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My art can find no better resting place than the personality of Jesus.
His life is the symbol of Humanity.
He shall always be the supreme figure of all ages
and in Him we shall always find mystery, passion,
love, imagination, tragedy, beauty, romance and truth.
—Kahlil Gibran1
The thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Ibn al Arabi wrote, “The person who catches the disease of Christ can never be cured.” How true this was for Kahlil, who caught this sweet contagion at a young age and was captivated with the personality of Jesus throughout his life. Kahlil was inspired early on by sages. Whether in person or through the pages of a book, he admired and was influenced by many different types of mentors who spurred him on toward inner spiritual depth and artistic distinction. As far back as his childhood in Lebanon, he spoke with deep affection of Father Yusef, his village priest, and the positive role he played in his life. He thrived on his relationships with artists and mentors such as Fred Holland Day and Albert Pinkham Ryder and the opportunity to meet Auguste Rodin, Rabindranath Tagore, and `Abdu'l-Bahá. He esteemed the work of da Vinci as a child and valued the kindred spirit he found in the life and writings of William Blake. His own created sage in The Prophet, Almustafa, was an accumulation of all he admired and thought wise and true. Yet he found the supreme sage in Jesus, whom he saw as The Supreme Light, as he titled one of his paintings. His ever-increasing fascination with Jesus was a thread woven throughout his entire life, and he searched passionately for ways to creatively present the inner Christ, whose path he sought to walk.
Kahlil consecrated his “hermitage” studio in New York as a sacred space of sorts in a way that facilitated both contemplation and inspiration. On his wall hung a large, old Armenian tapestry depicting the crucifixion of Christ surrounded by mourners and the two thieves, all portrayed with Asian features. Kahlil called the tapestry his “altar piece” and referred to Jesus’s expression on it as what he sought to depict in his writings and art on Christ. I saw this striking tapestry, albeit now frayed and threadbare, when I visited the Gibran Museum in Bsharri and learned from its now late curator, Wahib Kayrouz, that it had been made by someone known as Father Yaqoub. Kahlil said of his precious tapestry:
You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to live with. It makes everything else look small. It is the only crucifixion I have ever seen in which Jesus is blessing with his right hand—and there is no blood from either hand, nor from the feet or the side.2
As one studies Kahlil’s life, reads his writings, and admires his paintings, his fascination with Jesus’s magnetic personality is compelling, even contagious. From his early years in Lebanon to his close association within the Lebanese immigrant community in America, Kahlil found himself naturally surrounded by those who deeply venerated Jesus. The Maronite Catholic Church, to which his family belonged, would have passionately advocated an allegiance of belief in Christ. Everywhere in his Christian religious community, he would have found himself face to face with images or statuary of Jesus, from icons and sculptures in front of churches to crucifixes on walls and jewelry or on the ends of prayer rosaries. However, observing the corruption and inequalities of the church in Lebanon as a young man, he was at the same time drawn to the revolutionary aspect of Jesus’s all-embracing love and the strength of his humility.
As approximately an equal number of Lebanese are Muslim, he would have also found a deep respect for Jesus (known by his Qur’anic name, Isa) in Islam, which has had a preoccupation with Jesus spanning more than fourteen hundred years. As in the Christian tradition, Muslims also see Jesus as the origin of the Gospels (referred to as the Injil), believe in the virgin birth, call him the Messiah, and even believe in his eventual return. As renowned Cambridge Professor Tarif Khalidi, a Lebanese of Muslim background and the author of The Muslim Jesus, wrote, “[In Islam] there exists a preoccupation with Jesus that is unique among the world’s non-Christian religions. . . . Islamic culture presents us with what in quantity and quality are the richest images of Jesus in any non-Christian culture. No other world religion known to me has devoted so much loving attention to both the Jesus of history and the Christ of eternity.”3
Kahlil would naturally have been attracted to the mysticism within Islam known as Sufism. Sufis are particularly sympathetic to Christ, calling him “the prophet of the heart.” Sufism is known for its flexibility and wide variety, focusing on a different concept of approaching God, with the aim being union with God. Interestingly, much of Sufism bears a Christian resemblance. During the history of Islam, Sufis such as al Hallaj, Sahra Wardi, Ibn al Arabi, Hafez, and Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great Sufi poet, have tried to interpret Islam in fresh ways. In so doing Sufis have often looked to Christ as their model of self-sacrifice for God. For example, al Hallaj, the tenth-century Sufi martyr, loved Jesus and tried to closely identify with him, choosing Jesus as his life model and even choosing, when sentenced to death in Baghdad, to be crucified like Christ.
