Unbroken

I find it difficult to understand why someone would consciously choose to be an enemy of God. Yet an old story from the Middle East, and Unbroken, the new film about the life of American World War 2 survivor Louis (‘Louie’) Zamperini remind me that people do indeed set themselves against God.  

Tuesday was ‘Epiphany’ when Christians remember the visit of the wise men from the east to the infant Jesus.  On the way, they alert Herod king of Judea to their star quest. Familiar with the old prophecies of a coming Messiah, Herod ascertains from the religious experts that the child is to be born in Bethlehem, and subsequently massacres every young boy in the town. He hopes, presumably, to retain the throne for his descendants.

I can understand people who don’t believe in God acting as God’s enemies. But to me it’s almost incredible that someone who believes in the goodness and grace and the wildness of God should choose to oppose God. In Herod’s case, the reason was clearly the depravity and evil of a man who was ‘prepared to commit any crime in order to gratify his unbounded ambition.’

In Unbroken there was similar evil in the character of Matsuhiro Watanabe, a Japanese Prisoner of War camp commandant who saw in Louis Zamperini a particular challenge and sought, through a series of relentless beatings, to break him. A key scene shows an emaciated Zamperini forced by a gloating Watanabe to hold a heavy plank above his head. We are to regard it as a kind of crucifixion, good confronting evil.

Zamperini was born in 1917 in California to an Italian immigrant family. He was rescued from a delinquent childhood by his elder brother Pete who saw his potential as a runner and challenged him to develop it.

He participated promisingly in the 1936 Olympic Games, and had set his sights on a medal in the 1940 Games. War intervened and Louie found himself serving as bombardier on B-24 bomber flights over the Pacific. He survived a plane crash in the ocean, and a subsequent 47 days afloat in a rubber raft showing tremendous courage and resolve, only to be captured and imprisoned by the Japanese.

Unbroken is based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book of the same name which uses Zamperini’s own memoir Devil at my heels as a key source. For me, the film’s chief shortcoming is that it ends with Louie returning triumphantly, unbroken to his family in the USA, with brief on-screen text outlining the rest of his story. Thus we do not see his battle with post-traumatic stress – the nightmares, the obsessive focus on returning to Japan and murdering Watanabe, the alcoholism, the reckless investment, the disintegrating marriage.

These post-war years were also, I realised, years in which Louis Zamperini lived as an enemy of God. He had always believed in God, and had prayed repeatedly in the ocean and the prison camps. And yet, despite the miraculous nature of his escape from the sinking B-24, despite the gift of refreshing downpour following a prayer, despite the sense as he looked around him mid-Pacific at the beauty of ocean and stars that it was the handiwork of God, he set himself against God.

He refused to let his wife go to church; he refused initially to listen to a Christian evangelist. This was not the wickedness of a Herod or a Watanabe, but nevertheless, afraid to be reminded of his mid-ocean promise to serve God forever if he was rescued, Louie treated God like an enemy.

Unbroken? It seems to me that Louie was a broken man on at least two occasions – when, close to death, he called out to God in the raft, and when he knelt in Billy Graham’s gospel tent. ‘I made no excuses, I did not rationalise, I did not blame.’

I believe Louis Zamperini finished his life unbroken (in 2014 at the age of 97) because he passed through those times of brokenness. There he discovered that the God he’d considered an enemy was in fact a friend; there he found grace to let go of the hatred which was destroying him and to forgive those who had hurt him – even Watanabe.

The truth is that every one of us has the potential of thinking, or acting as enemies of God.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 8th January 2015)