The Mission – The Cedar Club of Naples
The Cedar Club of Naples is an organization established to share the traditions of our cultural heritage blending Lebanese and Americans of Lebanese descent. Our mission is to provide an organization which combines Americanism with the traditions of Lebanon: strong traditions of belief in God, sense of family, love of heritage and willingness to serve each other. It is an organization which recognizes the memory of our ancestors.
I believe in you, And I believe in your destiny. I believe that you are contributors to this new civilization.
I believe that you have inherited from your forefathers an ancient dream, a song, a prophecy, which you can proudly lay as a gift of gratitude upon the lap of America.
I believe that you can say to the founders of this great nation, “Here I am, a youth, a young tree whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.”
I believe that even as your fathers came to this land to produce riches, you were born here to produce riches by intelligence, by labor.
I believe that it is in you to be good citizens. And what is it to be a good citizen? It is to acknowledge the other person’s rights before asserting your own, but always to be conscious of your own. It is to be free in word and deed, but it is also to know that your freedom is subject to the other person’s freedom. It is to create the useful and beautiful with your own hands, and to admire what others have created in love and with faith. It is to produce by labor and only by labor and to spend less than you have produced that your children may not be dependent upon the state for support when you are no more. It is to stand before the towers of New York and Washington, Chicago and San Francisco saying in your heart, `I am the descendant of a people that builded Damascus and Byblos, and Tyre and Sidon and Antioch, and now I am here to build with you, and with a will.’
You should be proud of being an American, but you should also be proud that your fathers and mothers came from a land upon which God laid His gracious hand and raised His messengers.”
— Kahlil Gibran