8
A traveller am I and a navigator,
and every day I discover a new region within my soul.
—Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam1
Growing up on the coast of West Africa, not far from the Sahara Desert, I often dreamed of exotic adventures, caravanning off on a desert trek in search of parts unknown or setting off into the ocean looking for unexplored islands. One school year I sketched out rough plans to run away from my boarding school in Côte d’Ivoire and head back up along the coast to Senegal in a dugout canoe. Another year I gave one of my homing pigeons to a family friend who lived in the adjoining landlocked country of Mali. There he would release my pigeon, and I eagerly looked forward to seeing how long it would take for him to fly back home to me on Dakar’s Cap-Vert Peninsula. I was to learn months later that he had set my pigeon free in the bush of Mali, only to watch him immediately fly off in the opposite direction into the Sahara Desert, never to be seen again.
Stories told in West Africa of the ancient city of Timbuktu in Mali are legendary. Renowned more as a metaphor for the “middle of nowhere,” Timbuktu was a place I had always dreamed of visiting. Envisioning heavy-laden camels transporting salt blocks across shifting sand dunes, I imagined caravans in search of Timbuktu on the banks of the great Niger River. Years later, as an adult, I had the opportunity to visit the oasis town of Timbuktu numerous times and have always been fascinated by its history, surviving mud-brick buildings, ornate wooden doors, ancient mosques, old leather-bound sacred books preserved down through the centuries, and the striking flowing indigo blue robes of the Tuaregs, often known as the “Blue People.” On one occasion, I was invited to the home of a Tuareg friend. To my amazement, in the midst of this remote and ancient place where caravans begin their journeys out into the vast sand sea, I noticed he had a French translation of The Prophet sitting prominently on his bookshelf. What a distance this book had come, still influencing hearts and minds, to the ends of the earth. Words Kahlil wrote in The Prophet seemed to reverberate in the barrenness of this land of nomadic wanderers.
We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.2
Following the publication of The Prophet and Jesus the Son of Man, life began to ease financially for Kahlil. He was able to move his sister Marianna into a more comfortable home farther out in the suburbs of Boston. Mail began to pour in with expressions of appreciation for his work. His friend Mischa remembered news of admiration from Queen Mary of Romania upon her receiving a copy of The Prophet from a friend. Kahlil also showed him a letter from the president of Colorado College asking permission to inscribe the words of Almustafa in The Prophet onto their largest chapel bell: “Yesterday is but Today’s memory, and Tomorrow is Today’s dream.”3
Over the course of several years Kahlil’s health slowly deteriorated, and he began to long for the land of his birth. However, he continued to push himself to work and put his affairs in order. In March 1930 he completed the final copy of his will, providing financially for his sister Marianna, giving Mary Haskell the bulk of his art and manuscripts, and requesting that his final resting place be in Bsharri. By that Christmas he was in so much pain he chose not to visit Marianna in Boston, wanting to spare her the anxiety of seeing him in that state and using work as an excuse. He was confined that month to his studio “hermitage” and only admitted his agony to May Ziadah in Cairo.
My health at present is worse than it was at the beginning of the summer. . . . I am, May, a small volcano whose opening has been closed. If I were able today to write something great and beautiful, I would be completely cured. If I could cry out, I would gain back my health.4
Years earlier in a letter to Mischa, Kahlil had written of his dreams of returning to Lebanon one day.
Since long ago I have been dreaming of a hermitage, a small garden, and a spring of water. Do you recall Yusif El Fakhri [the hermit from “The Tempest”] . . . [T]he future shall find us in a hermitage on the edge of one of the Lebanon gorges.5
Constantly pushing himself to work, Kahlil was able to see his book The Earth Gods published just weeks before his death in 1931. During a visit from Mischa, Kahlil handed him the manuscript of The Earth Gods and asked him to read it aloud. After discussing it, Kahlil showed him the twelve drawings he had created for the book. Mischa later noted:
The drawings made me almost forget Gibran, myself and the poem whose music still vibrated in my ears. In addition to their lightness of touch, their depth of meaning and their harmony of lines and colors those drawings surprised me with a masculinity, a vigor, a depth and an ease never before so abundant in Gibran’s art.6
The Earth Gods is a mythological dialogue between three gods, reminiscent of Keats’s poem Hyperion. Some beautifully poetic passages pour forth, reflecting Kahlil’s thoughts soon before he died.