Kahlil expressed a lifelong belief that Jesus’s entrance onto the world stage was the most important event in human history and considered him the supreme figure of all ages. He was long fascinated with the person of Jesus, and his desire to write a book about him had been fermenting for more than twenty years. He chose to refer to Jesus in the way that Jesus mysteriously and most frequently referred to himself, “Son of Man.” It was a somewhat ambiguous title during Christ’s time, associated with a figure mentioned in the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible who would serve as a representative of God to the people. In referring to himself as the “Son of Man,” Jesus was breaking stereotypes and creating for himself a new category, completely unencumbered by extraneous associations, as he refused to be enslaved by people’s paradigms, which Kahlil clearly understood and admired.
Barbara Young wrote insightfully of Kahlil’s admiration of Jesus:
He regards Jesus as the most humanly enlightened . . . a supreme poet. . . . Gibran believes that Jesus lived his human life to the full, that there was no cup of human rapture that he did not drink, no extremity of human anguish that he did not comprehend and share in his divinity, and that withal there was no shadow, no blemish upon his life.4 From his earliest years his passionate devotion was given to Jesus, of whom he said in his youth that He was “the most supremely good and wise of all the wise and good who have walked the Earth; Jesus, our Lord and our Brother; Jesus, the Son of Man.”5
I have come across people all over the world, regardless of religious tradition, from Tuareg nomads in Timbuktu in the Sahara Desert to investment bankers in Hong Kong, who were inexplicably drawn to the person of Jesus. And like Kahlil, it is always the Jesus of the Gospels that attracted them, as opposed to the Christ of the Christian Church—a Jesus without all the religious or cultural associations that have accumulated around him over the past two thousand years. I have met Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka who became followers of Jesus, seeing him as their “Grand Master” within their Buddhist tradition. And Hindus in India who see Jesus as Mahatma Gandhi did, who said that Jesus “expressed, as no other could, the spirit and the will of God. . . . The lives of all have, in some greater or lesser degree, been changed by His presence, His actions, and the words spoken by His divine voice. . . . And because the life of Jesus has the significance and the transcendency to which I have alluded I believe that He belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world; to all races and people.”6 The words of the great Bengali Hindu poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Kahlil’s literary contemporary whom he so deeply admired, come to mind: “Great-souled Christ . . . we who are not Christians bow before you. We love you and worship you, we non-Christians.”7 I am reminded of the life of Sadhu Sundar Singh, the renowned Indian Sikh mystic and holy man who traveled through the Himalayas into northern India and Tibet, teaching about Jesus during Kahlil’s lifetime. In the Middle East I have met Muslim imams who through their personal study of the Gospels, the Injil, decided to become followers of Jesus and his teaching and yet remain in their roles in their mosques. I have even been introduced to a Bedouin Muslim tribe whose shaykh, captivated with Jesus’s life and message, led them all to follow in the way of Christ’s teachings.
Before assembling his thoughts on paper, Kahlil spoke to his friend Mischa about his idea to write a book on Jesus:
[W]hat do you say of a book on Jesus? Jesus has been haunting my heart and my imagination. . . . I am sick and tired, Mischa, of people who profess to believe in him, yet always speak of him and paint him as if he were but a sweet lady with a beard. . . . My Jesus is human like you and me. . . . I propose to have a number of Jesus’ contemporaries speak of him, each from his own point of view. Their views combined will bring out the portrait of Jesus as I see him. The scheme will be in perfect harmony with my style.8
Commenting on Kahlil’s approach to writing about Jesus, Mischa wrote, “[Gibran] writes of Jesus not as a historian or as a scholar, but as a poet and an artist. . . . Gibran writes of Jesus with a heart full of admiration, love and reverence; for Jesus to him had always been the very noblest and the very loftiest human ideal.”9
Years earlier, when visiting his sister Marianna after his study period in Paris, he spoke with her about his fascination with Jesus, telling her that he had read everything he could find about Jesus.
