Kahlil Gi

Lebanon (1883 – 1931) Timeline

Object 1

Christian
Secular or Eclectic
Khalil Gibran was born to a Maronite Christian family in Besharri, Lebanon (then part of Syria and the
Ottoman Empire).
His father, also named Khalil Gibran, had drinking problems and accumulated many gambling debts. This led
Gibran’s father to leave his job as assistant to his uncle who was a pharmacist, and take work as an
‘enforcer’ for the local Ottoman administrator. He eventually ended up in jail.
Because of the family’s poverty, Gibran did not receive a formal education as a young boy, but a local priest
taught him Arabic and Syriac, as well as the stories of the Bible and infused in him an awareness of the
mystical dimensions of Maronite Christianity.
When Gibran was eight, his mother took him, his older half-brother and his two younger sisters to Boston.
Although shy, Gibran quickly learned English and, thanks to a scholarship, started to receive more of a
formal education.
The boy became fascinated by Boston’s world of art and music, visiting galleries and performances. At age
13, his artistic gifts came to the attention of artistic cultural circles in Boston, where he was further
introduced to artistic trends.
Even with some of this early success, Gibran was sent back to Lebanon to complete his education, where he
excelled in poetry.
He returned to the United States in 1902 in the midst of a family crisis. His mother had cancer, and his older
brother and his fourteen-year-old sister had tuberculosis. His sister soon died. The brother, who had been
supporting the family with a small hardware store, moved to Cuba to try to recover his health, leaving the
young Gibran in the frustrating position of having to take over the hardware business. A year later, his
brother returned from Cuba, but he died. The same year, his mother also died.
In the aftermath of so much death, Gibran sold the family business and threw all of his energy into art and
writing and perfecting his English. He also reconnected with the Boston cultural benefactors he had known
before.
He began to write columns for an Arabic-language newspaper and later collected these writings into his first
published books.
In 1909, Gibran went to Paris for two years to broaden his artistic training, and he was particularly
influenced by the mystical artistic Symbolist movement.
Returning to America, he began to publish some of his first Arabic prose-poetry collections through a
publisher in Egypt. He became active with Arab intellectual and artistic organizations, promoting the rich
culture of the Arab-speaking world, while attempting to address its many problems under Western imperial
rule.
In 1911, Gibran moved to New York. There he met and was influenced Abdul Baha, the leader of the Bahai
Faith movement. He also met Carl Jung and was asked to paint the famous psychologist’s portrait, at which
time Gibran became intrigued by Jungian philosophy.
Gibran began to write in his adopted language of English, writing The Madman, though it would be rejected
by several publishing houses until a small publisher named Alfred Knopf would take a chance on the work.
When World War I broke out, he worked to free Syria from Ottoman rule, but was frustrated by the messy
realities of war and international politics.
Gibran published his greatest work, The Prophet. In the following few years, he would gain international
notoriety
He died in 1931 of cancer
I like this meditation on good and evil. It challenges assumptions and and raises important questions. Gibran
suggests there is only good, for that is everyone’s inherent nature, and what we call evil is simply being lost
and uninspired. He calls us to be compassionate to those who are selfish and cruel, for they suffer from
greater poverty than the homeless and greater hunger than the starving; they suffer from poverty of the
soul.
I strongly feel one should never passively allow the hard-hearted to inflict harm or hoard what belongs to all.
Such actions must be opposed with strength and courage and cunning. The vulnerable must always be
protected. That is a basic duty. But even complete success in one action does not stop the fundamental
dynamic of harm, just that particular instance. We must always remember that those who inflict harm and
encode selfishness into systems and institutions, those people are also seeking their way, just blinded by
their spiritual poverty. That’s where the real, patient work of the ages is found… finding how to open eyes
and hearts long used to to being shut, finding how to redirect them toward the forgotten goodness and
generosity held within.
This is where I have to take issue with the Gibran’s line, “Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the
turtles.” We are neither stags nor turtles, and the speed of our spiritual unfolding is not fixed at birth. Every
human being harbors something of the heavenly within. There is no speed to the process. All that is needed
is the right reminder of what we already are. Then begins the steady process of discovering how to
encourage that ember and let its warmth permeate all aspects of our lives. Turtles don’t need to become
stags. Humans simply need to become themselves. Humans just need to become more human.
But how to reach those who would armor themselves against the urging of their own hearts? No simple
formula, nor single action nor organization can accomplish this. Not a year nor a generation nor a century
will accomplish this. Still, that is what must be done. That is the real, hard, slow work given to us all to
accomplish, each in our own lives, our work, our world.