SECOND GOD:
The sacred loom is given you,
And the art to weave the fabric.
The loom and the art shall be yours forevermore,
And yours the dark thread and the light,
And yours the purple and the gold.
Yet you would grudge yourself a raiment.
Your hands have spun man’s soul
From living air and fire,
Yet now you would break the thread,
And lend your versed fingers to an idle eternity.7
In addition to The Earth Gods, Kahlil was also at work on The Garden of the Prophet, the second book in his planned trilogy. However, rather than publishing it in the state he had left it upon his death, Barbara Young arranged it into book form, calling into question its authenticity, although his voice certainly echoes forth amid its pages.
When darkness is upon you, say: “This darkness is dawn not yet born; and though night’s travail be full upon me, yet shall dawn be born unto me even as unto the hills.” . . . [W]e are the breath and fragrance of God. . . for God will not suffer Himself to be hidden from man, nor His word to lie covered in the abyss of the heart of man.8
The Garden of the Prophet was intended to address humanity’s relationship to nature, as The Prophet’s focus had been on humanity’s relationship with one another. The final book in the series was to explore humanity’s relationship to God, a passion already infused in his life’s work. Yet throughout his writings he continued to almost seamlessly weave together his thoughts on man, God, and nature, seeing them as completely intertwined. This is reflected in The Garden of the Prophet:
All that is deathless in you is free unto the day and the night and cannot be housed nor fettered, for this is the will of the Most High. You are His breath even as the wind that shall be neither caught nor caged. And I also am the breath of His breath.9
And what are the seasons of the years save your own thoughts changing? Spring is an awakening in your breast, and summer but a recognition of your own fruitfulness. Is not autumn the ancient in you singing a lullaby to that which is still a child in your being?
And what, I ask you, is winter save sleep big with the dreams of all the other seasons.10
One other fascinating piece of work Kahlil had finished but not yet published before his death was a play called Lazarus and His Beloved. It is a musing on death, seen from the prospective of Lazarus, who was not very happy to have been raised from the dead.
LAZARUS:
Pity, pity that I should be torn away. . . . The awakening is there where I was with my beloved and the reality. . . . my twin heart whom I sought here and did not find. . . . Then death, the angel with winged feet, came and led my longing to her longing, and I lived with her in the very heart of God. . . . We were in peace, my beloved and I . . . and it was forever the first day.11
The Wanderer was Kahlil’s final work as his life’s journey drew to a close. He completed its manuscript shortly before his death. It is a compilation of parables and sayings, ranging from the humorous to the sublime, and an expression of the unending spiritual pilgrimage in which Kahlil was engaged. The title is indeed apropos. He had earnestly wandered the road of life in search of the transcendent and allowed his unquenchable spiritual thirst to lead him to depths and new discoveries within, which he continuously sought to express. To him, the exploration and discovery were not enough; they had to be communicated and shared. In a playful revisiting of his lifelong desire for inclusivity, he wrote in one of his parables, titled “The Lightning Flash”:
There was a Christian bishop in his cathedral on a stormy day, and an un-Christian woman came and stood before him, and she said, “I am not a Christian. Is there salvation for me from hell-fire?” And the bishop looked upon the woman, and he answered her saying, “Nay, there is salvation for those only who are baptized of water and of the spirit.” And even as he spoke a bolt from the sky fell with thunder upon the cathedral and it was filled with fire. And the men of the city came running, and they saved the woman, but the bishop was consumed, food of the fire.12
Another short parable, “The Quest,” conveys the importance of journeying together. The story presents the dilemma of two philosophers who are arguing over the superiority of their own pursuit—one for the fountain of youth, the other the mystery of death, both accusing each other of spiritual blindness. Along comes a village simpleton and points out that they are both in search of the same thing.
