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We were taken, one by one, an abductor at each arm, into a living room and pushed onto a couch. The Qu’ran was being sung from a 24-hour religious channel illustrated with slideshow images of flowing water, green landscapes,
blue cloud sky. On the wall there was a picture of a man with puppy-dog eyes, long hair and a beard, fingers pointing to a heart
exposed through flowing robes. My face was seized by an involuntary grimace. Being kidnapped, searched, relieved of our passports,
handcuffed and blindfolded under the provident eye of the Sacred Heart and in the prayersong sound of the Qu’ran – it was just too surreal. I turned instinctively, blindly to prayer. I used my fingers to pray the rosary. I prayed the Jesus prayer, over and over, thousands of times, until it breathed autonomously in me: “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.” I thought of each person I knew, held them in light, gave thanks to God for the gift of their lives. I prayed especially for those who would carry the burden of our captivity most heavily: our families and loved ones, the CPT team in Baghdad, CPT’s Chicago and Toronto offices. I turned to the Sacred Heart and made up long litanies repeating “O most holy Sacred Heart” in conjunction with “Deliver me… Free me… Protect me… Hold me… Carry me…” I didn’t know what God’s will was. I didn’t know what I might be asked to give and I feared that I was too weak, too selfish to offer it. Over and over I prayed, reaching for that fearless, unflinching, open-to-anything-and-anyone heart of love, “Help me! Open me! Help me to be open!” The acute, heart-pounding terror of those first days gradually gave way to a chronic white noise that murmured in the background, such that I could sometimes forget it was there. Boredom became the great enemy. I felt like I was treading water in a vast ocean of time, and around me there was no horizon or sky. I was lost in a universe of greywash, grey that invaded and infected and debilitated every pore of my being. Tom became the prophet of the present moment. “All we have is the now,” he would say. “The past is a fiction and the future doesn’t exist.” He’d tell
us about his meditations: how, as he passed the chain through his fingers that bound his wrist, he would receive and send God’s light with the count
of each breath. He strained with his whole being to let go of everything – even the hope of release – and just be present to the present. I didn’t dare tell them - it was my problem after all, this relentlessly critical inner voice that constantly lashed at them - and then at me for being so relentlessly critical. Though I felt enslaved by my mental ravings, the way out of this suffering was clear to me. Each day, each hour, each minute I was confronted with a choice: withdraw, build a wall, clench my heart into a fist and conserve my widow’s mite of emotional energy; or open my heart, drop my little coin into the moment, be generous with acceptance and conversation and listening. Sometimes, when I gave my consent and allowed myself to be born into the present, the misery of captivity would dissolve into sharing about our
lives, games of Wheel of Fortune, riddles, discussions about bad movies or pedagogical strategies for unlearning racism, heated Quaker, Baptist
and Catholic Bible exegesis. I sometimes imagined that our task each day was to build a Palace of the Present Moment, a place of refuge from our
11-foot-square, paint-peeling room of never-ending gloom, a place that was always in our power to create. From early on, the prospect of release was held imminent before us. First they said it would be in a few days, a propaganda statement “To show the world we are not like Al Queda.” Then it was to be for the Iraqi election in the middle of December. When that came and went, they said it would be another week. Just in time for Christmas, we thought, a public relations coup for the insurgency. We began to entertain fantasies about a Christmas reunion with our families. As the day approached, Norman was the first to face facts and shift his focus to getting him, and us, through a Christmas in handcuffs and chains. I was the last to give up that hope, and staved off despair by recounting Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Norman led us through a Christmas Eve service modeled on that of his church and with the help of his prodigous memory we remembered and sang 36 Christmas carols. Tom told Luke’s Christmas story from memory. I gulped down tears at the words, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy for all the people…Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace…” The next day we put on stiff upper lips, told ourselves it was just another day and tried not to think about our families labouring through Christmas without us. Dinner consisted of an Iraqi pita stuffed with white rice. That night we got a visit from the ringleader, Medicine Man, so called because he brought blood pressure medicine for Norman on the second day of our captivity. He dropped a pile of clothes on a chair. There was a pair of track pants, socks, underwear, an