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I shall be a tempest in their sky, and a song in their soul.
—Kahlil Gibran, Jesus the Son of Man1
I have always been fascinated by storms. As a child growing up in Senegal, we had storms called the Harmattan. The storms would come in off the Sahara Desert down into the Sahel to the West African coast. Picking up sand along the way, by the time they reached us they were full of fine red clay dust that filled the air.
The winds that propel these storms increase the threat of bush fires and can cause severe crop damage. When the Harmattan trade winds interacted with southerly monsoon rains, the storms that ensued would be calamitous, tearing apart the poorly built housing structures in rural West Africa. As a young boy, I remember the Harmattan haze that would set in, and could block the sun for several days, like a heavy, dry, dusty fog. It costs airlines in the region millions of dollars each year to cancel and divert flights.
Living in Egypt we had the Khamaseen sandstorms, their name derived from the Arabic word for “fifty.” These spring storms would whip up sporadically over about a fifty-day period, carrying in fine dust off the desert that would penetrate our windows and leave an almost sticky residue on our tables. We would all hunker down when these winds blew because there was no escaping grit in your hair, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose if you were caught outside. During these storms Cairo in effect closed down, as most sought refuge inside.
Stories still circulate that both Napoleon’s military campaigns in Egypt as well as Allied and German forces in North Africa during the Second World War faced these dreaded Khamaseens. They were forced to halt fighting when sand whirled, temporarily blinding soldiers and creating electrical disturbances that could render compasses useless.
One year in Egypt we lived through a locust swarm, a storm like I’d never before experienced. News had spread in advance that swarms were moving toward Cairo. Our children were off at school the day the locusts arrived and, we hoped, safely indoors. When the skies eerily darkened and the locusts swept through our neighborhood, it felt as though an ancient plague was descending upon us. Many locusts fell to the earth as massive swarms ripped through the city, and our kids enthusiastically reported afterward that their science teachers had let them collect specimens for research purposes.
Some of the rainstorms I remember most clearly were in tropical Africa, when I was working briefly in Matadi, Congo’s main port on the left bank of the great Congo River. The forest rainstorms pounded so heavily on the corrugated tin roofs that you could not hear the person next to you speaking. The skies opened up and literally everything shut down, including electricity, so everyone took shelter inside in the dark. We became hermits in the storm. I recall standing in awe at the power of the thrashing storm as it raged on and on.
Kahlil felt these kinds of connections to the power of storms—the tempests, as he often called them. And as he did not separate the material world from the spiritual, he saw life as a tempest and learned the beauty of embracing it.
Yet the years after the First World War weighed heavily on Kahlil. He struggled with health issues as a result of many hardships and an unhealthy lifestyle: smoking, heavy coffee drinking, skipping meals, drinking arak (the strong anise-based Middle Eastern liquor), and often working obsessively all through the night. He had left the land of his childhood; lost his mother, brother, and sister within an eighteen-month period; and his pursuit of love was fraught with disappointment. Just the distress of leaving his childhood roots in rural Lebanon to settle into urban industrialization in one of poorest sections of Boston would have been enough to cause ongoing internal upheaval. Although much of his art over the years explored the realms of Symbolist Romanticism, Kahlil also did portrait work and family scenes, but his portrayals of families, children, and mothers often showed signs of distress.
The many personal losses he had experienced began to layer, causing waves of anxiety, grief, and depression. Kahlil’s father died while he was studying in Paris, although it was reported that his father had blessed him on his deathbed, after a lifetime of disapproval. In addition he suffered major financial losses due to failed business dealings. As the storms of life threatened to overwhelm him, Kahlil chose to explore the tempest metaphor, a theme he often revisited throughout his life. In The Madman, he expressed his inner struggles, reflecting the tension of being caught between two cultures.
But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?2
By the time the First World War was officially under way Kahlil’s homeland of Lebanon had already suffered greatly under the Turks, causing intense emotional angst for Kahlil. He sought ways to turn his feelings of helplessness into more tangible expressions and continued to pour himself into his art and writing. In great celebration at the war’s end in November 1918 he wrote to Mary Haskell:
Out of the dark mist a new world is born. It is indeed a holy day. The most holy since the birth of Jesus. The air is crowded with the sound of rushing waters and the beating of Mighty Wings. The voice of God is in the wind.3
When I visited the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, I saw a handwritten letter that Kahlil’s friend Barbara Young had written to his sister Marianna, expressing how relieved she was that Kahlil did not have to live through the Second World War as well.