The two philosophers looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then they laughed also. And one of them said, “Well now, shall we not walk and seek together?”13
I remember an enjoyable afternoon I spent in California one summer wandering through the many art galleries of the picturesque village of Carmel-by-the-Sea. This unique artist colony has long been a haven for artists, writers, and intellectuals. Nearly one hundred art galleries can be found within one square mile. After hours of meandering, admiring the work of well-known and local artists alike, I came upon a small sign in the back of a gallery. Etched into the wooden plaque were words from J. R. R. Tolkien that made me think of Kahlil:
Not all those who wander are lost.
Kahlil was indeed a wanderer. Yet his journey was full of intention and active seeking within and without; his was a life lived in exploring the depths. Words that I resonate with, written by writer Amin Maalouf in his epic novel Leo Africanus, reflect a journeying identity.
I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia . . . but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.14
An admirer of the Sufi poets and their manner of viewing God, the world, and the spiritual journey, Kahlil would have resonated with these words inscribed on Rumi’s shrine in Konya, Turkey:
Come, come, whoever you are
Wanderer, worshiper, lover or leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
Growing up internationally and traversing the edges of cultural identities myself, I have always been drawn to the concept of pilgrimage, seeing life as a caravan of spiritual discovery. As a teenager I loved the expressive rhythms of the Senegalese griots singing melodiously, often late into the night. I remember the electric energy of a visit from Bob Marley, his reggae music filling Dakar’s stadium and spilling out into the neighborhoods nearby. I listened to the whole concert through my bedroom window. Over the years I have admired the spiritual journey of Baaba Maal, one of Senegal’s internationally renowned singers. Baaba Maal is a Fulani, one of the traditionally Muslim nomadic groups in West Africa, and a member of one of Senegal’s Sufi brotherhoods. His album titled The Traveller embodies the journeying spirit of Kahlil himself. It opens with a song titled “Fulani Rock,” a high-energy, djembe-driven tribute to his homeland, and a stately mantra featuring a Christian choir from a church in Dakar. I love the way Baaba looks at this concept of being a traveler, both literally and metaphorically. He says:
When you travel you learn things that would have taken you years to learn in one place. You learn about the different corners of life. . . . Most of the problems we have are because people don’t travel enough and discover other people. . . . By travelling you discover that humanity is so beautiful: different faces, different cultures, different colours, different sounds. . . . When you travel you realize that humanity and the planet is a very big gift, in spite of some of the man-made horrors. This is what I want to celebrate.15
Baaba Maal’s music evokes the pleasures of voyaging and the satisfactions of homecoming. He explains, “No matter how long I might be away, wherever I am, and whatever I am doing, I will always return [home] to feed my soul.” As Kahlil’s health began to fail, his nostalgic longing for the hills of Lebanon intensified, as did his reflections on the greater meaning of life and what lay beyond: the infinite, the eternal. He truly lived his life in the world of the spirit and expressed his sense of wonder with the divine mystery at the heart of it:
If there were only one star in the firmament, one flower forever in white bloom, and one tree arising from the plain; and if the snow should fall but once in every hundred years, then we would know the generosity of the infinite.16
Barbara Young reflected:
His life, in terms of time, was a short life. But he neither lived nor thought in terms of time. A word constantly upon his lips was this: “We have eternity.” It was a word not idly spoken. It was his creed, and it directed his life.17
Years earlier Kahlil wrote:
I long for Eternity, for there I shall meet my unwritten poems and my unpainted pictures.18
Kahlil practiced a Good Friday ritual during Holy Week for much of his life, setting it aside as a day of reflection, including the Good Friday just before his death. Barbara remembered:
It was the poet’s custom to spend that day alone, in complete solitude. Then, when twilight drew on and the hour of acute remembrance of the Crucifixion had passed, he would call on the phone and say, “Once more . . . it is finished.” This he did on that last Good Friday, just a week before he died.19
The Thursday after Easter 1931, Gibran lay dying. He refused to be taken to the hospital, and the following morning he wavered in and out of consciousness. Barbara took him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, and his sister, cousins, Mischa, a Maronite priest, and others hurried to see him. At age forty-eight, with cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis in one lung, he slipped from this world before the day had ended, into the realm he believed would be an endless dawn, forever the first day.