undershirt and a sweater for each of us. I was delighted. The nights were beginning to turn cold, and after 30 days in captivity we were no longer quite so fresh. Medicine Man told us that negotiations for our ransom were underway, that “Big Haji” was in the United Arab Emirates and we would be released in five days. He pointed to us and then held his nose. “Tomorrow you will take some shower”, he said. When he left, I said, “Do you guys mind if I take one of those sweaters now? I’m cold.” Of course, they said. The one on top happened to be the one I liked best. As promised, water was heated for us and we had our first bath in 31 days. Standing in a grime-bottomed bathtub, a cauldron of water steaming on the kerosene heater I front of me, I poured basin after basin of water over my naked body, every cell of it thrilling with pleasure. Angels sang in the heavens above, their incorporeal jealousy disguised in rejoicing. While getting dressed I noticed something curious about my sweater. It had a zipper at the neck, and the zipper pull-tab was shaped like a heart. “Strange,” I thought, “Is this a woman’s sweater?” I examined it carefully. No, it was definitely a man’s sweater. The tag even said so. But a heart-shaped pull-tab? I looked again. It was a piece of polished metal, open in the center, the frame bent into the shape of a heart. An open heart. The Sacred Heart. Tears filled my eyes. Dr. Seuss was right after all. Christmas can’t be stolen. On December 28, our captors brought us a Christmas cake – a special order from a bake shop decorated with thick, white icing, green palm trees and indecipherable pink writing. They sang “Happy Birthday to You” in honour of Jesus’ birth, and we sang “Silent Night.” The captor we nicknamed Uncle cut and distributed the cake with a piece of cardboard. Then, laughing merrily, he scooped up a big fistful of it and shoveled it into his mouth. The next day, the captor we called Junior declared he was going on a suicide mission. In body language augmented by his handful of English words, he mimed driving a car full of explosives, pulling up to an American humvee and BOOM. Pointing first to himself and then skyward, eyes rolling piously, he said, “Jenna (heaven). With my mother, my father, my fiancé.” They, along with his best friend and one of his sisters, were killed when the U.S. bombed his house in Fallujah. Then, pointing to the earth and with spitting, he said, “America.” I once asked him what he would be doing if the U.S. hadn’t invaded his country. Shrugging his shoulders, he answered, “Helping my father in the
market.” Junior was 25 years old and had a grade six education. On New Year’s Eve, while Junior supervised our morning exercise and bathroom routine, I acted on an impulse. I brought Junior a chair, pointed to it,
then pointed to his shoulders and mimed massaging them. He often complained of neck and shoulder pain. He took the chair, eyes wide with surprise.
Standing behind him, I closed my eyes, took a breath and laid my hands on his shoulders. It was Day 117. We were unhandcuffed and rotating through the bathroom in preparation for bed, Harmeet, Norman and me. Tom had been separated
from us on February 12—39 days before. Though we suspected and feared the worst, we lived with and accepted our suspicions just as we did our handcuffs,
our chains, the on-going theft of our lives. It was just what we had to do. He asked me a question – what do they say in Canada about suicide? Is it okay or not? It is haram, I answered, something forbidden by Esau [Jesus].
Good, he said, just like Islam. He looked at me and said, pointing his finger solemnly at his chest, “I no suicide. Suicide no good – haram.
I (get) married. I (become) father.” It has been a year since our abduction. I often wonder what’s become of Junior and the others, what trajectories their lives have taken. Our lives have followed the trajectory of return to ordinary time, but I suspect none of us are quite the same. I know I’m not, though how I can’t really describe. It’s a feeling, an ontological imprint left by Tom (dear Tom!), Harmeet and Norman, our captors, our 118-day sojourn through the black hole of captivity, the paradox of being freed (and incredibly grateful for being freed) by the arms of the very soldiers we would disarm. It’s the imprint an extreme experience leaves when one is taken to the brink and faced with the abyss of mortality. This, I think, is what I’ve learned, though I make no claims about successfully living it. We are born to be born, again and again, every day in every
moment in every decision, big or small, regardless of where we are or what is happening to us. And peace, the birthright, the manger and swaddling clothes of every human being, announced by angel voices that say “Do not be afraid!” – I have come
to cherish it as the dearest and most essential of all things, even more (I say with fear and trembling) than life itself. The gun, the bomb, the
military-industrial office chair, the words that carpet-bomb, shrapnelize and incinerate the garden God gave us to share, these are anti-Christ indeed,
as anti-incarnational as Junior’s immolate despair. James Loney, |