Kahlil was especially impressed with French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, which I saw in Kahlil’s library at the Gibran Museum in Bsharri. Kahlil wrote of Renan:
At the moment I am reading Renan. I like him because he loved and understood Jesus. He saw him in the light of day, not at dusk.10
Renan, a French expert of ancient Middle Eastern languages and civilization, was inspired to write Life of Jesus while on a trip to Syria and Palestine with his sister, who died suddenly of a fever she contracted. It was published in 1863 and, while controversial, was hugely popular. With only the New Testament and a copy of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus’s work of history as his references, he portrayed Jesus as human, albeit in direct communion with God his Father, who did not preach dogma but instead taught us how to live. Halfway through the book, Jesus heads back to Galilee, disillusioned with the Jewish faith and spurning all religion that was not of the heart.
Another important book related to Jesus that I noticed among Kahlil’s personal library was Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a groundbreaking book at the time, using the historical method to provide a portrait of the life of Christ. Like Kahlil’s understanding of Jesus’s importance, Schweitzer’s conclusion calls his readers to follow Jesus’s teachings regardless of one’s theology. The German Nobel Peace Prize laureate, theologian, and renowned concert organist, Schweitzer ended up as a medical missionary in the river town of Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) as a result of his own “quest for the historical Jesus.” He published a book in 1910 by that same title, which quickly became a classic. His own study of Jesus’s life was so personally transformative that it led him to leave his career as a prominent theologian and musician to become a doctor and move to Central Africa to help the suffering there who had no medical care. He did this for the rest of his life. I once had the opportunity of visiting the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, which he founded on the bank of the Ogooué River, just south of the equator in lush rain forest. As I sat on a roughly hewn bench of okoumé wood on the riverbank, it was deeply inspiring to observe the hundreds of Bantu people being assisted by the hospital, all resulting from one man’s decision to attempt to follow in Jesus’s example.
I also noticed among Kahlil’s books Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a philosophical treatise based on the teachings of Christ that had a profound and lasting influence on Mahatma Gandhi, who first read it as a young protester in South Africa. Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, that this book “overwhelmed” him and “left an abiding impression.” Gandhi listed Tolstoy’s book as one of the three most important modern influences in his life, laying the foundation for what was to become known as his nonviolent resistance movement during the years 1918 to 1947. In 1908 Tolstoy wrote a letter to Gandhi, known as “A Letter to a Hindu,” which outlines the notion that only by using love as a weapon as Christ taught, through passive resistance, could the Indian people overthrow the colonial British Empire. The two continued a correspondence about the theological basis of nonviolence until Tolstoy’s death in 1910. In fact, Tolstoy’s last letter to Gandhi was one of his final writings, perhaps even the last.
Kahlil considered Jesus to be the greatest of all artists and poets.11 Over the years Mary Haskell recorded pages of his dreams and thoughts about Jesus. From Paris Kahlil wrote her:
My greatest hope now is to be able to paint the life of Jesus as no one did before. My life can find no better resting place than the personality of Jesus. . . . And [referring to a dream] I have been all through his country from Syria to Lower Palestine. And all my life the wonder of him has grown on me.12
In Mischa’s description of Kahlil’s drawings of Jesus we find no “sweet lady with a beard.”
