Kahlil Gibran and Corinthians 13

Recently, in suffering deep grief from the loss of someone very close to me, I came across the poem called "How I Became A Madman" by Kahlil Gibran. It goes as follows:

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

Reading this poem had a profound effect on me, perhaps because of the serendipity of finding it at the exact moment of where I was with my grief. The loss was so great for me, that any sense of recovery from it implied change that shook me down to the foundations.

I have been reflecting over the meaning over this poem for several weeks now. I think there are several interpretations of this poem, philosophical, theological, literary, psychological.

This morning, I realised that the poem has the most direct meaning to my situation if I juxtapose it with the latter part of Corinthians 13:

"Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known"

I see the poem as being about the process of growth, masks are put away, and a human becomes more whole in the process. A child pretends to be an adult, playing house, playing doctor, playing mommy and daddy. Going to school, the child learns the skills of 'knowledge' and 'prophecy'. So society provides a child with various 'masks' with which to grow up. There is nothing wrong with this, along the way,they are an essential component of growth.

Full maturity is attained not from these, however, but putting away even these masks that were put on during the process of growing up. Sort of like the buttresses that are erected when a building is being built, they are there to help a workman put in the bricks and cement, but have to be taken away to reveal the final work.

And as a child, we do not have the full capacity to love, in the full sense of the word. But we do have the charms of a child that provide reflections of the love that we will someday be able to give ('see as only reflections in a mirror'). I think that a human being can only become fully human, if he/she is able to fully love, and cast away all seven masks.

With Corinthians, the growing up process can involve gaining the ability to prophecy, to speak, to have knowledge, but true wholeness and completeness is achieved with the capacity to fully love. The other things are the tools, devices, vehicles that are used to bring us to this point, and we must recognise them as such. The madman poem sees these as masks.

The poem does talk about the vulnerability of this process though, where we can wake up, bare-faced, and be seen as 'mad', where even the beloved may laugh at us, or be afraid of us. The ability to withstand the derision in the market place, the sense of be able to find 'safety in not being understood', and 'find freedom in loneliness' is part of the full coming to age of love. Doesn't that sound a bit like our friend 2000 years ago?

But corinthians assures us of there being a deeper meaning of this, where what appears now to be half-understood senses and whisps of meaning, there will come a time when the full meaning of all these will be revealed.

I found comfort in the madman poem, not because grief made me mad. Rather, I have struggled a great deal to find meaning in the loss, because I could not see the senselessness in loving so much, and losing. Because, the love I had for this person was, of the sort that when Kahlil Gibran wrote what was replied to the Almitra when he was asked about love:

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself
He threshes you to make you naked
He sifts you to free you from your husks
He grinds you to whiteness
He kneads you until you are pliant
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire
that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast