Analysis Of Alan Paton's Cry The Beloved Country

As I was reading the chapter on forgiveness in Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling by McMinn (2011), the personal life experience that jumped out to me was when I had to make the decision to truly forgive my ex-boyfriend and his parents for the emotional pain they caused me. After living in New Jersey for a month and spending time with my boyfriend and his family, working, and taking care of an elderly lady with dementia my world came crashing down on me. My ex-boyfriend’s parents discovered sin in his life and told me I could no longer pursue a relationship with him because of the sins he had committed. After finding out the sinful things my ex-boyfriend had done, I chose to forgive him. I also chose to give him a second chance at a relationship with me, but my effort to salvage our relationship was futile.

Forgiveness has a different context depending on where the person is from or what he believes. Religion places a great emphasis on the view of forgiveness.

As human beings we are often reluctant to let go of our anger and unwilling to forgive others. This becomes especially true in the case of loved ones or family members. The poem, “How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?,” written by Dick Lourie, addresses the different dilemmas associated with a child forgiving his/her father. In his six-stanza poem, the poet discusses how a child should forgive their father for traumatic events imposed on the child. This includes reasons for forgiveness, appropriate time to forgive, and whether or not to even forgive at all. Detailed through the different stanzas, the poem suggests that until one learns how to appropriately forgive another for wrongful behavior, they will never be able to let go of resentment and

Alan Paton's novel, Cry the Beloved Country, showcases the theme forgiveness through metaphors which is important because it leads to friendship and peace. Stephen once said, "I shall care for your child, my son, even as if it were my own" (Paton 241). By saying those meaningful words, Stephen Kumalo indirectly stated that he forgave his

It is also vital to look at Wilson’s view on the practice of forgiveness and how if an individual decides to ignore it, it can place a road block in their process of change. She believes that God speaks about forgiveness for the following reasons:” (1) we are all sinners with whom to relate so we’ll need to become skillful forgivers (2) God makes forgiveness a centerpiece of our healing process because living in un-forgiveness is so much worse (Wilson, 2001).

Sometimes things are better off forgotten so one does not get too caught up in hatred. When the time comes to forgive someone or even oneself, one might find it very hard. The word forgiveness may have different meanings to some people. For example, some people may refer forgiveness as a way to lose weight off their backs. In Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer highlights the importance of forgiving the mistakes one has made, and the actions people around us make. Life’s experiences are not always easy to forget, nevertheless to move on from those experiences

Henry David Thoreau once said “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” in his novel Walden, which accurately reflects mankind’s relationship to the natural world around us. Frequently, the landscape dictates the well-being of the people who live there. In Alan Paton’s work Cry, the Beloved Country, he starts the book by describing the South African people’s bond to the landscape. Employing contrasting imagery and diction, powerful symbolism, and fluctuating uses of parallelism, Paton demonstrates how the land needs to be healthy in order for the people who live there to thrive, and harm to the earth is mirrored by the deterioration of community.

Alexander Popes famous saying goes "To err is human, to forgive is divine" (Line 525). Everyone makes a mistake every once in a while, everybody sins on way or another, and in the end almost all of them seek forgiveness. The very nature of people is to get upset and feel resentful towards those who have done some harm to them in any way. Humans tend to remember the undesirable actions that others inflict upon them. Forgiveness is overcoming the feeling of resentment towards the person who has done wrong to us. In the novel "The Glass Castle" by Jeanette Walls, Jeanette is constantly forgiving her parents for their unsuitable choices; choices that often leave them impoverished, emaciated, and in abhorrent conditions. Jeanette proves that even

Cry, the Beloved Country In a country torn by segregation and hatred, one man seeks to rebuild his family and his tribe. Cry, the beloved country is a tale of forgiveness, generosity, and endurance. In the story, the main protagonist is helped by a number of characters. A South African man Stephen Kumalo loses his young son, but is still determined to improve the life of his people.

The tone of Cry, the Beloved Country was uplifting towards the end of the book. The tone is uplifting because things start to improve in people’s lives. Mr. Jarvis began to help out the community. “Ended his words in a tone of hope and encouragement” (p.265). The wife of Absalom ends up living with Stephen and becoming like a second kid to him, which is a relief for Stephen despite his son, Absalom, being hung. This is uplifting as Absalom’s wife and child will live a better life with Stephen than they would have lived with Absalom. Towards the end of the book Stephen begins to lighten up a little bit too, laughing a lot more and seeing more humor towards the end of the novel. Mr. Jarvis ends up giving Stephen plans to build a new church in

In the book Rediscovering the Power of Repentance and Forgiveness, Dr. Leah Coulter seeks to challenge the conventional Christian approach to forgiveness. Conventional Christianity approaches forgiveness as a Christian duty, and, in many ways, this has been unfair to the victims who have almost been condemned for seeking justice rather than simply forgetting. She asks, "From an all too common Christian view, why must the weight and responsibility of forgiveness be placed on the sinned-against instead of the sinner's repentance?" (Coulter). Therefore, she focuses extensively on the idea of repentance and the duty of the sinner to repent. However, that is not to suggest that Coulter abandons the idea that forgiveness is a Christian imperative, but she attempts to place it within its Jewish context, and demonstrate how other facets of historical Judaism inform the practice of forgiveness and repentance.

Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel written by Alan Paton; the novel is filled with biblical allusions referring to II Samuel. Cry, the Beloved Country was first published in 1948 and stands as the single most important novel in twentieth-century South African literature. Cry, the Beloved Country; a work of blazing artistry, is the intensely moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, and how they were set against the background of a land and a people divided by racial injustice. Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man. The author, Alan Paton parallels II Samuel and Cry, the Beloved Country which heightens the understanding of the novel.

In Cry, the Beloved Country, the city of Johannesburg enables Gertrude’s desires to control her life, yet the desires that govern her are shamefully careless. Before Gertrude left Ndosheni, she had been surrounded by villagers who essentially knew many or all of their community’s people, including her. With the fear that several people would know of or observe her actions, Gertrude was encouraged to act upon the ethical desires widely accepted by her people. On the other hand, Johannesburg has little to no sense of community—being a heavily populated city and the majority of its inhabitants strangers to one another—which allows Gertrude to pursue the amoral desires within her, and for them to occur unnoticed by relatives. When Stephen Kumalo, her brother, finally receives word of Gertrude’s illness, he leaves for Johannesburg and finds her in a shabby, dirty house, crammed between similar buildings. Anxiously standing in front of his sister’s door, awaiting what would be their first encounter after several months, Kumalo overhears a “laughter in the house, the kind of laughter of which one is afraid… perhaps because it is in truth bad laughter,” (Paton 59 emphasis added). The bad laughter he hears is a product of Gertrude’s careless desires; her undisciplined lust for men. The context in which this laughter comes from is what makes it bad, especially in Kumalo’s mind, for he is not just her family, but a priest as well. Without a close-knit community to direct

Asking for forgiveness and forgiving to many is the hardest thing to do but we must remember in the book of Matthew (18:21-22) Peter said to the Lord: “Lord if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” In this paper, the chosen case study will give the reader a better understanding of what forgiveness is to Jesus. Forgiveness is a big part of the Bible and if Jesus forgives us of our sins we too must learn to be as forgiving as him.

Firstly, in The Sermon on the Mount, when on the topic of forgiveness, it is stressed to go deeper than to just say you forgive the wrongdoer. In the following quote, Jesus expresses that you must truly feel no anger or sense of retaliation towards the one who committed the wrong. Jesus says, “You have learned that they were told, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ But what I tell you is this: Do not set yourself against the man who wrongs you” (Page 8, Lines 38-40). A typical response