How does Jesus look as drawn by Gibran’s pencil? A beautiful and a noble face delicately veiled with something expressive of pity gripping the heart, rather than of sorrow crouching in the soul. In the sensitive mouth is a firmness too gentle to wound, and a self-respect too proud to be meek. In the nose is the sweetness of poetry, the harmony of art and the symmetry of architecture. The eyes look through and far beyond whatever material objects they may seem to fall upon. They are inspired, but not serene; and hopeful of ultimate victory, but not yet victorious. They speak of loneliness unsoothed by Love, and of solitude uncomforted by its own light. The slightly knitted eyebrows seem to speak of a mind straining after a secret not yet revealed, or an aim not yet attained. They suggest that the man has reached the threshold of that secret whose door remains locked in his face. In his high and broad forehead is an aloof majesty. The soft hair brushed back from the brow and the temples and descending to the shoulders is eloquent of purity, immaculate and unsoiled. On the whole it is a face suggestive of many meanings, the most pronounced of them being a will that has not yet conquered, but is determined to conquer.13
Even in his sleep throughout the years, Kahlil often dreamed of Jesus coming to him, walking with him, sitting with him, talking to him. He pictured Jesus as a fellow Middle Easterner and felt a deep personal connection to him. The opportunity to write about Jesus’s life became an ever-increasing aspiration. As a young boy in the mountains of Lebanon, his education was limited to regular visits to his village by a priest, who taught him the basics of Christian belief and the Bible and provided increased exposure to Syriac and Arabic. Syriac, the language of ancient Syria, was a western dialect of Aramaic, the language that Jesus grew up speaking. Many early Christian texts are preserved in Syriac, and it is still used by Syrian Christians as a liturgical language. Starting during his childhood, Kahlil naturally would have felt a cultural and spiritual affinity with Jesus as a Middle Eastern compatriot.
On a trip to Syria I found it profoundly moving to hear an Orthodox monk chant The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic high up in the picturesque rugged mountain village of Ma'loula, forty miles northeast of Damascus, at the fifth-century Mar Sarkis monastery, which has been partially destroyed in the Syrian civil war. Ma'loula is one of the three remaining mountain villages where Western Aramaic is still spoken. Interestingly, the local residents are both Christian and Muslim and have lived harmoniously side by side for centuries, each coming to the monastery for blessing and worship.
In March 1908 Kahlil wrote of Jesus in a letter to Mary:
My soul is intoxicated today. For last night I dreamt of Him who gave the Kingdom of heaven to man . . . if I could only describe Him to you. . . . I sat near Him and talked to Him as if I had always lived with Him. . . . My soul is thirsty for that which is lofty and great and beautiful. And yet I cannot write nor draw nor read. I can only sit alone in silence and contemplate the Unseen.14
By the time Kahlil began to write his book on Jesus, he had moved beyond both the religious disillusionment of his youth and the need to antagonize religious authorities to make his point. No longer critical, he chose to soar above the fray, freely expressing himself in a creative and compelling manner. One of Kahlil’s contemporary biographers commented on his intentions in his writings about Jesus:
By plunging his Jesus deep into the turbulence of earthly existence Gibran had no wish to negate the master’s divinity, but aimed instead to replace a somewhat distant conception of a figure, conjured by the church, with a more approachable personality.15
According to Barbara Young, on the evening of November 12, 1926, Kahlil suddenly and passionately decided to pull together all he had been mulling over in his mind and heart concerning Jesus and intensely turn his attention to the task of writing, in English, his portrayal of Jesus for the next eighteen months. A few weeks earlier he had written:
Last night I saw his face again, clearer than I have ever seen it. It was not turned towards my face—it was looking far out into the vast night. . . . He was youth, ageless and immortal; not God, no, but the Son of Man, facing all that man must face, knowing all that man has ever known, or shall ever know. . . . He walked as a man facing into a strong wind, yet who was stronger than the wind.16
Despite his intent to produce a sequel to The Prophet, Kahlil refocused his intensity to fulfill this dream of writing about Jesus, a project that had captured his imagination and weighed heavily on his heart. Kahlil’s passionate artistic portrait of Jesus was published in 1928. Titled Jesus the Son of Man, it received more reviews than any of his other books, and its sales were second only to The Prophet. John Haynes Holmes, a prominent minister and cofounder of the NAACP and the ACLU, wrote in a review for the New York Herald Tribune:
Kahlil Gibran has attempted a unique and daring experiment. . . . If any man were fitted to attempt this adventurous task it is Mr. Gibran. . . . It is as though a contemporary [of Jesus] sat down at a belated hour, to write another and different Gospel.17
Like The Prophet, which foreshadowed Kahlil’s creative spiritual endeavor on Jesus, he sought to further harmonize his spiritual journey through myriad voices in the search for the Son of Man. This vision culminated at a time when his health was gradually failing. Skeptical of doctors, Kahlil turned more intently to alcohol to self-medicate his pain, securing supplies of arak during the height of the Prohibition years in America.
