On building bridges...and blowing them up

Warning: major spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the movie…

The headman of a village in Ceylon surveyed the huge, awesome new bridge that had finally been completed in the rugged jungle. The people of his village had helped build it. Fearing evil, the village’s devil dancers had performed ceremonial rites on it, priests had murmured incantations, coconuts had been broken on it, limes squeezed on it, drums beaten, and streamers of betel leaves hung – all to drive the devils away from it. “Now,” the headman told Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel for whom the bridge was built, “the spirits will preserve your bridge for all time.”

There was an irony in his words beyond the headman’s comprehension. How was he to understand that Spiegel and a large, expert crew had dedicated themselves wholly to blowing up this bridge – stupendously, magnificently – for the climax of a new motion picture, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

All the labor of eight months – cutting down 1,500 giant trees in the jungle, shaping them into pillars, loading them onto the backs of forty-eight elephants to be dragged to the building site, pile-driving them into the ground to create a structure larger than any in Ceylon (425 feet long and 90 feet high) at a cost of over $250,000 – was to go, one week after the headman spoke, to providing one thirty-second scene in which 1,000 tons of dynamite would destroy the bridge at the precise moment when a railroad engine pulling six cars was crossing it.

At Kitulgala, after the bridge had fallen in ruins, the souvenir hunters swarmed over the wreckage. Some took undamaged timber for practical purposes, like building fences and sheds. Parts of the train were gathered by junk men for scrap metal (after sixty-five years in service the engine had been completely refurbished for its 30 seconds of glory in the finale). The torrential river swept away a good deal of what remained. As for the natives, it is reported that many still go to the site of the bridge and gaze at it. They look at the scene and still cannot comprehend why anyone would want to build a bridge and blow it up, carve a road through the mountainside, and then abandon it. The headman of the village, who predicted long life for the bridge, still presides over his village’s life and activities. No reporter has asked him to comment on the explosion.  – from the original The Bridge on the River Kwai souvenir book, produced in 1957

I so love this film, even after the umpteenth viewing a month or two ago, that I preordered the deluxe blu-ray as soon as I saw a release date for it on Amazon. The book inside was worth it. I had never read the story of the bridge before – or about the genesis of the film. I read it from cover to cover several times right after opening it. The story excerpted above about the headman of the village praying over the bridge is classic.

It’s a real life parallel to the one of the key kingdom lessons for me in the film:

Don’t get too attached to the things we build, whether it’s a physical structure or a philosophical or theological one.

Nicholson was obsessed with his bridge.

He was obsessed with building a “proper bridge” that would show “these barbarians” what the British soldier was capable of doing. It became for him a monument to his culture and his people – as well as the crowning achievement of his career. It gave his men a point of focus, it restored their morale and discipline, and he revelled in the fact that “the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it is built and who built it; not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers, even in captivity.”

The exchange with his engineer officer epitomizes his obsession:

Reeves: “Oh by the way, sir, I meant to tell you. There are trees in this forest very similar to elm, and the elm piles of London Bridge lasted nearly six hundred years.”

Nicholson: “Six hundred years, Reeves?”

“Why, yes sir.”

“Six hundred years. That would be quite something.”

This fixation on the bridge resulted in some of the most delicious ironies of the film: to finish his bridge on time, Nicholson ends up doing the very things his captors had threatened to do. The great conflict occupying the first hour or so of the movie over whether the British officers have to do manual labor is finally won by Nicholson. But he utlimately puts all of them to work himself. The Japanese commandant, Saito, threatened to close the hospital and send the sick to work. Nicholson called it blackmail – but in the end empties the hospital himself so the sick can engage in “light duties” in finishing the bridge.

And all the while he forgets one very important wee detail: he is building a bridge for his enemy as part of a railway that will supply the invasion of his beloved India.

The irony is indeed delicious. The point simple – delivered by the one truly sane person in the entire story, the British doctor, Clipton: “Madness!” How easily reality gets turned every which way not only in war but in all of life. How attached we get to our buildings, our achievements, our systems. How quickly our identity becomes inseperable from them. We want to build churches that will last. They won’t. We want to build small groups that will ever end. They will. We construct theological systems of doctrine and belief that will provide the ultimate bridge taking us and generations to come all right to the shores of heaven. But before you know it, some new team of commando reformers will blow it to kingdom come as they then erect their own bridge in it’s place, only to have another upstart do the same to their work, and so on and so forth.

How attached we get to the things we build. How loosely we need to hold them.

The greatest structures – the most useful bridges we build today for the kingdom – potentially become the greatest detour in enemy hands even as faithful generations in later years desperately try to maintain them and defend them. What was an Ebenezer becomes a Nehushtan. You remember Nehushtan, don’t you? “Nehushtan” was the name Hezekiah gave to the famed bronze serpent that Moses made at the Lord’s direction generations before. That “snake on a stick” had served as a means of healing as grumbling and snake-bitten Israelites looked to it with faith that they would recover. That’s in Numbers 21. Nothing more is said about it until the reference in 2 Kings 18:4, possibly over 700 years later. It was no longer the bronze snake that was a means through which healing came to a generation. Now it was an idol among many in the temple to which incense was burned. But to Hezekiah it was just “a thing of brass” (=Nehushtan). And he smashed it to pieces.

Building is good. Many of us in this current generation have become experts in demolition. We blow up the traditional and church institutions as well as traditional systems of doctrine and theology. That’s not always a bad thing! Shame on us for perpetuating something that has lost it’s way rather than being prepared to blow it up ourselves and begin anew. Shame on us for desperately clinging to our structures, for fighting those who show up to demolish them, for ignoring the fact that it may be divine orders sending them to do it in the first place. But all that being said, all too often those who blow up bridges that have ceased functioning as useful bridges or that in fact are now being used by the enemy to advance his agenda, have no idea what to build in its place. Building is good.

It’s just that we need to always build with an anticipation of blowing it up eventually.

God tends to build temporary bridges. He lives in tents more than he does in temples. And in point of fact, he blew up the temple he had built for himself. Twice. And now he lives in a people that are on the move (but oh how we are driven to build ourselves a permanent home!) even as He Himself is constantly on the move like the wind that no one knows “where it’s coming from or where it’s going” (but oh how we are driven to confine that wind in our own familiar and safely constructed boxes, rather than enjoying its sound in the trees and in the singing of the chimes!).

So build wisely, build well – even build a “proper bridge.”

Just remember it’s temporary, and be prepared to blow it when its time has come.

And when it is blown, may we rejoice as the locals swarm over its ruins and find all kinds of constructive uses for the debris from what we have built – even if it was the largest structure on the little island of our generation.