A shot explodes in a dark room. Blood splatters on the floor. A man falls. Another man leaps from the darkness in an acrobatic defying of gravity, whips out a sword, and demands justice. The lights go down. The small theater is cool, still, and quiet. "Vengeance is mine," says the Count. "I will repay."
It is another night at Lifeline Theater in Chicago, and Jason and I are sitting on the fourth row of this small theater enjoying a preview showing of the latest production The Count of Monte Cristo. BIG STORIES. UP CLOSE. This is the theater’s tag line, and so it feels Friday night when I’m glad we are not sitting on the front row! The story of The Count of Monte Cristo is one well known to many- man is treated unjustly by friends. Man spends 14 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Man’s mind and spirit are awakened in prison by an old priest who teaches him the arts and sciences. Man escapes. Man seeks revenge. In his revenge he not only ends up destroying that which he truly loves but himself as well. He says, in an emotional speech at the end of the story, "Fool that I am that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself" (Alexander Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo).
Literature is a powerful medium for helping us understand ourselves, our passions, our hungers, our desires, our struggles, our weaknesses, our sin. It is a rare and powerful thing when literature gives a poignant picture of the human struggle with sin. The Count of Monte Cristo, in all its richly textured costumes, sword fights, and choreographed battles, in the end, shows a man’s desire for revenge completely destroying him. Rather than forgiveness it is self seeking justice which drives the story and revenge which destroys. I find myself thinking of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, that powerful character who in his hunger for power and jealousy for the ‘ring’ withers to become ugly, deformed, and a mere shadow of his former person.
Leo Tolstoy, in his sweeping narrative of 19th c. Russia Anna Karenina, describes this ‘withering’ through identifiable characters. The love which once inspired an affair begins to wither through the lies and deception.
“She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning... He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it” - Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
In Anna Karenina Tolstoy notes even the subtlest of human expressions and interactions to make you fall in love with his characters, get angry with them, and then want to throw the book across the room because you are so frustrated with their choices...all the while knowing that what is so insanely frustrating about them is that they are not unlike ourselves. And what a perfect picture of the temptation that sin offers us- a beautiful flower we desire and want to consume. We pick it, like Eve with the fruit, and watch it wither in our hands as we wonder what we desired so deeply in the first place.
Using one another through revenge, lust, envy, or anger can destroy us, but repentance and forgiveness can change us.
“At his wife’s bedside he had given himself for the first time in his life to that feeling of tender compassion..which he had previously been ashamed of as a bad weakness. Repentance... and above all the joy of forgiveness, made it so that he suddenly felt not only relief from his suffering but also an inner peace that he had never experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved” (Tolstoy 418).