I have thought often how glad I am that Kahlil did not stay here to behold this ghastly horror and nightmare that has befallen the planet. His agony would have been intolerable.4
The theme of suffering and death weighed heavily on Kahlil. I remember seeing one of his drawings from 1910 in the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, depicting a reminder that death is always present. It is a charcoal drawing of a beautiful woman in the forefront with a skull floating in the air behind her. The museum labeled it “Woman and Death’s Head,” but Kahlil had left it untitled.
After the end of the First World War, the following year of 1919 saw the publication in English of a book of Kahlil’s drawings titled Twenty Drawings. He also published a long prose poem written in classical Arabic called The Processions, a dialogue between a spiritually awakened man and a man in bondage. As these thoughts were materializing, he was also hard at work on a collection of prose and short stories called The Tempests.
The Tempests was published in Arabic in Cairo in 1920, and it gives us a deeper glimpse into his fascination with storms that developed when he was a young boy in Lebanon. He loved the power and wonder they evoked. Mary records Kahlil’s enchantment with storms in her journal after a visit together during the summer of 1920:
A big storm broke, with torrents of rain and with thunder. Kahlil was elated. “Mary, a storm does something for me that nothing else on earth does. In a storm like this one I rode on a white horse at a run, galloped fifteen or sixteen miles. The horse was probably a little bit maddened. I was exceedingly happy. My first memory is of a storm. I tore my clothes to run out into it. They ran after me, and brought me back. I was soaked and they rubbed me with alcohol. But I ran out into many another. Everything I’ve done that is biggest has come from a storm. My latest book is named Storms (The Tempests).” There came a great thunder roll. “That went through me like Christ speaking to me,” said Kahlil.5
One of Kahlil’s stories that I find especially thought-provoking is the pinnacle piece in The Tempests. It is a short story called “The Tempest,” placed in the setting of his childhood, the Qadisha Valley, about a young man who is roaming the cedar forests one autumn afternoon and gets caught in a terrible rainstorm. He seeks cover in an isolated shelter inhabited by a hermit, Yusif El Fakhri, someone he had heard of from local villagers and had longed to meet one day.
Kahlil decorated his home studio “hermitage” sparsely in a manner that created a contemplative atmosphere. A simple wooden bed, several crucifixes made of wood and metal, a small brass chalice, an easel, and a tapestry of an Eastern Christ hung on the wall above an altar-like table with brass candlesticks. It was a reminder to him of the hermitage near where he had spent his childhood in Lebanon. Five years before his death, he had considered purchasing the Carmelite monastery for his retirement and its monks’ hermitage for his final repose. His dream did materialize following his death, as his will requested that he be buried in the grotto of that same hermitage in what is today the Gibran Museum in Bsharri.
In Kahlil’s day, while some believed that hermits were mystics, most assumed they were madmen. It is rare for a person to withdraw from society into isolation in the context of a Middle Eastern communal culture, such as exists in Lebanon. When living in Egypt, it was fascinating to see how even life in prison is lived in community. I remember going to visit a Belgian in prison in Cairo who had been arrested for selling drugs. The prisoner’s mother had asked me to visit him, as he was allowed to receive visitors, but she could only come from Belgium several times a year. On my first visit I imagined him being held in isolation, locked up in an individual cell. But to my surprise, he was in one large room with all the other prisoners. I was not allowed to enter that area of the prison, but I learned that the inmates naturally divided themselves into communities based on where they were from in Egypt. As he was the only foreigner, he had to join a community for safety and food. He had changed “communities” several times in the years he had been there. Families would send food regularly to the prison, and the prisoners helped provide for one another. Tora Prison, where he was being held, was just a couple miles from where we lived. It was also known as Egypt’s political prison; hence, during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it was one of the prisons attacked during the days of chaos, and many of those who were imprisoned there by President Mubarak were set free.
My first visit in Egypt to the oldest monastery in the world, St. Anthony’s near the Red Sea, was a powerful experience. At that time the many ancient frescoes in the church were being restored. For centuries they had not been visible due to accumulated dirt, smoke damage from candles and incense, as well as layers of graffiti, including from the hands of historic Crusaders passing through the region. All of this was slowly being removed, and the frescoes beneath were breathtaking. Vivid in color, they were being restored to their original beauty.
