3 A year later Vincent put it this way: “To believe in God is to feel that there is a God . . . [who is] urging us towards aimer encore [loving more] with irresistible force.”4
Moving to Paris in 1908, Kahlil fell in love with the city. His time in what is often referred to as the City of Love was an immensely formative period, profoundly influencing him for the rest of his life. It was a time when art thrived in Paris. Many of the great Impressionist artists were still there, albeit aging: Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt. It was also a period when “revolutionary elements” were influencing visual art. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, cofounders of Cubism, were in France at the time. The Fauvist movement of Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault was well under way. Even the young Russian modernist artist Marc Chagall moved to Paris while Kahlil was there. Some historians call this period in Paris “The Luminous Years.”
There could not have been a more interesting time to be in this art capital of the world, and Kahlil matured greatly in both his art and thinking. Although artistically gifted, prior to Paris Kahlil lacked formal training. Painting was initially his primary expression of creativity, and while this came instinctively to him, his patron, Mary Haskell, realized the benefit that formal training could provide during this early stage of his artistic development. Her willingness to sponsor several years in Paris enabled Kahlil to explore the fundamentals of painting and introduced him to the concept of visionary art, educating him in the artistic genre of Symbolism. Symbolist art, a late-nineteenth-century artistic movement in which artists portrayed their own vision of existence, thereby becoming seers or prophets of sorts, had deeply personal and mystical components and often employed mythological and dream imagery.
Underscoring how important the subject of art was to Kahlil, he wrote:
We have forgotten—or have we?—that there is but one universal language and that its voice is art.5
Kahlil wrote to Mary from Paris in October 1908:
I am painting, or I am learning how to paint. It will take me a long time to paint as I want to, but it is beautiful to feel the growth of one’s own vision of things. There are times when I leave work with the feelings of a child who is put to bed early. Do you not remember . . . my telling you that I understand people and things through my sense of hearing and that sound comes first to my soul? Now . . . I am beginning to understand things and people through my eyes.6
Not long into his formal art studies at L’Académie Julian, Kahlil began to feel confined and frustrated by the rules and constraints of a traditional art program. In another letter to Mary he describes his angst:
The professors in the academy are always saying to me “do not make the model more beautiful than she is.” And my soul is always whispering “O if you could only paint the model as beautiful as she really is.”7
Some months later he was introduced to a new teacher, Pierre Marcel-Beronneau, a visionary painter and disciple of the great nineteenth-century artist Gustave Moreau, who is seen as a father of the Symbolist movement. Kahlil found in him a kindred spirit—a mystic—and was encouraged to pour himself into the rudiments of technical painting, yet with the freedom and ultimate goal being self-expression. He also discovered the work of the French Symbolist painter Eugène Carrière, who had died three years earlier. Carrière’s work was ethereal and deeply inspiring to Kahlil. In another letter to Mary he wrote:
The work of Carrière is nearest to my heart. His figures, sitting or standing behind the mist, say more to me than anything else except the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Carrière understood faces and hands more than any other painter. He knew the depths, the height, and the width of the human figure. And Carrière’s life is not less beautiful than his work. He suffered much, but he understood the mystery of pain: he knew that tears make all things shine.8
It was during this time that Kahlil had the privilege of meeting the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin, a close friend of the late Carrière. Kahlil saw Rodin do with sculpture what Carrière attempted to do on canvas. He was deeply inspired by the “spirituality” of Rodin’s work. Kahlil’s friend Mischa wrote of Kahlil’s impression of Rodin: “He always marveled at the grand sweep of [Rodin’s] imagination and the passing ease with which his chisel and his brush made bronze and stone and canvas burst with power, poetry, and the will of life to freedom.”9
Nowhere is the transcendent nature of Rodin’s work captured more beautifully than in Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s long essay on the great sculptor. It is something I have personally gone back to time and time again. Rilke, in Paris at the same time as Kahlil, spent many hours with Rodin and worked as his personal secretary for a year. A mystic himself, Rilke highlighted in his work one of Rodin’s most moving marble sculptures about love, titled L’Éternelle Idole. Focusing on the spiritual depth of the sculpture, Rilke wrote, “The material texture of this creation encloses a living impulse as a wall encloses a garden.”10 Interestingly, the painter whom Kahlil most idolized, Carrière, owned one of the copies of this moving sculpture and had it prominently displayed in his Parisian home. Attempting to describe it as it was positioned in the twilight, Rilke wrote:
[T]his stone pulsates like a spring in which there is an eternal motion, a rising and falling, a mysterious stir of an elemental force . . . [it] radiates a mysterious greatness. One does not dare to give it one meaning, it has thousands. Thoughts glide over it like shadows, new meanings arise like riddles and unfold into clear significance. . . . A heaven is near that has not yet been reached, a hell is near that has not yet been forgotten. Here, too, all splendor flashes.11
I have visited the Musée Rodin several times. Its beautiful estate, with splendidly manicured gardens, is just a few blocks from where I first resided when living in Paris just after university. Today it contains the largest collection of the sculptor’s works. After each visit I have come away deeply inspired. Walking in the gardens I am always struck by Rodin’s moving sculpture Fugit Amor (Fugitive Love). The atmosphere is so inspiring that it makes many visitors believe even they can perhaps learn to sculpt.
