c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) My still-fresh memories of Kenya, where I spent a couple of weeks in October, are not of the sociopolitical tensions, violence and chaos that I’ve watched explode in images on television and online in recent days.

What I remember most vividly are the people I met and befriended for life, I hope: men, women and children who changed the way I see the world, the way I perceive myself.

I recall their hospitality, humor and stubborn grace. The desperately poor mothers and children in the Kibera slums in Nairobi. The artists who had fled violence and unrest in other parts of Africa for the refuge of stable Kenya. The flinty band of widows who had formed a collective to support themselves and their families. Our college-educated traveling companion who had dedicated his life to helping the poorest of the poor get a fingerhold on the bottom rung of the ladder leading up.

We spent our last night in Nairobi lingering with some of these new friends over dinner at a trattoria in the city center. It’s not far from where police clashed with thousands of angry knife-wielding demonstrators who heeded the call of opposition leader Raila Odinga for a million-man march to protest his narrow defeat by President Mwai Kibaki in the Dec. 27 elections.

Now some of our friends fear for their lives, and with good reason. But not for a good cause.

Because vengeance is never a good cause.

In the wake of the election fiasco, one side emerged feeling wronged and, rather than sit down at the bargaining table, chose to begin meting out their twisted form of justice by torching businesses, homes and churches, or by having a go at their neighbors with rusty machetes.

Revenge is a never-ending cycle. There are always more eyes to be poked out, more hands to be shorn off, more victims-who-in-turn-seek-revenge to be made.

Where and when will it end?

Vengeance, however, is not particular to the powder keg of poverty, desperation and age-old tribal rivalries that have rent the fabric of Kenyan society this week. The urge for revenge is a universal desire that leads, invariably and universally, to great tragedy.

Sometimes it’s societal revenge, as in Rwanda, Northern Ireland, or the Middle East.

Sometimes it’s particular, personal revenge, as with the case of an 82-year-old Sardinian poet was gunned down recently as he went to buy his morning newspaper. Those who knew him say it was likely a 50-year vendetta finally catching up with him.

When we foster memories of offenses _ real or imagined _ and allow them to morph into ideologies or, worse yet, mythologies, they end up consuming families, societies and whole peoples _ including our own selves.

The cycle of revenge appears unstoppable, but it doesn’t have to be. William Bole, co-author of the book, “Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace,” speaking at a 2006 Woodstock Theological Center gathering, cited examples _ huge, societal, unbelievable, superhuman examples _ of successful alternatives to the theopolitics of revenge. Big time.

“The most celebrated example is South Africa,” Bole said. “A brutal, white minority regime fell, and black South Africans rose to power. Practically everyone assumed that blacks would do unto whites as whites had done unto them. They didn’t, as a group. Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president, appointed a truth commission instead. And through that commission, South Africa formally abstained from revenge.”

If forgiveness can make it there, to paraphrase Kander and Ebb’s song, it can make it anywhere.

Most people who attempt to exact vengeance believe what they’re doing is moral because they were wronged first. Bole calls this the “ethics of even-numberedness,” as in, “the second punch that gets thrown is right and just because it responds to the first.”

The problem is how and when you begin the counting. Rarely can anybody agree on who started the fight.

Can you really ever get even with someone, whether they’ve cut you off in traffic, betrayed you and broken your heart, stolen your lunch out of the break room fridge, or taken the life of someone you love?

What does “even” even mean?

Revenge doesn’t work.

No matter how you keep score.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

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