Jesus the Son of Man was the longest and last book Kahlil wrote before his death, and some see it as a sort of “fifth gospel.” Depicting the inherent alluring nature of Christ’s humanity, Kahlil portrays the life of Jesus with the imagination of an artist and poet. Through the eyes and voices of seventy-seven individuals during the time of Christ, some historical and others purely fictional, some friends and others antagonists, Kahlil catches the reader off guard with the beauty of Jesus’s character; from the mother of Judas grieving her son, to an angry widow in Galilee, to the tender tale of a shepherd, to concluding the book with his own voice, “A Man from Lebanon.” Through vignettes we hear from the disciples; Mary, the mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene; and from many others about how they saw and experienced Jesus, giving voice to Kahlil’s own vision of the Son of Man.
Only Mary Magdalene makes more than one appearance in the book. She shares a deeply moving and beautifully vivid depiction of Jesus. Through these diverse voices Kahlil communicates that regardless of doubts, questions, or an individual’s starting point (as Kahlil’s Mary Magdalene at first dislikes Jesus), when the spiritual quest is done with an open mind and a sincere heart, one is undoubtedly left wordless, awestruck by the person of Jesus. Throughout the book it is obvious that Kahlil is enchanted with Jesus’s character and enraptured by his teachings, and he seeks to pay tribute to him through exquisite prose.
Reflecting on his personal admiration for Christ, whom he referred to as the “Master Poet,” Kahlil wrote, “in His voice, we heard a song unfathomable. . . . In my heart dwells Jesus of Galilee, the Man above men, the Poet who makes poets of us all, The Spirit who knocks at our door that we may wake and rise and walk out to meet truth naked and unencumbered.”18
Through the vignettes in Jesus the Son of Man, Kahlil delivers a mesmerizing picture of the essence of Jesus. One of the earliest chapters shares the reflections of the often-controversial figure of Mary Magdalene. Interestingly, many of his chosen characters in the book are women, whom he describes with admiration and depth of spirit. Kahlil’s Mary says:
It was in the month of June when I saw Him for the first time. He was walking in the wheatfield. . . . The rhythm of His step was different from other men’s, and the movement of His body was like naught I had seen before. Men do not pace the earth in that manner. And even now I do not know whether He walked fast or slow. . . . And I gazed at Him, and my soul quivered within me, for He was beautiful. . . . I left my house and walked towards Him. Was it my aloneness, or was it His fragrance, that drew me to Him? . . . Even now I do not know. . . . But when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away.19
Later, Jesus speaks to her:
Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gaze at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended. I alone love the unseen in you.20
As her musing concludes, she ponders:
Then He stood up and looked at me even as the seasons might look down upon the field, and He smiled. And He said again: “all men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.” And then He walked away. But no other man ever walked the way He walked. Was it a breath born in my garden that moved to the east? Or was it a storm that would shake all things to their foundations? I knew not, but on that day the sunset of His eyes slew the dragon in me.21
The “Matthew” chapter is full of resplendent depth, bringing to life the Gospel writer’s words:
One harvest day Jesus called us and His other friends to the hills. The earth was fragrant, and like the daughter of a king at her wedding-feast, she wore all her jewels. And the sky was her bridegroom. When we reached the heights Jesus stood still in the grove of laurels, and He said, “Rest here, quiet your mind and tune your heart, for I have much to tell you.”22
Kahlil daringly goes on to paraphrase Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount”:
Blessed are the serene in spirit.
Blessed are they who are not held by possessions, for they shall be free.
Blessed are they who remember their pain, and in their pain await their joy.
Blessed are they who hunger after truth and beauty, for their hunger shall bring bread, and their thirst cool water.
Blessed are the kindly, for they shall be consoled by their own kindliness.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall be one with God.
Blessed are the merciful, for mercy shall be in their portion.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for their spirit shall dwell above the battle, and they shall turn the potter’s field into a garden.
Blessed are they who are hunted, for they shall be swift of foot and they shall be winged.
