Redemptive Conversations & The African Queen

Many of us have seen what seems to be unprecedented rain this year.  Our lakes and rivers have been full – many to the point of intervention – or even evacuation.  One of my favorite river movies is that classic, “The African Queen.”  Here are some thoughts on that amazing cruise.

The African Queen is one of the best exodus journey films ever made. This 1951 film starring Humphrey Bogart as Charlie, a riverboat captain, and Katharine Hepburn as Rose,  a spinster missionary who is in Africa ministering with her brother, is set in pre-war German East Africa in August/September 1914. The Germans burn a mission village, herding off the people, and Rose’s brother dies. This event sets up the unlikely alliance between Rose and Charlie as they take to a riverboat and seek freedom on the other side of a lake that is downstream – past a German Fort, a rapids, and a German gunboat. The river as a character is both destructive and redemptive in the film.

The power of the story is in the redemptive relationship between Rose and Charlie. Bogart and Hepburn, two powerful actors, make you want to believe people can change in the midst of the chaos of war and nature, that love between two, so different, strong willed and courageous people can happen.   The spinster English missionary’s faith is part of the reason she is so courageous and keeps her virtue. In the movie she does not lose her faith but can see Charlie as someone whom she needs for this journey and her/their mission to blow up the German gunboat. They are married before the Germans try to hang them. The overturned African Queen and her homemade torpedoes blow up the German boat, and the newly-married couple swims off to freedom.

The African Queen does what film often does best. It gives viewers two people with an historical setting of good and evil on a journey against the odds, united by a mission to overcome evil. The people find love on a shared journey, an exodus from evil oppression to a promised land across water. It is the dialogue between two actors at the height of their craft that makes this story believable and memorable. The dialogue makes the redemptive relationship work.

As a Christian, a military chaplain and pastor, I have seen redemptive conversations between people in hard, disappointing life events. I have had redemptive conversations in the valley of the shadow of death in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have had redemptive conversations with families who have lost loved ones and with children wounded and confused by their parents’ divorce. God gave us his word in his son and in the text that we can speak into the lives of the wounded and broken to bring salvation and courage to face the chaos and confusion so many face each day.