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Les Misérables the musical, based on the 1862 Victor Hugo novel by the same name, started as, I have learned, a concept album. The musical/opera based on the concept album opened in London in 1985 to poor reviews from professional critics, but the everyday people had a different opinion–it sold out its original 3 month run, moved to the West End, then Broadway, and remains one of the most beloved musicals today.

Les Misérables can be translated as The Miserables, The Wretched, The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims, and The Dispossessed. It took Victor Hugo 20 years to write the novel and when taking it to publishers, he believed it would be his most important work. He wanted to tell the stories of social misery and injustice.

I haven’t read it. I know. But I think one thing Victor Hugo was trying to say had to do with the systems, the wheels of society and injustice that people get caught in and couldn’t escape–the ways people are kept poor, hungry, desperate, miserable.

I say this, because I think the musical teeters on the edge of being about making good choices.

Our story begins in 1815 as Jean Valjean is released from 19 years of hard labor for stealing bread for his starving family, and then trying to escape. One of his guards, Javert, gives him his parole papers that Valjean will have to show everywhere. Free, he can’t find work or a place to stay while he holds those papers.

A bishop invites him in, feeds him, gives him a place to sleep, and treats Valjean like a human being, which must have been jarring. Valjean steals the silverware, flees into the night, is caught, returned to the bishop who offers him the silver candlesticks too, offering grace, forgiveness, and an opportunity to start again. While that must have been terrifying, Valjean does so, takes on a new name and identity, and becomes a prominent person in the next 10 years.

Though he can’t escape himself, or Javert, forever.

There is Fantine, who the book tells us was an orphan and whose name means Baby, Infant-like, Child-like. She had nothing and, it seems, was taken advantage of by an older, wealthy, already married man, who left her pregnant. Children born to unmarried women would end up in orphanages, the streets, or in the homes of others, which they had to pay for. There were some options for women to work in factories, but it was precarious, and eventually she was fired and, in desperation, fell into prostitution. She seems to be one who gets lost, falls through the cracks, lives and dies unknown. I didn’t even intend on mentioning her.

Valjean goes to the Thenardier’s to adopt Fantine’s daughter, Cosette. The Thenardiers are what happens when the wretched become… grifters and thieves. They take advantage of the customers of their inn, find there is always a deal that can be made, they are part of a gang of thieves, and then, literally pillage the bodies of dead revolutionaries and soldiers to build their wealth. It’s a dog eat dog world and they are determined to land on top, no matter the costs.

Javert, spends his life at least keeping an eye out, if not hunting down, the escaped parolee, Valjean. He is, as the song Blue sang, certain and steady as the stars in the sky, full of conviction, righteous, a pull yourself up by your bootstraps because I did, kind of man. He would have never considered himself a miserable one. When Javert is caught, and Valjean is given the opportunity to kill Javert, the man who hunted him, ran him from the good alternative lives he set up for himself, Valjean lets Javert go free–he passed on the grace that had been given to him. And it breaks Javert. He sings of the stars having gone black and drowns himself in the Seine River. He was caught in his own wheel of beliefs that didn’t let him off, and the world was changing around him and there was nothing he could do about it, and had no room for change.

It isn’t just that Valjean stops doing wrong and makes better choices, his wrong choice to steal bread could be considered right, at least it was about survival. He did change, but it was about being seen. Dignity, the change comes from treating Valjean as a whole person, worthy of a meal, a bed, comfort, hospitality, Grace, forgiveness. And it changed him. He got out from the wheel that was crushing him, the system that was going to keep him down, at least for a time.

There’s a push, a movement to deny people’s stories, history, cultures, languages, Religion, Dignity.

And to deny any one of these is to deny someone’s person-hood. And when someone isn’t considered a person, you can do anything. Force them into prison labor, into desperate life killing means for just enough to scrape by, enslave them, make them disappear, move them into camps, call for their death, ignore their death…

I think the lives of the sheep in our reading is as simple and as complicated as that: did you look people in the eyes and see them. See them as people, human, worthy of dignity and kindness, hospitality and grace.

And, do you go out of your way, even a little, to find those who have been considered the least important, that some consider less human, And look them in the eyes, and see them.

Or did you let the wheel, the systems keep turning over on them.

In his 1933 essay, The church and the Jewish Question, German theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer said there are 3 possibilities for actions that the church can take in response to the state: 1) making the state responsible for what it does. 2) an unconditional obligation to the victims of any social order–even if they are not Christian.

And 3) not just bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

Disrupt the systems, the wheels that run people over, in every way possible, as often as possible, with as much love as possible, for as long as you can. Do not lose your innate dignity as you speak up, remind the powers of the dignity of everyone else.

Despite everything I said before, the central event of Les Mis the failed June Revolution which was led by mostly young men of means, though not exclusively. They read Voltaire and Rousseau, they were early communists and believers in the republic. They had ideas for what the world could be, for what the world should be, for what it would mean if people could chart their own course, not be trampled under the wheels of the system, they could have a voice in their government, a voice in their lives.

They knew of these other revolutions, ones that brought down the monarchy, or changed the government, they didn’t seem to last but maybe this time… when the sun rises over the barricades, they will see the world they have been waiting, hoping, fighting for.

And when the sun rises, it looks like it was all for nothing; just about everyone dies.

For all of its flaws, the movie of the musical from a decade ago did something different at the end, or made obvious what was already there. Valjean dies at the end and is escorted to the beyond by Fantine, to the barricades, and everyone is there, singing. It’s like they are saying this vision you had, this hope you struggled for, this life beyond the barricades is not forgotten, the struggle and the fighting is not for nothing. Somewhere beyond this moment, there is a world we long to see, there is a Kin-dom of God fully realized. And I don’t think the way to it is fighting, but it is worth the struggle and striving.