The hospital Kahlil was taken to had received survivors of the Titanic disaster for treatment in April 1912 and was the main hospital used for treating victims of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. The Sisters of Charity founded St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1849. They took care to ask Kahlil if he was Catholic and if he wanted a priest to administer last rites. He did not feel the need for them, as he had grown far beyond the rituals of his own faith background. Kahlil’s refusal of last rites brings to mind another spiritual wanderer, Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Kahlil’s contemporary, and his desire at the end of his life to run away, literally, from the pressures that were crushing in on him. In 1910 he boarded a train in search of refuge in a monastery, on the condition that he did not have to attend any religious services, but he ended up having to stop at the remote railway station Astapovo, where he succumbed to pneumonia.
Following Kahlil’s death, his body lay at the Universal Funeral Home on Lexington Avenue for two days, where reportedly hundreds of people came to say their good-byes. The entourage of family and friends then transferred their grieving to Boston. Mary received a telegram from Marianna and rushed to Boston for the funeral service in the little Church of Our Lady of the Cedars. Under the guidance of his sister, Kahlil’s request to be buried at the monastery in Bsharri was honored. She was able to purchase the monastery that now houses his tomb, and royalties from his books support the Gibran Museum in Bsharri, which is dedicated to his life and work.
In July 1931 Kahlil’s remains left Providence, Rhode Island, and sailed to Beirut. Upon his arrival in Beirut, an official governmental delegation boarded the ship and a ceremonial honor guard detail stood by. Once on shore the coffin was opened and the minister of education pinned a medal of Fine Arts on his breast, conferred posthumously by governmental decree. Then began the long march from the port to the Maronite Cathedral of St. George in Beirut. In their biography, His Life and World, Jean and Kahlil Gibran wrote of his final return to Lebanon.
Walking in the procession were the Minister of the Interior and representatives of the High Commissariat, the French Admiralty and the army of [French] occupation. Following them were representatives of the consular corps, the benevolent societies of all creeds, Christians, Moslems and Jews, and thousands of school children.20
The archbishop then blessed his body upon its arrival at the cathedral, and that evening the first president of Lebanon, prior to independence, officiated at a reception hosted by the government. Kahlil’s friend Ameen Rihani was present as well and spoke movingly of their friendship. The next day it seemed the entire country paid its respects. The Gibrans continue the narrative:
The fifty-mile route from Beirut, along the coast, and up the steep mountain to Besharri was lined with townspeople. Twenty times the swelling cortege stopped for local ceremonies. Following the body streamed men chanting martial songs and improvising poetry, while wailing women beat their breasts. At a town near Gebail ancient Byblus ceremonies evoking ancient rites to the local goddess Astarte were enacted as young men in native dress brandished swords and dancing women scattered perfume and flowers before the hearse.21
Blazing a rebellious and revolutionary trail in his younger years, Kahlil’s wandering journey ultimately formed him into an all-embracing spiritual contemplative. He was welcomed home to his final resting place in Bsharri, not as a shunned heretic but as a revered sage and celebrated son, surrounded once again by the cedar trees he loved.
On my first visit to Kahlil’s tomb in Bsharri, I was deeply moved by the setting chosen for it. Stairs in the old monastery, literally hewn out of the rocky mountainside, spiral downward toward his final resting place in the ancient grotto. The rugged walls lining the descent reminded me of Michelangelo’s sculpture The Awakening Slave. Although carved in marble, he intentionally created an unfinished appearance in which one can visualize the emergence of a figure no longer fully trapped in stone. Michelangelo felt he was “freeing a figure that was imprisoned in the stone.” So with Kahlil, his art and his words continue to echo forth, unable to be entombed or forgotten, an eternal spirit of awakening, reverberating down through time. Outside the entrance of the museum is a towering rock sculpture of Kahlil’s face that is purposely only partially carved out of the stone. It profoundly expresses this sense of Kahlil’s liberated spirit continuing to be released to the world.
In an unpublished poem titled “Ready Am I to Go,” Kahlil wrote:
[B]ehold the shadows of the unknown pass beneath my brows,
And hear in my last breath the echo of infinity.
Lo, I have reached the summit; I have outstripped the cries of men,
And I hear naught save the vast hymn of this eternity.22
Adjacent to his final resting place is a reconstruction of his “hermitage” studio in New York that includes his small bed and a few of his easels. A portrait of Kahlil, painted by his friend Yusif Huwayyik, is displayed between two of his tall candlesticks, and a wooden plaque is inscribed with the words he wanted written on his tomb:
I am alive like you, and now I am by your side.