Rejoice and be joyful, for you have found the kingdom of heaven within you.23
I remember my first visit to the Church of the Beatitudes in Galilee, built on the supposed site of where Jesus first spoke the words of his Sermon on the Mount. The small Byzantine-style church is set atop a lush green hill that slopes down into the Sea of Galilee. Surrounded by palm trees, the simple church is octagonal in shape, representing the eight beatitudes, or blessings, spoken by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, which echo the highest ideals of Jesus’s teachings on mercy, love, humility, compassion, and peace.
After walking through the serene sacred space, as I headed toward the gardens I noticed a young man in jeans hanging out on a bench talking with his two friends. Casually slung over his shoulder was an Uzi submachine gun. While the country’s citizens are allowed to openly carry guns, I found it deeply unsettling in this setting, of all places. A little later, looking back toward the church, I noticed a prominently displayed sign: “NO FIREARMS OR WEAPONS PERMITTED INSIDE THE CHURCH.” Even more disconcerting was to read in the parking lot, before heading down the hill, that the church had actually been commissioned by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. One wonders how Kahlil would have reacted, knowing both his disdain for the institutional church aligning itself with political power and authority and his love of Jesus’s message of nonviolence. Perhaps he would have remembered the words of Rabindranath Tagore, whose portrait he had painted, who was fond of asking, “What are you Christians doing? You have the clearest moral precepts in the Sermon on the Mount. Why do you not act up to them?”
Kahlil concludes his chapter on Matthew with a remarkably fresh interpretation of The Lord’s Prayer.
And Jesus said, “When you would pray, let your longing pronounce the words. It is in my longing now to pray thus:
Our Father in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy name.
Thy will be done with us, even as in space.
Give us of Thy bread sufficient for the day.
In Thy compassion forgive us and enlarge us to forgive one another.
Guide us towards Thee and stretch down Thy hand to us in darkness.
For Thine is the kingdom, and in Thee is our power and our fulfillment.24
His chapter “John the Son of Zebedee” serves as a powerful exploration of various interpretations and names for Jesus:
The Christ, He who was in the ancient of days, is the flame of God that dwells in the spirit of man. He is the breath of life that visits us. . . . He is the will of the Lord. He is the first Word, which would speak with our voice and live in our ear that we may heed and understand. And the Word of the Lord our God . . . was man like unto you and myself. For we could not hear the song of the bodiless wind nor see our greater self walking in the mist. . . . This is the Christ, the innermost and the height, who walks with man towards eternity.25
John’s reflection continues:
And Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, was the host and the mouthpiece of the Christ, who walked with us in the sun and who called us His friends. In those days the hills of Galilee and her valleys heard naught but His voice. And I was a youth then, and trod in His path and pursued His footprints . . . to hear the words of the Christ from the lips of Jesus of Galilee. Now you would know why some of us call Him the Son of Man. He Himself desired to be called by that name, for He knew the hunger and the thirst of man, and He beheld man seeking after His greater self. The Son of Man was Christ the Gracious, who would be with us all. He was Jesus the Nazarene who would lead all His brothers to the Anointed One, even to the Word which was in the beginning with God.26
Kahlil gives voice to many other fictional characters in Jesus the Son of Man. From “Salome to a Woman Friend” we hear:
For there was no valley of hunger He could not bridge,
And no desert of thirst He could not cross.27
An imaginative and illusory character, “Cleopas of Bethroune” speaks of Jesus:
When Jesus spoke the whole world was hushed to listen. His words were not for our ears but rather for the elements of which God made this earth. . . . And still His speech slumbers within our breast like a love-song half forgotten, and sometimes it burns itself through to our memory. His speech was simple and joyous, and the sound of His voice was like cool water in a land of drought.28
“Rumanous, a Greek Poet,” muses:
For in His voice there was the laughter of thunder and the tears of rain, and the joyous dancing of trees in the wind.29
“Benjamin the Scribe” says of Jesus:
He was an awakening.30
In his final chapter, “A Man from Lebanon,” Kahlil himself addresses Jesus. They discuss Jesus’s loyal and disloyal friends, and speak of things that have passed since the time he spent on earth. Kahlil refers to Jesus as Master Poet, Master Singer, King above all kings, Master of infinite compassion, Master of our lonely hours, Master Lover, Master of Light, Sky-heart, and Knight of our fairer dream. The book concludes:
Poet, Singer, Great Heart,
May our God bless your name,
And the womb that held you, and the breasts that gave you milk.
