How often, when you are facing a stressful problem, do you stop and think, ‘This is really going to help me develop as an individual’? Most people probably don’t see things in such an optimistic light. It is much easier to sink into the depths of self-pity and hatred than to climb out of the shadows and face your struggles with hope. In Alan Paton’s book Cry, the Beloved Country, he put emphasis on the lives of two men who were hurting deeply. Neither one of them was enjoying their current situation, but they were learning and growing, and finding how to love. They had every right, in the eyes of other humans, to seek revenge and be cold-hearted. However, the two men, Stephen Kumalo and James Jarvis, were able to look past their differences and be …show more content…
Kumalo and Jarvis did not start out with a perfect relationship. In fact, for the majority of their lives they did not have any sort of relationship at all. Kumalo, a Zulu native, had seen James Jarvis, a wealthy European man, ride past the church occasionally, but they had never spoken. Once Absalom murdered Jarvis’ son, Kumalo was terrified of confronting him and having to deal with the guilt and the weight of another person’s pain. Jarvis, on the other hand, did not even recognize Kumalo when they were in the same courtroom for Absalom’s trial. There definitely was no shalom between them, and that brokenness was caused by Absalom’s murder of Arthur. Author Pierce Brown once wrote, “Death begets death begets death,” meaning one death or tragedy leads to another. This is evident in a way in Cry, the Beloved Country, as the poverty, pain, and death in Johannesburg was the leading cause for native crime, of which Absalom was a part. Broken shalom between the blacks and whites led to broken shalom in Johannesburg, which led to crime, which led to the murder of Arthur Jarvis, which led to the smaller-scale broken shalom between Stephen Kumalo and James