Yesterday, when I was promoting Ken Burns' "Civil War" series on Facebook, I said it had changed my life when I watched it twenty-five years ago.
Now, I'm the kind of person who believes when anyone makes a statement like that, it's pretty much mandatory that he or she explain those events. Because, honestly, they don't happen that often, and who doesn't like a life-changing story? Oh, we read of them DAILY on Facebook...although I doubt the veracity and monumental-ness of many of them. I mean, finding 8,320 uses for Dawn dishwashing liquid does not qualify for "life changing" status, but apparently social media gurus tasked with creating scintillating copy have been born again by discovering that Dawn can make an effective mosquito repellent (unless you live in Minnesota...the only effective mosquito repellent there is hibernation during the summer months.)
So, here's my story.
I have a degree in history. In the middle of my junior year I switched from a sociology major to history, pretty much because I liked the professors more and I have some kind of mutated brain that can retain and retrieve lots of dates and names and stuff that's useful in history tests. And I can pull off some pretty convincing BS on essays. (I often say I got a BS in BS.)
When I was a student at William Woods College, we had this mini-semester at the end of the year, right after spring break, called Short Term. Basically, folks took a four-week class from 10-12 (or if you were one of those overachievers, a class from 8-10), and the rest of the day was free to do all the things college students do all year long, except you don't have to cut classes to do it.
There were also "off campus" excursions to far away places like Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina in courses called "The Civil War South." Two weeks of classroom and two weeks of travel. I was fortunate to be able to go on one of those trips and spent hours and hours walking through battlefields and antebellum homes and cities that were pristine and oozing southern charm... and pretty far removed from the carnage that took place there a hundred plus years ago.
So it was hard for me to really feel like I had gotten an intimate picture of how really devastating it was for our country. I still had a passion for history, but it was a read-the-textbook-memorize-a-bunch-of-facts kind of passion.
Enter Ken Burns and his ground-breaking documentary in 1990. Through the stirring narrative, journals, diaries and authentic images, some of them so graphic in nature it was difficult to comprehend, the Civil War - and its people - went from being stories from my history textbooks to real, live, 4D people. The dead - in a real sense - came to life for me.
It was at the end of the first episode that this metamorphosis crystallized for me...the reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, written one week before his death at the first Battle of Bull Run. Its eloquence, honesty and unabashed love for his wife moved me to tears and I felt the heartache that families across the young nation had to endure for four long years...still does every time I hear it (you won't be surprised to learn that I've watched the series multiple times). If you're interested, here's a link to the text of his letter (it was edited in the film, but it's no less impacting in its abbreviated form). http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/sullivan-ballou-letter.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
That same year I saw "Dances With Wolves," which also gave me a more accurate picture of the travesty borne by Native Americans at the hands of our greedy, arrogant and misguided forefathers in their attempt to conquer the continent. Again, the Lakota (and all Native Americans) became flesh and blood people, not just the subjects of Hollywood oater films - most of which portrayed the white folks as righteous crusader-like overlords and the Native Americans as uneducated, savage heathens, whose claim on their ancestral lands was illegitimate and a nuisance.
And here's where the story comes full circle...once I had established in my mind that these folks had beating hearts, eloquence of thought and speech, and a real loss of family, lands, culture, etc., I was able to make that same connection with...Jesus.
I've been a Christian all my life, but it wasn't until I saw those two films that I was able to take what had been an abstract idea in my mind and transform it into a living, breathing soul that walked the earth, teaching, loving and, ultimately, dying for my sin.
I know that's a very roundabout way of getting to a mature faith, but everyone's climb to the mountaintop is different, right?
I was humbled twenty-five years ago as the light bulbs kept blazing on in my head. While I'm grateful to be an American, I can't say I've always been proud to be an American. These two periods in our history are gruesome and grisly...a crossroads that my favorite "Civil War" commentator Shelby Foote says was a "hell of a crossroads."
Let's make sure we always try to choose the right path.