During Kahlil’s Parisian sojourn, what is today the Musée Rodin was then the Hôtel Biron. It was a somewhat dilapidated building that, while up for sale, allowed tenants. Among them were several prominent writers and artists, including the painter Henri Matisse. One of the artists was a young sculptress named Clara Westhoff, Rilke’s future wife. Clara told Rodin about the estate, and in 1908, the year Kahlil moved to Paris, Rodin began renting four south-facing ground-floor rooms opening onto the terrace to use as his studios. The gorgeous garden that one sees today was at that time allowed to run wild, and Rodin saw it as a space to place some of his works. Gradually Rodin took over more of the building, and by 1911 he was the sole occupant, residing there for the rest of his life.
It is here that Kahlil once spent an hour in Rodin’s studio, together with professors and students. During a question-and-answer period, the great sculptor spoke of William Blake, the early-eighteenth-century English poet and artist who is considered one of the most original Romantic visual artists. Rodin spoke of Blake’s life and how the muses of art and poetry combined to give him a complete artistic expression, enhancing his art with poetry and his poetry with art. Rodin was echoing the saying of the ancient Roman Horace: ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”). Kahlil left Rodin’s studio and went straight to an English bookshop, found a copy of Blake’s works, and spent the rest of the day at the Jardin du Luxembourg on the Left Bank obsessively devouring Blake’s art and poetry; he had discovered a companion for his spiritual and artistic journey.
During his time in Paris, Kahlil journeyed to London and while there absorbed himself in Blake’s paintings and etchings at the Tate Gallery. Years later, when Kahlil’s publications were being marketed by Alfred A. Knopf, an up-and-coming American publisher, it was said that Rodin himself referred to Kahlil as the “William Blake of the twentieth century,” a claim that cannot be verified. Yet one significant artistic project that Kahlil initiated in Paris was his Temple of Art series of pencil portraits of famous artists of the day. Central to this series was a commanding portrait of Rodin, which I saw in Bsharri.
In 1910, during his last spring in Paris, one of Kahlil’s oil paintings, his medium of art in Paris, was entered in a show of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Entitled Autumn, it is said to be of Micheline, a French romantic interest he had first met in Boston who had helped him get settled in Paris. Like many of his works, the subject’s eyes are closed, as if in an appeal to look deeper than the surface of beauty into the soul. Rather than a defining portrait, it is an inspiring work full of movement and feeling, authentic and in harmony with his style of expression. While Kahlil was unhappy with his painting’s location in the exhibition hall, he was thrilled to see Rodin visiting the exhibition. Rodin recognized him, and they spoke briefly; the sculptor even stopped for a moment in front of his painting. Kahlil truly held Rodin in awe. It is fitting that today the largest collections of both Rodin’s and Kahlil’s works in the Western Hemisphere are exhibited next to each other at the fabulous Soumaya Museum in Mexico City.
