Five-minute digest
The Prophet
Summary
The Prophet is a book of twenty-six prose poems framed by a simple story. Almustafa, 'the chosen and the beloved', has lived for twelve years in the city of Orphalese, waiting for a ship to carry him home to the island of his birth. When at last the ship appears, the people of the city gather and beg him not to leave. Almitra, a seeress who first believed in him, asks him to speak to them of the truth before he goes, and one after another the townspeople ask him to speak of the great matters of life. He speaks of love, which both crowns and crucifies; of marriage, in which there should be 'spaces in your togetherness'; of children, who 'are not your children' but 'the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself'; of giving, eating and drinking, and work, which is 'love made visible'; of joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. Then, at evening, he says farewell, promising that he will return, and goes aboard. The language echoes the King James Bible, with its parallelism and imperatives, and its imagery draws on Lebanese landscape, Christian mysticism, Sufi poetry, Nietzsche and William Blake. Gibran's teaching is not orthodox Christianity: he speaks of a universal divine Self in which all souls share, of good and evil as aspects of a single life, and of religion as all deeds and reflections rather than a particular faith. Yet many of his sayings about generosity, work, love and suffering resonate with Christian readers. The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1923 with twelve drawings by Gibran himself. It sold slowly at first, then steadily, and has never gone out of print; it has been translated into more than one hundred languages. Because it was published in 1923, it entered the US public domain on 1 January 2019, and the library includes the full text.
Top Lessons
Work as love
Almustafa says work is love made visible. Compare Colossians 3:23.
Children as gifts
He tells parents their children are not their own. Discuss stewardship.
Discernment
The book mixes biblical cadence with ideas foreign to Christian faith.
Verified Quotes
“Your children are not your children.”
“Work is love made visible.”