St. Anthony was a fourth-century Middle Eastern monk in Egypt who gave birth to the idea of monastic life. Anthony settled into a small cave—a hermitage—secluded on the edge of a barren rocky cliff near the Red Sea. Pilgrims today still make the climb up to his dwelling. The first time I visited St. Anthony’s, I had imagined meeting quiet ascetics steeped in meditation and withdrawn from society. Instead I found a vibrant community of active monastics. The monastery guide was a resident monk who wore the traditional long black Coptic Orthodox robe with a camel-leather Coptic cross hanging from his neck and embroidered crosses on his skullcap. In the midst of his overview to visitors about the monastery’s history, we heard the incongruous sound of a cell phone ringing. Moments later our monk rummaged through his long flowing robe and pulled out a black flip phone. Before that conversation had ended, another phone began ringing; he sheepishly smiled at us and dug out a second cell phone from his other deep pocket. Reflecting the communal nature of Middle Eastern culture, as opposed to being cloistered, we found the monks of St. Anthony’s to be vital members of the Coptic Orthodox Church at large, running church publishing companies and charities and actively leading spiritual retreats.
We did learn that there was a separate area of the monastery designated for reflective respite when desired, and communal prayers were woven into the routines of their days and nights. Although the hermitage Kahlil would have encountered in Lebanon as a child was nestled into a forest of trees rather than barren desert, the cultural workings of its monastic life were probably very similar. The imagery of monastic life was something Kahlil admired.
My first experience within the walls of a Middle Eastern monastery took place before I moved to Egypt. I had been invited to speak at a spiritual retreat at the fourth-century Coptic monastery of St. Bishoy in the Wadi El Natrun, a desert valley in the Nitrian Desert. All I knew of the Wadi El Natrun was through the writings of the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who crashed his airplane in the desert there, survived, and went on to write his famous philosophical novella The Little Prince, highlighting the metaphysical insights he gained from his experience of being marooned in the area’s barrenness. I soon learned that this ancient monastery named for the Desert Father St. Bishoy had more recently been a prison of sorts for the late Pope Shenouda III, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, who was kept there under house arrest during the years Anwar Sadat was president of Egypt. It was indeed a fascinating place, with ancient churches, cells for monks, refectories, a four-story modern “palace,” and relics of Coptic saints, including the purported incorruptible body of St. Bishoy himself. I also discovered that Pope Shenouda III kept a zoo of exotic animals in his private monastery quarters, which I thoroughly enjoyed walking through in the coolness of the early mornings. Yet despite the many inspiring experiences I have had there since, I will never forget the mosquitoes. On my first night I climbed onto my rock-hard mattress and glanced up at the tall arched ceiling before turning out my light. A dark mass of mosquitoes loomed high above. I crawled under the sheets, turned off the light, and waited. Minutes later I flipped on the light switch and looked up at the ceiling; there was not a mosquito in sight, as all were already on their way down toward me. At breakfast the next morning, I noticed the swollen, red-marked faces of the other priests. No one had been spared.
In Kahlil’s story “The Tempest,” our first-person narrator realizes that the storm is a fortunate opportunity, as he has long wanted to learn this old hermit’s spiritual secrets.
I was in a miserable plight when I reached the hermitage, and as I knocked on the door the man whom I had been longing to see opened it. He was holding in one hand a dying bird whose head had been injured and whose wings had been broken.6
Upon being let in, the elderly hermit Yusif says to the story’s narrator, when he complains about the tempest outside:
The tempest is clean . . . why do you seek to escape from it? . . . The tempest would have bestowed upon you a great honour . . . if she had swallowed you.7
As the old man gently attends to the bird’s injuries he says:
It is my wish that man would show the bird’s instinct . . . for man inclines towards fear . . . and as he feels the awakening of the tempest he crawls into the crevices and the caves of the earth and hides himself.8
Many are those who lift their heads above the mountain tops, but their spirits remain dormant in the obscurity of the caverns.9
Referencing biblical imagery, Yusif continues:
I came to this place when the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.10
The hour begins to get late:
Night was spreading her black garment upon those valleys, and the tempest was shrieking dizzily and the rain becoming stronger. I began to fancy that the Biblical flood was coming again.11
The old man engages in conversation reluctantly and slowly imparts his wisdom through beautiful imagery. Again, we see the weaving of seasons into Kahlil’s writing.