Of Kahlil’s art, his friend Mischa wrote:
[A]s an artist he always sought simplicity of form and execution which gave his works that intriguing lightness and transparency. It was a classical simplicity which had a firm grasp of the basic fundamentals of art without being conscious of the fact; a simplicity that with a few lines would create many shapes. Far from being boundaries to the looker’s imagination those lines were eyes and wings that carried the looker leagues and leagues beyond themselves.12
While in Paris, albeit distanced from Mary, his admiration and love for her continued to grow. As their frequent letters attest, the sharing of their inner lives was deepening. Upon his return to Boston after the two-year separation, he proposed marriage to her. At first she refused, the societal complexities too great, and then she changed her mind. After much angst for them both, they ultimately settled into a platonic relationship sustained by the companionship of their souls. They resonated deeply on a spiritual level, and Mary remained his benefactor all his life and finally the guardian of his work after death.
Throughout this period his contact with the Arabic literary world was flourishing. For several years he had contributed work to the New York newspaper al-Mohajer (The Emigrant), which was reaching audiences across the Arab world. While in Paris he worked on a semi-autobiographical novella titled Broken Wings, which was eventually published in 1912. More than any of his other writings, the pages of Broken Wings strongly express Kahlil’s love for life, for women, and for God. It was a work that also led to “meeting” another profound love in his life, May Ziadah, who had moved to Cairo the year Kahlil moved to Paris. She was a gifted young writer, born in Nazareth in 1886. Her father was a Lebanese teacher from a village in the north of Lebanon; her mother was Palestinian. She grew up in Lebanon, but in 1908 her family moved to Egypt, where her father became the editor of a newspaper. Unusually talented with a command of English, French, and Arabic, she made a name for herself in journalism and literature. She was a committed feminist and hosted a weekly literary salon of contemporary Arab intellectuals in her home, attended by some of the Arab world’s greatest writers. These included Taha Hussein, known as “The Dean of Arabic Literature” and one of the most influential twentieth-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, termed “Professor of the Generation.” He was the first director of Cairo University and an architect of modern Egyptian nationalism.
After reading Kahlil’s novella Broken Wings, May wrote to him expressing admiration for his writings, to which Kahlil responded, beginning an intense and lifelong correspondence. Like Kahlil, May never married, and although they never met in person, they exchanged letters regularly and a love grew between them that continued until his death nineteen years later. While Kahlil’s letters to her over the years have been compiled into a book, her family never gave permission for hers to be published. Most importantly, May is credited with introducing Kahlil’s work to the Egyptian public.
Kahlil Gibran is still a household name in today’s Cairo, a vast city of more than twenty million people, where I lived for ten years. Along the banks of the ancient Nile, Cairo is often referred to as the “capital of the Middle East” due to its cultural, political, and religious influence. Egypt is the center of the Arab world’s film and publishing industry and is also the home of Al-Azhar, the intellectual and spiritual heart of Sunni Islam, counting more than 90 percent of all Muslims in the world. It also has the largest and oldest indigenous Christian community in the Middle East, the ancient Coptic Orthodox Church, numbering up to ten million people. I was there as the rector of the English-speaking international church, St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been founded in 1931 and over the years had become a creative catalyst for building bridges between the cultures and creeds of the Middle East and the West. As the arts can be one of the most effective mediums to build bridges between the faiths of the East and West, we held numerous interfaith programs focusing on visual art, film, literature, and music.
