We roam this earth like bewildered animals trying to reclaim the divinity within us – descendants of the great apes who invented gods so we could reflect our best and rein in our worst, but we are still and have always been our own shepherds.
In a time of crisis for humanity, amidst the massacres and wars and burning forests and firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human – its complexities, contradictions, the immensity of capabilities that allow us to choose who we are, as a person and as a person.
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 between the two world wars, called “the divinity that walks among nations and speaks of love, pointing out the paths of life, while people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In Vision: Reflections on the Path of the Soul ,public Library) – a wonderful collection of meditations, essays and poems taken 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 ashes, but have become a blazing fire above the sheltered ravine.
An era before Maya Angelou enumerated our multitudes in her breathtaking space poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor gods,” Gibran considers what we must do as “descendants of the apes” to achieve spiritual perfection as a species:
Mankind will advance towards perfection only when it realizes that humanity is: a boundless sky and a shoreless ocean, a constant blazing flame, an infinite shining light, a wind when it blows and when it is still, a cloud when it thunders and lightning and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blooms in spring and becomes naked in autumn, a mountain when it is high, a valley when it descends And a field when it is fertile or barren.
When mankind has realized all these things, it will have reached the midpoint of its path toward perfection. If he wishes to reach the path of perfection, he must, if he understands his essence, realize that humanity is: an infant dependent on his mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost between his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future conflict with each other, a hermit in his ashram, a criminal in his cell, a scholar among his books and papers, a fool between the darkness of the night and the darkness of his day, A nun between the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the claws of her weakness and her needs, a penniless man between her bitterness and complacency, a rich man between his ambitions and his subjection, a poet between the fog of his evening and the rays of his morning.
If mankind proves capable of experiencing and knowing all these things, it will reach perfection and become a shadow among the shadows of the gods.
If you could use something to ignite the fire of your faith in humanity, warm yourself to the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo and EB White’s brilliant response to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, and how to cope with the uncertainties of love.