And may God forgive us all.31
In the midst of writing, Kahlil labored over a drawing of Jesus to be the book’s frontispiece. Years earlier, Kahlil confided in his sister that his “ultimate hope is to be able to paint the life of Jesus like no one has ever before been able to paint it.”32 This was something that he had long wished to be able to do. Even in Kahlil’s work for The Prophet, his moving frontispiece of the Christlike character Almustafa is deeply resonant with traditional artistic expressions of Jesus. Later, after having completed his picture Christ’s Head, he said that it was nearer to his heart than any other picture he had ever drawn.33
When visiting the Telfair Museum in Savannah, I was able to see six of Kahlil’s drawings of Christ. All of them clearly bear the features of a Middle Easterner, as opposed to a Westernized Jesus; four were done in pencil and two in pen and ink. The drawing that struck me most powerfully is the most ordinary in form, the bent head of Christ with only his bare arm exposed. It is so human, almost hauntingly so, vulnerable and yet muscular. It is a visual expression of inner strength, intentionally gentle but not passive or vanquished in any way. Kahlil did not see Christ as a mild-mannered victim but understood him to be full of strength, as the Son of Man who walked amid the winds of the tempest.
Regarding Jesus’s strength, one Good Friday he wrote in Arabic:
Today. . . man is startled from his deep slumber and stands before the phantoms of the Ages, looking with tearful eyes . . . to witness Jesus the Nazarene nailed on the Cross. . . . For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the Savior. The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of his strength.34
Barbara Young conveyed the response of an eight-year-old boy to the sight of one of Kahlil’s portraits of Jesus: “Oh, Daddy; that is the way He looked! Why didn’t the other people ever make the picture right before?”35 And when shown to a teenager: “Well . . . I’m not religious—and I don’t want to be. But I could go for a Jesus like that one.”36
One of Kahlil’s goals in writing about Jesus was to restore his identity as a Middle Easterner, which he expressed intuitively in his drawings of Christ. Not only did Kahlil’s drawings of Christ highlight his Middle Eastern origin, but the settings in which he placed his characters in Jesus the Son of Man also bring these images to life. In early 1914 Mary recorded one of Kahlil’s dreams in which he met Jesus along a road and they talked together. With detailed description he tells Mary of his appearance as a typical Middle Easterner.
I saw Jesus coming towards me down the road. The walnuts and weeping willows arched over the road, and I could see the paths of sunlight falling through on his face. It was the same face as always—an Arabic type of face, aquiline nose, black eyes, deepest and large, yet not weak as large eyes are so apt to be, but as masculine as anything could be, with his straight black brows. His skin was brown and healthy . . . with a thin beard like the Arabs—and his hair was abundant and black but not well kept, head bare, as always. He had on the same brown robe, loose, with a cord round the waist, and little torn at the bottom—and the same rough, heavy, common kind of large sandal on his feet—they were as usual a little dusty.37
In America Kahlil was undoubtedly presented a European-looking Jesus, resembling an individual more of Scandinavian roots than Middle Eastern. Due to Christianity’s center of gravity moving to the West over the centuries, the portrayal of Jesus increasingly took on a European look. This Europeanization of Jesus was so successful that, ironically, even Muslim Arabs from the Middle East today often understand Jesus to be Western, when he actually came from their own culture. And of course many Westerners today perceive Christ as just like themselves, with little connection to the Middle East. As a Middle Easterner living in the West, Kahlil sought to reintroduce Jesus as the full-blooded Middle Easterner he was. Through his art and writings, he emphasized to those living in the West how critical it is to recognize and embrace Jesus’s Middle Eastern origin and nature in order to most fully understand his teachings. When reading Kahlil’s writings on Jesus, we are challenged to strip Jesus of his Western trappings and return him to his cultural origins, seeing him afresh as one who was born, lived, and died in the Middle East—a Jesus who first walked the Middle Eastern road.