Literary salons continue to play an influential role in Egyptian public discourse. Throughout the history of the Middle East, salons have provided forums where citizens conspired, formed alliances, and critiqued their country’s leaders. The most celebrated literary gatherings in the Arab world, which I once had the privilege of attending in Cairo, were hosted by the late Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Today, however, the most prominent literary salons are hosted by the renowned Egyptian novelist and writer Dr. Alaa Al Aswany, whose novel The Yacoubian Building captured the world’s attention. An outspoken political and social commentator and one of Egypt’s best-known public intellectuals, Al Aswany’s writings played a crucial role in triggering the revolutionary sentiments among the Egyptian people in early 2011. Al Aswany was one of the few prominent faces of the leaderless demonstrations in the now-famous Tahrir Square, which lasted eighteen days and ended on February 11, when President Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
During my years in Cairo, the distressing days of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution were by far the most memorable. With all telephone and Internet communications with the outside world purposely cut off by the regime during the early days of the protests, there was a sense of deep uncertainty as to what was really happening. We experienced a few traumatic nights, as did millions of residents of Egypt’s largest cities, as thugs attempted numerous times to enter our apartment building, only to be warded off by our Egyptian neighbors’ shotguns. CNN’s global news coverage actually highlighted the various attempts by bandit mobs carrying knives, two-by-fours, and makeshift weapons to breach our building. Soon neighborhood vigilante groups formed throughout the cities to protect their respective neighborhoods, as all police and government security had disappeared. These were harrowing days in many ways.
Just under a month after President Mubarak’s ouster, I found myself in downtown Cairo, standing in a crowded smoke-filled room for Al Aswany’s first post-Mubarak salon. He had been holding this weekly literary salon for more than fifteen years, but this one was different. More than one hundred political activists, artists, academics, businesspersons, and youths packed the room to hear his perspective on the current political situation. Most of the discussions revolved around the seemingly real possibility of building democracy in Egypt.
Banners surrounded the entrance to the meeting room, carrying everything from popular revolutionary slogans to publicity for Coca-Cola. But the central banner, visible to everyone, held the words of Kahlil Gibran in Arabic, about what good “citizenship” entails:
It is to acknowledge the other person’s rights before asserting your own; but always to be conscious of your own. It is to be free in word, and deed; but it is also to know that your freedom is subject to the other person’s freedom. It is to create the useful and the beautiful with your own hands and to admire what others have created in love and with faith. It is to produce by labour and only by labour and to spend less than you have produced that your children may not be dependent upon the state for support when you are no more.13
May would have been extremely proud.
Broken Wings, the longest narrative Kahlil ever wrote, is a tender lyrical story of love that flies in the face of the Middle Eastern cultural traditions of his time. Exploring the contrasting colors of joy and sorrow, he used brushstrokes of compassion to insightfully portray both love’s happiness as well as immeasurable sorrow in a search for spiritual meaning.
It was actually Kahlil’s defense of the rights of “her oppressed sisters in the East” that most impressed May in Broken Wings. Kahlil embraced an incredibly high view of women, whether friend, stranger, lover, sister, or mother, and he consistently wove his admiration for them into the essence of his painting and writing. This is especially noteworthy considering the patriarchal society of his childhood, and also the time period in America in which he was immersed, as women were in the thick of the fight for the right to vote. Even his view of God echoed his convictions and pushed the boundaries of the accepted norm:
Most religions speak of God in the masculine gender. To me He is as much a Mother as He is a Father. He is both the father and the mother in one; and Woman is the God-Mother. The God-Father may be reached through the mind or the imagination. But the God-Mother can be reached through the heart only—through love.14
He also wrote affectionately of mothers and drew the image of his own mother in a moving work of art called Towards the Infinite, the frontispiece of a published collection of his art titled Twenty Drawings. In Broken Wings he lifted the role of “mother” onto the highest pedestal.
The most beautiful word on the lips of mankind is the word “Mother,” and the most beautiful call is the call of “My mother.” It is a word full of hope and love, a sweet and kind word coming from the depths of the heart. The mother is everything—she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly.15
Every thing in nature bespeaks the mother. The sun is the mother of earth and gives it its nourishment of heat; it never leaves the universe at night until it has put the earth to sleep to the song of the sea and the hymn of birds and brooks. And this earth is the mother of trees and flowers. It produces them, nurses them, and weans them. The trees and flowers become kind mothers of their great fruits and seeds. And the mother, the prototype of all existence, is the eternal spirit, full of beauty and love.16
Kahlil, reflecting on his mother, wrote, “She lived countless poems and never wrote one. . . . The song that lies silent in the heart of the mother will sing upon the lips of the child.” And in the wake of her death, he said, “My life is shrouded, not because she was my mother, but because she was my friend.”17
In the opening pages of Broken Wings, Kahlil invites us into the silent sorrow of an older man as he recalls the loss of his great love in his youth. The hand of destiny led the man early in life to his heart’s “shrine,” Selma.
