I'm late! It's late. I've sprung a motivation leak. Reading a chapter is like pedaling home with a flat tire. Dribbling drills with a flat basketball. If the eyes are the lamp of the body I've been putting out some dull, gray rays.
There are a lot of great Protestors against Christianity and of religion in general, but who out there genuinely, with understanding, opposes the teachings of Jesus? (Most folks who I would claim oppose Jesus don't think or care that they oppose Jesus). Nietzsche is the only anti-Jesus intellectual I've spent time with.
Gibran's Jesus is quite similar to Nietzsche's Zarathustra, supremely confident, embodying and calling out to the "greater self," as Gibran puts it. But Gibran's Jesus doesn't completely slough off the dead skin of "slave morality," as Zarathustra would have us do. Jesus condescends from the heights of spiritual enlightenment to help us in our mud puddle. But rather than teach us to transform our mud puddle into a garden, Jesus wants to lead us free of all mud - no more religion, politics, or economics - only beauty and truth. He's like a horse, like a spiritual Houyhnhnm; regal, beautiful, caring but alien, loving us to the point of death...but honestly too good for the likes of us.
The voices of Jesus' adoring disciples are sharp and distinctive, but their recollections of Jesus and his words tend to blend and mush the flavor. On the other hand, the indifferent and antagonistic voices retain more of their distinctiveness when they describe Jesus.
Notes
- but when you heard him your heart would leave you and go wandering into regions not yet visited
- he knew the source of our older self, and the persistent thread of which we are woven
- be not heedful of the morrow, but rather gaze upon today, for sufficient for today is the miracle thereof
- and the Spirit was the versed hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp
- would that you seek the Father as the brook seeks the sea
- Himself a miracle wrought in Judea. Yea, all his own miracles, if placed at his feet, would not rise to the height of his ankles
- the dead in me buried their dead; and the living shall live for the anoited king
- no one shall open the floodgates of his ancestors without drowning
- you shall be held down by the chains of your own judgment
- all that was timeless before him became timeful in him
- he stood before the earth as the first man had stood before the first day
- men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder
- there were two streams running in the heart of the nazarene: the stream of kinship to God whom he called Father, and the stream of rapture which he called the kingdom of the above-world
- the beauty of the day is not only in what you see, but in what other men see
- in every aspect of the day Jesus was aware of the Father
- Can it be that the Syrian is conquering us in the quiet hours of the night? It should not indeed be so. For Rome must needs prevail against the nightmares of our wives.
- And behind her walked Zion and Rome, ay, the whole world, to revenge itself upon one free man.
- the seasons shall tire and the years grow old, ere they exhaust these words: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do"
- when he uttered these words methought I saw all men prostrated before God beseeching forgiveness for the crucifixion of this one man
- it is in your longing that you shall find the son of man. for longing is the fountain-head of ecstasy, and it is the path to the Father
- but now I felt not the weight of the cross. I felt only his hand. And it was ling the wing of a bird upon my shoulder
- if lover were in the flesh I would brun it out with hot irons and be at peace. But it is in the soul, unreachable.
- must you break your harp and your lyre to find the music therein? or must you fell a tree ere you can believe it bears fruit?
- The childless woman too at her window, where frost designs the forest on the pane, she finds you in that symmetry
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