Word: gibran
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...Gibran was instructed in the Maronite rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but he was not a churchgoer, and his book would be out of place in any cathedral. The Prophet, Almustafa, about to sail away from Orphalese, where he has sojourned for twelve years, submits to questions from the villagers. They ask him about Love, Joy, Sorrow, Freedom, Pain, Giving, Work and other human affairs. He answers in mystical terms that seem to carry great meaning: "Work is love made visible." "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked." "Beauty is Eternity gazing at itself in a mirror...
Sown Scraps. Mysticism threads itself not only through Gibran's work but through his life. As a boy of four in Bsherri, a village perched amid Lebanon's northern mountains, he sowed bits of torn paper in his garden and waited patiently for a harvest of full leaves. The mystic did not find a cult until he moved to the U.S., where he exhibited his drawings-which blend elements of William Blake and Maxfield Parrish-and held a kind of mystical court in his Greenwich Village studio...
...celibate, Gibran nevertheless exerted a strong spiritual influence on women. A Manhattan jeweler's wife with whom he corresponded directed that his letters should be buried with her in her coffin. Barbara Young, a poet, swore allegiance to the master after hearing The Prophet read in a Greenwich Village church (he was also present as a listener). She served Gibran as secretary until his death from cancer...
Mixed Harvest. The scraps of paper planted by Gibran have borne bountiful fruit: nearly $1,000,000 in royalties to date, some $100,000 more every year. Gibran, who coveted both fame and riches, died too soon to reap most of this harvest. His will left everything to the place of his birth, Bsherri. But except for Gibran's body, which was sent home to be entombed in the monastery of Mar Markis, Bsherri has little to show...
...committee of 40, appointed to administer the unexpected riches, sponsors an annual Gibran festival and maintains a Gibran museum that charges admission and turns a modest profit. Plans for a grander museum, for a hospital, for a literary contest in his memory, have had to wait while the committee settles quarrels among its own membership and disputes in court with lawyers representing Marianna Gibran, the poet's sister, who lives in Boston and was not remembered in his will...