In that year I was reborn and unless a person is born again his life will remain like a blank sheet in the book of existence. In that year, I saw the angels of heaven looking at me through the eyes of a beautiful woman.18
Real beauty is a ray which emanates from the holy of holies of the spirit, and illuminates the body, as life comes from the depths of the earth and gives color and scent to a flower.19
The sorrowful spirit finds rest when united with a similar one. . . . Hearts that are united through the medium of sorrow will not be separated by the glory of happiness. Love that is cleansed by tears will remain eternally pure and beautiful.20
Just as love is blossoming, Selma’s widowed father is visited by an imposing bishop, shattering the old man’s world with his request for the hand of his daughter for a nephew in need of a wife. The father’s only response to the bishop was a deep silence and falling tears.
The father emerges from this meeting bent down, as if carrying a heavy load, and in tears tries to tell his daughter she is going to be taken away.
Hearing these words, Selma’s face clouded and her eyes froze as if she felt a premonition of death. Then she screamed, like a bird shot down, suffering, and trembling, and in a choked voice said, “What do you say? What do you mean? Where are you sending me?”
Then she looked at him searchingly, trying to discover his secret. In a moment she said, “I understand. I understand everything. The Bishop has demanded me from you and has prepared a cage for this bird with broken wings.”21
After a week passes, the young man searches for perspective as he processes what is to come. We get a subtle glimpse here of Kahlil’s intentional insertion of joy in the midst of sorrow, a sort of swaying back and forth in the rhythmic dance of life.
In the morning, when I walked in the fields, I saw the token of Eternity in the awakening of nature, and when I sat by the seashore I heard the waves singing the song of Eternity. And when I walked in the streets I saw the beauty of life and the splendor of humanity in the appearance of passers-by and the movements of workers.22
Before the two lovers are forced to part ways, each speaks in turn:
Then she said, “I want you to love me as a poet loves his sorrowful thoughts. I want you to remember me as a traveller remembers a calm pool in which his image was reflected as he drank its water. I want you to remember me as a mother remembers her child that died before it saw the light, and I want you to remember me as a merciful king remembers a prisoner who died before his pardon reached him. I want you to be my companion, and I want you to visit my father and console him in his solitude because I shall be leaving him soon and shall be a stranger to him.”23
I answered her, saying, “I will do all you have said and will make my soul an envelope for your soul, and my heart a residence for your beauty and my breast a grave for your sorrows. I shall love you, Selma, as the prairies love the spring, and I shall live in you in the life of a flower under the sun’s rays. I shall sing your name as the valley sings the echo of the bells of the village churches; I shall listen to the language of your soul as the shore listens to the story of the waves. I shall remember you as a stranger remembers his beloved country, and as a hungry man remembers a banquet, and as a dethroned king remembers the days of his glory, and as a prisoner remembers the hours of ease and freedom. I shall remember you as a sower remembers the bundles of wheat on his threshing floor, and as a shepherd remembers the green prairies, the sweet brooks.”24
Later in Broken Wings, on his deathbed Selma’s father declares:
Let my dream end and my soul awaken with the dawn.25
Oh, Lord, have mercy and mend our broken wings.26
For some time after Selma’s marriage, the two lovers arranged to meet, chastely, in the ruins of an old temple, until suspicions arose. The setting is symbolic; on one wall is painted a crucified Christ with his mother and women sorrowfully at his side, and on the other is an old Phoenician picture carved into the rock depicting Ishtar, goddess of love and beauty, sitting on her throne.
