"How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe
for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species"
by Maria Popova
"We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within - descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our own only shepherds.
In times of crisis for humanity, amid the genocides and the wars and the burning forests and the firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human - the complexity of it, the contradictions, the panoply of capacities from which get to choose in becoming who we are, as persons and as peoples.
Every crisis of and for humanity is evidence that we have forgotten what we are - what
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), writing in the interlude between two world wars, calls a “divinity which walks among the nations and speaks of love, pointing toward the paths of life, while the people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In "
The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul" (
public library) - the wonderful collection of meditations, essays, and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life - he writes:
We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble. We were a faint spark buried in the ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.
An epoch before Maya Angelou reckoned with our multitudes in
her breathtaking spaceborne poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Gibran considers what it would take for us, “scions of the apes,” to attain spiritual perfection as a species: "Humankind will proceed toward perfection when it feels that humanity is: A limitless sky and a shoreless ocean, an ever-blazing flame, an eternally gleaming light, a wind when it gusts and when it is calm, a cloud when it thunders and lightnings and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blossoms in the spring and disrobes in the autumn, a mountain when it towers, a valley when it descends, and a field when it is fertile or barren.
When humankind has felt all these things, it will have reached the midpoint in its path toward perfection. If it wishes to arrive at the road to perfection, it must, if it perceives its own essence, feel that humanity is: An infant relying on its mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost among his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future wrestle with one another, a worshipper in his hermitage, a criminal in his cell, a scholar amidst his books and papers, a fool between the black of night and the dark of his day, a nun among the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the talons of her weakness and the claws of her neediness, the indigent between his bitterness and complaisance, the rich man between his ambitions and his submission, the poet between the fog of his evenings and the rays of his dawns. Should humankind prove able to experience and know all these things, it will arrive at perfection and become one shadow among the shadows of Gods."
Read "The Vision", by Kahlil Gibran, online here:
