On Love — The Pruning
The Teaching
When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
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.
Commentary
Gibran’s vision of love as the force that simultaneously crowns and crucifies, that prunes in order to grow, maps precisely onto the mystical tradition’s understanding of the spiritual path as kenotic: the self must be emptied, broken open, to become a vessel for something larger.
Rumi’s Song of the Reed: ‘Separation’s pain has ripened me.’ The same wound, the same music. The wound of love is not accidental suffering but the instrument of transformation.
The Gita’s teaching on action without attachment has the same structure: you must act fully, love fully, engage fully, but without the ego-self clinging to the outcome. The pruning IS the teaching.
Themes
Connections 12
Unsure
Gibran wrote about the Sufi poets; how much they shaped The Prophet is argued.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Travelled
Ram Dass read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Unsure
Gibran wrote about the Sufi poets; how much they shaped The Prophet is argued.