During one visit Selma points out:
In the heart of this rock there are two symbols depicting the essence of a woman’s desires and revealing the hidden secrets of her soul, moving between love and sorrow—between affection and sacrifice, between Ishtar sitting on the throne and Mary standing by the cross. The man buys glory and reputation, but the woman pays the price.27
Human society has yielded for seventy centuries to corrupted laws until it cannot understand the meaning of the superior and eternal laws. A man’s eyes have become accustomed to the dim light of candles and cannot see the sunlight. Spiritual disease is inherited from one generation to another until it has become a part of people, who look upon it, not as a disease, but as a natural gift, showered by God upon Adam. If those people found someone free from the germs of this disease, they would think of him with shame and disgrace.28
This tender tale finds an appropriately tragic ending with the death of Selma and her newborn. Yet infused throughout are the vacillating emotions and expressions of joy and sorrow. To Kahlil this theme permeated so much of his worldview and, in turn, his art and writing. In the face of personal suffering, he allowed himself to feel deeply; but in that same well of depth, he found its counterpart—the beauty of joy. He was a lover of life, not primarily in the surface layer of happiness abounding, although he undoubtedly experienced such moments, but in a fuller, richer sense.
“‘Seeing through the Eye,’ old boy, is the secret,” a wise old sage told me as he put his hand on my shoulder; his sparkling blue eyes seemed to penetrate my soul. Working in London not long after university, I had taken the Saturday train down to the village of Robertsbridge in East Sussex to meet one of my heroes, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English writer, mystic, and former BBC commentator. He was eighty-five years of age, with only several years left to live. Yet there in his quaint country cottage, he pointedly wanted to share the lessons he had learned over the course of his fascinating and at times troubled life. “Seeing through the Eye.” It was a line from a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet and artist William Blake, whom Muggeridge, like Kahlil, was very keen on and had written about extensively. Muggeridge introduced me to William Blake that day, as Rodin introduced Kahlil to him in Paris. Interestingly, Muggeridge was pointing me to what is very much the theme of Kahlil’s Broken Wings. As one reads Broken Wings, one senses the influence of Blake throughout. Blake had himself experienced profound states of celebration and desperation throughout his life. Muggeridge, like Blake, as the young Kahlil was learning, understood that Joy and Suffering are the two poles between which the current of life passes. Yet they can also together generate a spark of the Divine.
Muggeridge’s favorite lines of Blake’s poetry, lines I have become very fond of as well, certainly would have also captured Kahlil’s attention.
Man was made for Joy & Woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the World we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine,
Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro’ the Eye.29
(“Auguries of Innocence,” 1803)
Kahlil very poignantly captures in Broken Wings this same paradox of life, in which deep joy is intertwined with profound sorrow.
As I left that day, heading back to the train station, I was reminded of a speech Muggeridge had given at my alma mater a number of years earlier. In it he concluded, “I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned . . . in the world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness.”
The life gift of joy and sorrow is a theme that Kahlil addresses in his writings throughout the rest of his life. In his work “The Spirit,” from his collection A Tear and a Smile, Kahlil creatively explores this mystery more fully.
And the God of gods separated a spirit from Himself and created in it Beauty.
He gave to it the lightness of the breeze at dawn and the fragrance of the flowers of the field and the softness of moonlight.
Then He gave to it a cup of joy, saying:
“You shall not drink of it except that you forget the Past and heed not the Future.”
And He gave to it a cup of sadness, saying:
“You shall drink and know therefrom the meaning of Life’s rejoicing.”30
Love, which is God, will accept from us these tears and sighs as an offering . . .
(A Tear and a Smile)31
In other writings, Kahlil elaborates on this life mystery.
For he who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy.
(The Voice of the Master)32
When either your joy or your sorrow becomes great the world becomes small.
(Sand and Foam)33
Sorrow softens the feelings, and Joy heals the wounded heart. Were Sorrow and Poverty abolished, the spirit of man would be like an empty tablet, with naught inscribed save the signs of selfishness and greed.
(The Voice of the Master)34
Your joy is sorrow unmasked.
(The Prophet)35
He was a man of joy; and it was upon the path of joy that He met the sorrows of all men. And it was from the high roofs of His sorrows that He beheld the joy of all men.
(Jesus the Son of Man)36
Kahlil resonated with Blake’s spirituality as well as his art and writing. While Blake’s work often attacked conventional religion, his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of spirituality. And Blake, like Kahlil, admired Jesus profoundly, seeing him as above all dogma and morality.
