I've never seen a more compelling portrait of the unbreakable meekness that will inherit the earth: moral courage under fire sustained by faith and humility.
There is beauty, grace, and pathos here to behold, and together they speak to our ultimate human questions.
Perhaps I was primed for this by my forays into World War histories, especially my reading of The Somme by Peter Hart this summer. The book brought to the imagination in grim detail the carnage witnessed on the battlefields of the Great War. Most soldiers who witnessed it did not care to speak of it, lest the conjured memories return and re-traumatize the heart and mind. Most kept these things behind an earthen dam to hold back those floodwaters.
Hacksaw Ridge
is rated R for depicting such battlefield violence, including the sights a medic would have encountered in war. The Okinawa battlefield was also a charnel house of newly- and lately-slain Allies and Japanese soldiers in various stages of decomposition, a home for vermin and pestilence. These images are not for the squeamish.
In 2004, documentary film director Terry Benedict made The Conscientious Objector about Doss. He knew Doss for 17 years before his death in 2006 at 88. At a private screening of Hacksaw Ridge last night, Benedict described how Doss told his amazing story for years--"by rote," but never let out the full story of what he experienced until Benedict pressed him on it, friend to friend. Doss's dam broke and he emotionally told his interior and personal story to Benedict. In the film, the Doss character does look deeply shaken after his heroics.
In relating this last night, Benedict himself swallowed hard and nearly lost it when be began to describe how Doss lost it when he opened up. Such is the power in the personal encounter of such events that, when shared friend to friend, run deeper than rote surface descriptions of a basic story line. The true story is passed on in a personal way from man to man, or in a phrase Russell Kirk often used, a conscience speaking to a conscience.
So, too, does the gospel-directed encounter with Jesus Christ rise up within our hearts, seeking to convert the whole man, deeply shaking our inner dams so that we let go of the world we clutch with our self-centered egos and love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and might. Those dam breaks often come with tears. Religion can give us a surface appearance of integrity we maintain; but the pure in heart, the unbreakable meek, will be the ones to see God. In Hacksaw Ridge, I saw a lightning flash of that courageous and suffering love for mankind that enlightens this dark and woeful world of war.
Follow the Light.