Furthermore, Kahlil felt that this vision of Jesus as one who comes to us from the Middle East also contradicted the image of Jesus and the message of his life that was often portrayed and taught by the Church. He felt that religion, such as the institution, laws, and rituals of the Church, can even inoculate against the real Jesus. In Sand and Foam Kahlil shared his interpretation of Jesus:
Long ago there lived a Man who was crucified for being too loving and too lovable.
And strange to relate I met him thrice yesterday. The first time He was asking a policeman not to take a prostitute to prison; the second time He was drinking wine with an outcast; and the third time He was having a fist-fight with a promoter inside a church.38
In 1920 Mary Haskell recorded words Kahlil had shared with her concerning this incongruity:
Christianity has been very far from the teaching of Christ. In the second or third century, people were not vigorous enough to take the strong food that Christ gave. . . . They could not face the gigantic self that Christ taught. . . . The greatest teaching of Christ was the Kingdom of Heaven, and that is within you. . . . But if the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, if you have that calm in yourself, that quiet in your centre, if you are in love with life, you love your enemy because you love everybody.39
During my conversation with Kayrouz in Bsharri at the Gibran Museum, as he showed me the handwritten drafts of Jesus the Son of Man that are preserved there, he highlighted the fact that the Jesus Kahlil focused on was what he liked to refer to as “Jesus of Nazareth” and Jesus’s movement known as “The Way” (i.e., following in the way of Jesus), before Christianity received the official sanction of the Roman Empire and drifted further away from its Middle Eastern roots. He reiterated that Kahlil did not believe that Jesus intended to usher in a new religion, but rather to point humanity toward God and God’s desired way for us to live, and to illuminate that path, walking among us as the Son of Man.
Reflecting on Kahlil’s fervent attraction to Jesus, I realized how he sought to emulate the words of counsel shared with me by another writer I admired, the late Malcolm Muggeridge. As we were talking about the many interpretations of Jesus, I asked him how he believed one can discover the real Jesus. And he simply replied, “Read the Gospels and follow Jesus’s teachings.” Muggeridge’s journey with Jesus also mirrored Kahlil’s experience, when he later said, “Jesus, for me, has been a long process of discovery—a process that is by no means over, and never can be. Like an infinitely precious and rewarding human relationship which goes on developing and constantly reveals new depths and possibilities of intimacy.” These are words that Kahlil would have embraced himself.
In Beirut I visited with Alexandre Najjar, a prominent lawyer and one of Lebanon’s award-winning novelists. He also wrote an excellent biography on Kahlil, his countryman, and is considered an authority on him. He very generously gave me a small bust of Kahlil for my office, a miniature of the large stone sculpture outside the Gibran Museum. A practicing Maronite Catholic, Najjar has given a lot of thought to Kahlil’s views of Jesus and the Church that developed around his name in the subsequent centuries.
Gibran admits that Jesus is immortal. But it is not because he is God that he is immortal. It is because he knew how to follow the path that leads to the divine. Mankind has achieved, with and through Jesus, the perfect divine manifestation. . . . Gibran strays from the dogmas of the Catholic Church . . . and de-emphasizes the redemption. But for all that, his thesis is not so radical: well versed in the Bible, Gibran has a high opinion of Jesus and wrote texts about Him with such beauty that it is difficult to think of him as a heretic.40
Years earlier Kahlil shared his views on Christ and the “new path” that he sought to communicate in his Jesus the Son of Man.
Christ’s death, as well as his life, had a wonderful effect on his followers. The day will come when we shall think but just of the Flame—of the fullness of Life that burned in him. Socrates and his followers’ relation was more mental, but Christ’s followers felt him more than they felt any of his ideas. . . . Christ changed the human mind and . . . found a new path.41
Kahlil reminds us that if anything is true about Christianity, it is true because of Jesus, not because of Christianity. After all, Jesus wasn’t even a Christian. Perhaps nothing expresses Kahlil’s views of Jesus more clearly and poignantly than a powerful short story he wrote years before Jesus the Son of Man, which sums up everything he was trying to communicate about him.
Once every hundred years Jesus of Nazareth meets Jesus of the Christian in a garden among the hills of Lebanon. And they talk long; and each time Jesus of Nazareth goes away saying to Jesus of the Christian, “My friend, I fear we shall never, never agree.”42