I sought solitude for in it there is a full life for the spirit and for the heart and for the body. I found the endless prairies where the light of the sun rests, and where the flowers breathe their fragrance into space, and where the streams sing their way to the sea. I discovered the mountains where I found the fresh awakening of Spring, and the colourful longing of Summer, and the rich songs of Autumn, and the beautiful mystery of Winter. I came to this far corner of God’s domain for I hungered to learn the secrets of the Universe, and approach close to the throne of God.12
The theme of the spirit’s awakening emerges as conversation continues:
And among all vanities of life, there is only one thing that the spirit loves and craves. . . . It is an awakening in the spirit; it is an awakening in the inner depths of the heart; it is an overwhelming and magnificent power that descends suddenly upon man’s conscience and opens his eyes, whereupon he sees Life amid a dizzying shower of brilliant music, surrounded by a circle of great light, with man standing as a pillar of beauty between the earth and the firmament. . . . It is a secret hand which removed the veil from my eyes.13
Yusif, the old sage, bared his soul, clarifying that he left the world to “live in the awakeness of life” and “think upon the compelling and beautiful mystery of existence.”14
Thinking of the tempest of life, I am reminded of a poignant novel titled Ports of Call, written by the renowned Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf, whom many see as reflecting the spirit of Kahlil Gibran today. I was so moved by the story that I sought out Maalouf in Paris to secure the film rights to the book. At that time I had hoped that legendary Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, a friend, who had previously acted the role of Kahlil Gibran in film and was a fan of Maalouf’s writings, would play a role in the eventual production of the movie. Ports of Call tells the story of a man going through a tremendous tempest in his life. It is an epic love story between a Lebanese-Turkish Muslim man, Ossyane, whose mother was Armenian Christian, and a Jewish woman, Clara, whom he met when serving in the French Resistance during the Second World War. Ossyane lived a virtual tempest in terms of both the love and the life he lost due to the many years he was unjustly locked away in a Lebanese asylum. In many ways the story is a microcosm of the Middle East, a turbulent and war-torn region. Addressing the inordinate amount of innocent suffering experienced due to ethnic, religious, and national conflicts, the story nevertheless profoundly contributes to overcoming traditional prejudices with respect to the differences that have divided people and made them enemies.
When I went to Paris to meet Amin Maalouf, we had dinner together and talked until well after midnight over two bottles of champagne, his drink of choice. The aspect of Ports of Call’s story that spoke most powerfully to me was the sense that Ossyane, who narrates the story as an older man, had lived an incredibly difficult life but had overcome its power to destroy his spirit. He had learned to embrace the storm. The hardships he experienced were beyond his control, but through them all his true spirit emerged, resilient and beautiful. After a quarter of a century, the lovers’ reunion at the end of the book is one of the most moving passages I have ever read. Ossyane had come through and overcome the tempest. Maalouf, in one of his other novels, expresses thanks to God for life’s “storms.”
Let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.15
At the powerful conclusion of “The Tempest,” the old hermit Yusif leaves the young man sheltered in his hermitage.
I am going now to walk through the night with the tempest. . . it is a practice that I enjoy greatly. . . . I hope you will teach yourself to love, and not to fear, the tempest.16
Kahlil’s ability to face life’s storms, rather than run from them, liberated him internally, and through his writings he sought to share this freedom with others. In thinking of Kahlil’s life, I am reminded of the wise words of Origen, the third-century church father from Egypt: “You have coals of fire . . . sit on them and they will be of help to you.”17 Kahlil continued to journey, to grow, and to learn from the storms of life. In a letter to May in Cairo some years later, he wrote: “If you only knew how much I need simplicity. I wish you knew how much I long for the absolute . . . the absolute in the storm.”18
I saw a fascinating painting by Kahlil at the Gibran Museum in Bsharri called Tempest Rising in the Spirit of the Poet. It is a dark painting with a storm brewing. A man alone with a walking stick is slumped over. One thing that struck me in the Gibran Museum was how many of his paintings are related to this theme. There is a very emotive work called Anguish. Just a few feet away is another poignant work, titled On Death and Despair. Clearly, Kahlil was captivated with the tempests of life, both spiritual and physical.
