When thinking about forgiveness and what is required one might just decide to stay angry and never address the situation that occurred. However, neglecting to truly forgive can essentially hold you back emotionally as well as physically depending on the level of damage that happened to you. Throughout the novel, “Cry, the Beloved Country”, by Alan Paton forgiveness seems to be one of the main themes. In the novel, the characters suffer countless heartbreaking situations. These situations would cause the holiest person to completely turn their back on their faith and family. The vital way to get past all this is forgiveness. By forgiving and truly opening your heart you can let go of the hurt which makes a way for sympathy and confidence.
The first heartbreak that we see in the novel is when Kumalo receives a letter stating that his sister Gertrude is ill. Kumalo leaves his village to go tend to his sister. He leaves a place that he is familiar with to go to Johannesburg, which cost him a good chunk of money. When he arrives and finally obtains more information about his sister, he discovers that she is a prostitute and sells liquor. This piece of information greatly disappoints him. He sees his sister and he makes his point clear, “You have shamed us, he says in a low voice, not wishing to make it known to the world. The liquor seller, prostitute, with a child and you don’t know where it is? Your brother a priest. How could you do this to us?” (61). His sister begins to cry
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
Forgive today, live in peace tomorrow. Forgiveness; one of the many hardships we encounter throughout life. As Marianne Williamson, an American author, stated, “Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.” Forgiveness leads to peace because it lets go of all the negative feelings and allows freedom from disturbance to take place.
2. According to the article, forgiveness is granting unconditionally grace to those who have cause suffering and pain and accepting what they did and not letting that affect the love they show to that person. Forgiveness is central for racial reconciliation because forgiveness is the first step of mending the relationship with others. It also allows God to do a work between the two groups. When there is forgiveness God can change hearts and create amazing things to happen out of tragedies.
Life, as we all know is saturated with misfortune. Most of us are able to go through these and learn from and exempt ourselves. Yet, this isn’t always the case. People are faced with bone riveting experiences that often take a long time to get over, if they ever do get over it. These episodes brew in our brain popping up at the most random points often bringing our tone down. Although these experiences may scare us and fill us with ruefulness and penitence, we can’t continue to live in the past and let these regrets habituate us. Self forgiveness is a remedy to healing and to moving on in life, no matter how hard it is.
At the beginning of the novel, Stephen Kumalo is very respectful and is a caring person that is always willing to help others. “Perhaps you might be hungry, small one” (35). Kumalo expresses his father-like figure to this young little girl because Stephen knows that the little girl has traveled a long way to deliver this letter.
In FYS we were taught many ways to live in the world through the stories we read, speeches we listen to, and the projects we did. In the book, Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger, The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, and Destiny of The Republic, by Candice Millard, I saw a few prominent themes of how one should live. In these three books I learned about the author 's voice through their writings. I saw how one should live their life. In these books the authors shared common themes through their writings. The authors showed how to live life with forgiveness and live life with faith. Krueger and Potok both showed me through their novels how to forgive someone and they did this by showing that there is a bigger picture in
Sometimes, forgiveness is used as an excuse to make the mistakes conducted okay. Eventually, the ones that are forgiven take advantage of the idea of forgiveness. In the memoir, The Glass Castle, the protagonist, Jeannette Walls and her siblings face difficult situations where they're forced to accept and learn from a young age to forgive those who are responsible. Jeannette’s parents struggle with being strong and stable parents for their children, making mistakes that have consequences that affect not only themselves but also the the Walls children. Jeannette chooses to believe that by letting go of the grudges she holds about parent she can avoid a bitter life, even though it is her parents responsible for her pain. Through Jeannette Walls journey she is able to capture the hard reality of forgiveness.
Forgive and forget - the motto that is ingrained in all of us from childhood, teaching us to be more compassionate and understanding, and ultimately developing us into better people, right? Perhaps not. While forgiveness is undoubtedly an important trait that enables people to overcome conflicts, where do we draw the line? There are no concrete or established rules on what the acceptable number of times to forgive someone or something is, so how can we define what is too much forgiveness? When does forgiveness go from a sign of your maturity, compassion, and strength, to a sign of your subservience and weakness? How can we be forgiving and thoughtful, without jeopardizing our own self-worth? These are all questions that arise in the memoir
The challenges are over lapped on top of each other, which is tougher to forgive someone that is so greatly connected to you, but learning that this person will always love you is a thought we should all keep in our minds. In the novel The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls is faced with the daunting challenge of having to forgive her father. Jeannette’s relationship with her father, Rex Walls, is not the finest. As Jeannette grows up she starts to lose faith in her father because of his alcoholism is affecting the family emotional and financially, because most of the time he spends his money on booze. It was hard for Jeannette to realize that she had no love for her father, but still forgive him for his mistakes and find a way to welcome him to her heart. Jeannette forgives her father when she tries to learn how to swim and her father dropped her into the water when she almost drowned. She forgives him and thinks of his purpose of inspiring her to learn. Jeannette thought to herself “I figured he must be right, there was no other way to explain it”. At the end of the story when Jeannette and she father meet for the last time she forgives him for “all the hell raising and destruction and chaos he created in her life”. She says “I could not imagine what my life would have be like- without him in it. As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had”. Therefore, you
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
The general topic of forgiveness has received a magnitude of attention and research on a conceptual level in recent years. Hall and Fincham consistently noted, however, that self-forgiveness had little to no empirical study or research documented and believe this is a critical piece to an individual’s overall emotional health. In an effort to stimulate additional research on the
In the Novel “Cry the Beloved Country” by Alan Paton, two fathers are trying to put the pieces of there families back together while also keeping themselves together. They each go through a variety of struggles, with one learning his sister is a prostitute and his son is a murder while the other deals with his sons death and tries to move passed it. Throughout the novel, racial tension is a theme frequently seen from the beginning of the book til the very end. Paton uses the setting of South Africa to underscore racial tension associated with the apartheid movement to illustrate these themes. The concept of racism is prevalent during the story as it is used by the government to caused both blacks and whites to fear each other which eventually tears apart Kumalo’s family.
In Alan Paton’s Cry The Beloved Country, the character Stephen Kumalo experiences an epiphany concerning the brokenness of his family, tribe, and of South Africa as a whole. The tribal breaking began with Gertrude, who left for Johannesburg. She fell into a bad lifestyle as a prostitute and by selling alcohol. She struggles to find motivation to leave this corrupted city and is in devastation due to her condition. Not long after her absence, her nephew Absalom also goes to Johannesburg. He cannot escape the norms of the city because he commits murder and also is the father to a child out of wedlock. While Absalom is serving his time in prison, his father Stephen comes to Johannesburg and realizes that his own family members are suffering in a city full
Power, religion, frustration, and family all are aspects of man’s relationship with man. These things bring people together and tear them apart. Throughout Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton utilizes anaphora to develop this theme of man’s relationship with man. The anaphora emphasizes these aspects and highlights their importance.
was the husband of Gertrude, who in turn, went to look for him and found other men