Ordinary Time 27th Sun C

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
1st Reading: HAB 1:2-3; 2:2-4
Responsorial Psalm: PS 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9
2nd Reading: 2 TM 1:6-8, 13-14
Gospel: LK 17:5-10

It was Thursday, May 27, 1943, a B-24 bomber, Green Hornet, was out looking for another B-24 bomber that had disappeared south of Hawaii. A year and a half earlier the Japanese had decimated the American fleet in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and since then the Japanese had seized a vast swath of Asia including the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma and many Pacific Islands. While the Americans had won at Guadalcanal after horrendous loses, the war was far from over.  During the war many planes would disappear in the Pacific theater, downed by various malfunctions, accidents and difficulties, and survivors would suffer severe difficulties, the vast majority dying from drowning or thirst, from exposure, starvation or shark attack (there were always sharks), some going mad before their death. But that greatest fear of downed airman was not exposure, not thirst, not even the sharks, but being captured by the Japanese. By this time the Japanese had earned for themselves a reputation for savagery and cruelty unknown in recent annals. In 1937 at Nanking in China, on capturing the city the Japanese committed a six week frenzy of killing, raping, mutilating and torture, killing maybe as many as 430,00 Chinese in the most disgusting, vicious ways possible.  And made no attempt to hide it, but reveled in this grotesque, Satanic slaughter, the infamous Rape of Nanking. Many other incidents of savagery followed, like the Bataan Death March in April 1942 when the Japanese brutalized and killed thousands of Filipino and American prisoners. And on April 22, 1943, after the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the Japanese had announced that any captured American pilots would be given a “one way ticket to hell.”
As the bomber was searching for the plane, one of its crew, twenty-six year old Louie Zamperini, must have marveled how his life had changed. This young Californian, by many people’s estimation, was one the greatest runners in the world, whom many expected to be the first to break the four-minute mile. He had performed well at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, gaining the attention of an impressed Adolf Hitler who asked to meet him personally, and he had every expectation that he would clean-up at the 1940 Olympics to be held in Tokyo. But there was to be no Tokyo Olympics. War intervened, and now he was a flyboy in the war against the Japanese in the Pacific.
That day his own plane’s engines malfunctioned and they crashed. Only three of the eleven crew members survived. For twenty-seven days they floated in a raft, fighting off sharks, fighting off starvation when a plane came by. They were saved. Unfortunately it was a Japanese plane which repeatedly strafed them with machine gun fire. Remarkably, no one was killed but the rafts were riddled with bullet holes and they had to work desperately to keep them inflated and fix the holes as they repeatedly beat back shark attacks.  After heroic efforts they succeeded. One of them died. They drifted more weeks--forty-seven days in all--fighting off sharks and fighting off starvation, fighting off despair before they found land, some 2,000 miles from where they had crashed.
How had Louie survived this forty-seven day ordeal? While he had been raised Catholic, he was not very religious, but at points, out of sheer desperation, he had turned to prayer and that had helped. He even had promised God that if he would spare his life he would serve God forever. However, the land they landed on was controlled by the Japanese and they were captured. Their first prison was a place where the previous American prisoners (eight marines) had all been beheaded with Samurai swords. He was starved; he was beaten; he was experimented on. He dropped down to sixty-five pounds. Then he was transferred to a new camp in Japan itself--and that was where the real horror began. One guard in particular went out of his way to humiliate and torture him, to break him. He was called the Bird. To get a sense of how brutal and sadistic this guard was, at the end of the war he was listed among the top forty war criminals to be brought to justice. He was up there with the man who led the Bataan Death March; he was up there with Tojo, the mastermind of Pearl Harbor and the man who ordered the execution of POWs. At one point the Bird ordered him to pick up a thick heavy wooden beam, some six feet long, and hold it over his head, ordering the guard to strike him with his gun if he should lower it. He was only skin and bones and it could not be expected that he could hold it up very long. The beam became heavier and heavier, and he seemed to crumble until a single thought dominated his mind. That thought was: He cannot break me! He cannot break me! And a strength arose within him which he could not explain. For thirty-seven minutes he held up that heavy beam, and he would have continued holding it up but the Bird, watching all this, became enraged and attacked and beat him.  For two and half years he suffered.  But he survived and was freed with the end of the war. He returned home.
He quickly recovered from his physical suffering and regained his weight—he was a walking skeleton before--but the body can only take so much physical abuse and his running days were over. In 1946 he married and all seemed well. He seemed unbroken. He was, however, far from unbroken, while he was physically all right, deep psychological and emotional scars remained. He suffered frightening flashbacks to his days in the camps, and horrific dreams that left him exhausted. He was haunted by the memories of torture and every night he would have nightmares of the Bird who had tortured him. He began to drink heavily, and to his flashbacks and nightmares he added alcoholic blackouts. His life and marriage began to disintegrate. One night during a nightmare he started to strangle his pregnant wife in their bed thinking she was the Bird. Desperate, his wife left him and decided to divorce him. She, however, after attending a religious revival then happening in LA, (the famous Billy Graham Crusade of 1949) she decided against it and even persuaded her husband to go. After much effort he did go, and he was transformed. Graham was talking about war, and suffering and miracles; of how the hand of God can be seen in every part of his creation and every moment of our lives, even in the suffering, and he said what God asks of men is faith, faith in him. Louie remembered all the events when he had seemed to be delivered from danger, he remembered the promise he had made to God--and he was changed!
As the book puts it so well: he became a New Creation.  He was completely healed and totally transformed. He put away his bitterness and hatred, and his flashbacks and nightmares disappeared completely. He felt only gratitude and love. He forgave all those who had tortured and destroyed his life. He gave himself his life to serve Christ, a life of good works, particularly working with young delinquents. Oddly enough the Bird survived, hiding out until an amnesty had been decreed, and when Louie in 1998 went to Japan to run a leg in the Olympic Torch relay at the Nagano Winter Olympics, which was near one of the POW camps he had stayed in, he tried to see the Bird but he refused to see Louie.  Louie Zamperini died  in 2014, at the age of ninety-seven. His life is truly a miracle of what the power of God can do for us, of what faith can do. You can read about the amazing story of Louie Zamperini in Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book Unbroken, a book that was on the New York Times bestseller’s list for over four years, including fourteen weeks as number one. It is an incredibly readable book; you cannot put it down. There was even a Hollywood movie made by Angelia Jolie in 2014 though I don’t think it was very good.
WE are called to an extraordinary life. In today’s Gospel Our Lord say that by the power of faith we can do extraordinary things. In today’s second reading St. Paul tells us that we should fan into a flame the gifts God has given us. Both faith and our spiritual gifts grow as we grow in grace, and grace grows as we pray, go to the sacraments and do good works. The more we do, the more we get. The more we get, the more we are healed, transformed and made happy.
Let me end with a story from the Desert Fathers--those monks of the early centuries One day Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man Abba Joseph stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten torches of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.” If we will we can become all flame. If we will we can become a New Creation.  If we will we will experience the power of God.