Despite the fact that Kahlil did not resonate with the forms of a traditional religion and repeatedly blasted hypocrisy in religious institutions, such as utilizing the role of a bishop as the “bad guy” in Broken Wings, he was a deeply spiritual person with a profound love for God. From his earliest years on, he refused to limit his concept of God, rooted in him through the gift of his mother, but rather sought persistently to quench his longings for God.
He once expressed to Mary, “When I paint a picture, I try to give the picture a presence. It is the coming together of certain elements in a certain way, as if they made a sort of path along which God can come through to our consciousness.”37 Another time he wrote to her, “I have obtained a first-rate telescope, and I spend an hour or two every evening staring into infinity, close to that which is distant and remote, and in awe of the Greater Whole.”38
The collection of imagery and created synonyms Kahlil used for God are many: The Infinite, The Almighty, God Creator, Nature, Love, Spirit, Holy Spirit, Eternal Wisdom, Unseen, Supreme Poet, Eternal Altar, All-Powerful, Eternal Spirit, Supreme Infinite, Lord of Life of Love and of Death, Great Spirit, Great Intelligent Being, the Unknown, the Great Sea, the Absolute, Great Power, to name a few.
Over and over again Kahlil focused in his work on love for God rather than religion:
“Religion?” in answer to a query. “What is it? I know only life. Life means the field, the vineyard and the loom. . . . The Church is within you. You yourself are your priest.”39
Kahlil’s friend Barbara Young was often asked about Kahlil’s perspective on God and religion. In her reflections on Kahlil she wrote:
Organized religion had no attraction for this man. He would not argue the subject. When some ardent cultist would seek to convince him of the supervalue of a particular creed or dogma, the poet would answer, “Yes, it is all on the way.”40
The question has been constantly asked me, “But was not Gibran really a Christian?” My own reply would be that he was the greatest Christian of them all—but neither an organized nor an orthodox Christian. Perhaps if we must have a word—he did not need one—we might call him a Christian mystic. For mystic he certainly was in the perfect and perfected sense.41
Kahlil was also a lover of great interior depth.
“The soul is mightier than space,” he said, “stronger than time, deeper than the sea, and higher than the stars.” He was preoccupied during his entire life with the depths that he knew the spirit of man able to plumb and the heights that he was convinced man was destined to scale.42
He lived from within, passionately and intensely, exploring the rich reservoir of inner resources he had been given. To discover these gifts and share them was his passion. His work was his life, and with intensity of spirit, it gave the breath of creation to each of his tasks. Once asked by an admirer if he preferred writing or painting more, he responded by saying that was like asking someone which of his two children was his favorite. His time of development in Paris matured him on many levels, giving him more tools of expression and a greater understanding of who he was, as well as the permission to listen to the spiritual and creative foundations that had been whispering within him since his earliest days. He wrote to a friend a couple of years later, reflecting on the time in Paris, saying, “In Paris I was reborn.”43 Kahlil returned to Boston from Paris with confidence and clarity of vision. He would spend the remainder of his life giving expression to the creative fire of love within him.
In a letter to Mary on his birthday a few years later, he wrote:
I have been thinking of writing, of giving forms, to the one thought that changed my inner-life—God and the Earth and the soul of man. A voice is shaping itself in my soul and I am waiting for words. My one desire now is to find the right form, the right garment that would cling to the human ears. The world is hungry, Mary; and if this thing is bread it will find a place in the heart of the world, and if it is not bread, it will at least make the hunger of the world deeper and higher. It is beautiful to speak of God to man. We cannot fully understand the nature of God because we are not God, but we can make ready our consciousness to understand, and grow through, the visible expressions of God.44
Paris profoundly shaped Kahlil’s view on the fuller dimensions of love. While in Paris he began writing what was to become, years later, his magnum opus, The Prophet, his best-known work. It is composed of prose poetry essays addressing numerous topics. And in it Kahlil focuses first on Love, expressing his matured understanding of its meaning and depth.
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.45