As I wandered through the museum, I was drawn to an early handwritten draft of Kahlil’s final book, Jesus the Son of Man. I was struck by how Kahlil described Jesus’s death through the voice of Mary Magdalene: “On that day there was a great storm that swept the valley.”
Another story in this collection published with “The Tempest” was one that Kahlil wrote on Good Friday called “The Crucified,” in which he portrayed Jesus with the strength of a raging tempest.
The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength. . . . Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings.19
In a letter to May in Cairo, apparently addressing a concern she had about The Tempests, he wrote:
What am I to say about the caverns of my soul? Those caverns that frighten you so—I take refuge there when I grow weary of the ways of men, of their rankly blossoming fields and overgrown forests. I retreat into the caverns of my soul when I can find no other place to rest my head; and if some of those whom I love possessed the courage to enter into these caverns they would find nothing but a man on his knees saying his prayers.20
In The Tempests, the theme of awakening continues to evolve in Kahlil’s story titled “Eventide of the Feast.” It is a dreamlike story that tells of a man portrayed as homeless and a bit mad who asks another man for shelter. The man is willing to give him money for lodging at an inn, but he replies that he is not seeking a roof but human shelter. Eventually the man sees the marks of nails in his palms and cries out “Oh Jesus, the Nazarene!” He then awakes, realizing he had been dreaming.
At that moment, I opened my eyes, lifted my head, and looked around, but found naught except a column of smoke before me, and I heard only the shivering voice of the silence of the night, coming from the depths of Eternity. I collected myself and looked again to the singing throngs in the distance, and a voice within me said, “The very strength that protects the heart from injury is the strength that prevents the heart from enlarging to its intended greatness within. The song of the voice is sweet, but the song of the heart is the pure voice of heaven.”21
I made a trip to Washington, DC, to see the Kahlil Gibran Memorial Garden, which was dedicated in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush. It was to be a quick trip because I was expected in New York for meetings; I decided to fly into Washington on my way and then take a train up to New York the following day. I woke up extremely early the day I was leaving to a torrential downpour. I was staying in a hotel across the Potomac River and could hear the relentless wind and rain driving sideways into my windowpane. I doubted my umbrella was going to be of much help. It was still early dawn when my prearranged chauffeur arrived to take me to Union Station via the memorial garden. My chauffeur was quick to inform me that he had just dropped off William Bennett, the former secretary of education, for his morning radio program. Evidently he drove him to the radio station each day. My driver was an older Sudanese Muslim, and his gracious spirit was contagious. When I told him we were going to the Gibran Memorial because I was writing a book about Kahlil, he immediately came to life, exclaiming, “Gibran is the answer to our needs today.” He then went on to tell me that Ralph Nader, the political activist, attorney, and five-time presidential candidate, also of Lebanese descent, is related to Kahlil and that he had driven for him several times as well.
The memorial garden is located on Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, directly across from the British Embassy and not far from the National Cathedral, the Islamic Center, a Jewish temple, and Orthodox churches. It is a very apropos setting for one who resonated with the great unity of life and wrote:
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.22
Aptly, I was making this journey in the middle of a raging storm, thinking of Kahlil’s love of storms and the imagery found in “The Tempest.” Once I arrived at the memorial and started wandering around, holding on to my flimsy umbrella, I came across a thoughtful line of Kahlil’s etched in marble: “Do not the spirits who dwell in the ether envy man his pain?” Kahlil believed that in order to be fully alive one had to embrace life’s storms that whirled with pain and to view life’s suffering as a gift to be experienced.
The same year that The Tempests was released in Arabic, Kahlil’s The Forerunner was published in English. It has a very different feel than his previous work. Kahlil is much more settled and mature, less self-introspective and more outwardly focused on others. His same depth and life values shine through, but the cynicism and sense of despair had lessened. One piece, “Said a Sheet of Snow-White Paper,” perhaps more clearly than anything else he wrote, illustrates Kahlil’s embrace of the storms of life, subtly echoing The Tempests’ voice:
Said a sheet of snow-white paper, “Pure was I created, and pure will I remain for ever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me.” The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, and it laughed in its dark heart; but it never dared to approach her. And the multicolored pencils heard her also, and they too never came near her. And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste for ever—pure and chaste—and empty.23