Close your eyes, look around you, and you will see me.
Following Kahlil’s death, interest in his works and person heightened. Even his physical appearance became a subject of significance as his fame spread. Mary provided a comprehensive description:
Physically, he could appear slight and weak, liable to colds, flu and stomach upsets, or sturdy and compact. He was not tall—about five foot three or four. . . . His build was slim: when healthy, he weighed about 140 pounds, but owing to his frequent bouts of ill health he was often closer to 130 pounds. His voice was quite high-pitched, and it broke relatively late in his teens. The moustache that is constant in the photographs from 1902 onwards was complemented by a trim beard for a while in the early 1920s. By 1917 his hair was grey at the temples, and in later life he wore spectacles for reading. We should imagine him with a cigarette in his hand (he smoked heavily from his time in Paris onwards), and with a cup of thick Middle Eastern coffee by his side. His energy was often tense and nervous; he paced up and down the room while working, but took little proper exercise and generally ate sparingly. His movements were graceful. His face easily reflected his mood, changing from light to dark in an instant, and he had extraordinarily expressive eyes. . . . At work in his studio, he wore Syrian clothes, but as the years went by Western suits became more his style.23
I traveled to Mexico City one summer with my friend Brice to visit an extensive collection of Kahlil’s art purchased by Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest men in the world who, while Mexican, is also of Lebanese descent. My own quest for this “prophet” had now spanned three continents, and my interest in his life’s journey only heightened as time passed. I have always found Mexico City to be a fascinating blend of the historic and contemporary, with beautiful Spanish architecture, cultivated parks, plazas, ornate churches, and colonial palaces all amid the chaos of people, cars, canals, markets, cafes, cantinas, colorful murals, and the energetic rhythms of the country’s celebratory music.
In 1934, shortly after Kahlil’s death, a Lebanese immigrant in Mexico translated The Prophet into Spanish, and a young Syrian Orthodox priest, also in Mexico at the time, was the first person to complete an Arabic translation. On the fiftieth anniversary of Kahlil’s death, the Lebanese community in Mexico commissioned the much-loved sculptor Ramiz Barquet to sculpt a bronze bust of the poet, which was presented to Mexico City. I went to see the sculpture, still on display in a little parklike space on the corner of what is now a busy intersection in the city’s Florida suburb—a tiny oasis in the midst of the crowded intensity of that metropolis.
Kahlil’s work is on permanent exhibition at the Soumaya Museum. It is one of the largest collections of his work anywhere in the world, housing some three hundred works of art and more than seventy manuscripts. The museum’s new building is a spectacular modern architectural structure. It also holds the world’s largest private collection of Auguste Rodin’s art outside France. Carlos Slim’s late wife, Soumaya, for whom the museum is named, was a great admirer of Rodin’s work. It seemed so fitting to find Kahlil’s work preserved under the same roof as the art of Rodin, who had influenced and inspired him so powerfully during his years in Paris as a young man.
While there I met with the curator, Hector Palhares Meza, and was especially taken with the many portraits and oils by Kahlil, many of which I had not seen before in other publications. The museum had a very different feel from what I had seen on display in Bsharri, which housed the majority of his more ethereal work. I saw letters of Kahlil’s in English and Arabic, original manuscripts, notebooks, sketches, drawings, oil paintings, and vintage photographs, as well as his death mask and several signed first editions of his works. The museum’s presentation created a real sense of what he was like on a personal level. His sense of style was evident through some of his personal items—a beautifully carved walking cane, an Art Nouveau cigarette case, and a French beret. It was clear that he loved life and lived it to the fullest. In a wonderful letter to his sister he wistfully described the excellent quality of a bottle of arak that a friend brought him.
The bulk of the collection had been gathered and preserved by Kahlil’s namesake, relative, and godson, a notable Boston sculptor named Kahlil Gibran. He also collaborated with his wife, Jean, to write a comprehensive biography of his godfather. Born in Boston in 1922, Gibran remembers visits from Kahlil, his father’s cousin, who inspired his artistic abilities. After his godfather’s death in 1931, young Gibran became very close to Marianna, who lived in Boston as well. Years later he became her trusted and personal assistant, and when she died in 1972, she transferred responsibility to Gibran to care for all she had preserved from Kahlil. He dedicated himself to the task of preserving Kahlil’s memory and enhanced the collection greatly.
Gibran also had the honor of sculpting the commemorative bas-relief portrait plaque of Kahlil I visited in Boston’s Copley Square, which the mayor, along with religious and academic leaders, dedicated in 1977. In search of an institution that would be able and willing to preserve and share the collection with the world, Gibran approached Carlos Slim, and his dream came to fruition. While in Mexico City I met with the now late Patricia Jacobs Barquet, who was sent by Mr. Slim to meet with the Gibrans in Boston to assess the viability of obtaining their collection. What she discovered in their archives and vaults was beyond anything she had envisioned. She shared with me how Carlos Slim’s father had loved Kahlil’s work and even personally translated some of his work into Spanish. Hence, Mr. Slim grew up with a great admiration for Kahlil. While I was visiting the Soumaya Museum, he was actually in Beirut visiting Kahlil’s biographer, Alexandre Najjar, to talk further about Kahlil.
Following hours spent in the museum, I ended up at the San Angel Inn, a beautiful restaurant set amid spacious gardens and fountains surrounded by whitewashed Spanish cloisters. It was the perfect setting to reflect on my exploration of Kahlil’s spiritual journey, which had taken me from Lebanon all the way to Mexico. Fittingly, while reading about the restaurant’s history, I learned it had originally been a Carmelite monastery, as was the museum in which Kahlil now lies in rest in Bsharri.
Kahlil’s friend Mischa was at his side when he passed away at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Of the experience he wrote:
Should I feel glad for my brother’s release from the cares of the earth; or should I grieve over his life, so full of storms, so rich in thought, imagination, hope, light and shade, but now picking up its hems from the earth before having had its fill of the earth? I feel the deep and awesome mystery Life is fulfilling right before my eyes. To my mind comes the words of Almustafa to the sea: Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade, and then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.24
The symbolism of streams and rivers flowing into the heart of the sea is a recurring theme in Kahlil’s writings. It brings to mind his journey of spiritual wandering, of his endless pilgrimage toward life’s deeper dimension. In a letter to Mary, he once wrote:
Our thirsty spirits stand now on the bank of the Great River.
We drink deeply, and we are full of gladness.25
His allegory in The Wanderer titled “The River” is one of my favorites. It is frequently read at memorial services and is reminiscent of Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha. It is set in his beloved Qadisha Valley and visually tells the story of two lives that are separate but one.
In the valley . . . where the mighty river flows, two little streams met and spoke to one another. One stream said, “How came you, my friend, and how was your path?” And the other answered, “My path was most encumbered. The wheel of the mill was broken, and the master farmer who used to conduct me from my channel to his plants, is dead. I struggled down oozing with the waste of those who do naught but sit and bake their laziness in the sun. But how was your path, my brother?”
And the other stream answered and said, “Mine was a different path. I came down the hills among fragrant flowers and shy willows; men and women drank of me with silvery cups, and little children paddled their rosy feet at my edges, and there was laughter all about me, and there were sweet songs. What a pity that your path was not so happy.”
At that moment the river spoke with a loud voice and said, “Come in, come in, we are going to the sea. Come in, come in, speak no more. Be with me now. We are going to the sea. Come in, come in, for in me you shall forget your wanderings, sad or gay. Come in, come in. And you and I will forget all our ways when we reach the heart of our mother the sea.”26
Kahlil saw himself first and foremost as a pilgrim, journeying toward the Divine, never feeling he had arrived. So much of religion, like Kahlil’s church background, teaches their devotees that they “arrive” at their destination by living a certain way or believing a specific dogma. The creedal emphasis of many religions has a sense of finality to it. However, in contrast, Kahlil was a pilgrim, someone always on the move. Pilgrims embody a spirit of openness when seeking depth on their spiritual journeys. As a wanderer, Kahlil, through his life pilgrimage, beautifully affirms the words of a poetic verse from that remarkable pilgrim Psalm or, as his Muslim friends would have called it, the Zabur:
Blessed are those who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. (Psalm 84)