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Episcopalians: Terry Waite urges church to be a voice for peace'
From
dmack@episcopalchurch.org
Date
Wed, 7 May 2003 15:21:11 -0400
May 7, 2003
2003-098
Episcopalians: Terry Waite urges church to be a voice for
peace'
by Dan Webster
(ENS) "The world of international affairs is a moral mess,"
Terry Waite, the former Anglican envoy held hostage for four
years in Lebanon, told an audience at the Salt Lake City Library
auditorium May 3. "I don't know who is going to clean it up."
Waite was in Utah for the annual Dewey Lecture Series, and
preached the following day at Salt Lake City's All Saints
Church. He served as an envoy of Archbishop of Canterbury Robert
Runcie in the Middle East during the 1980s, negotiating with
kidnappers in Iran and Libya, when he was taken hostage by the
group Islamic Jihad in Lebanon in 1987. He was released after
1,763 days in captivity in November, 1991.
The former hostage told the audience at the library that there
are two perceptions in the Arab and Islamic worlds that should
concern the United States: that the primary motive for the war
in Iraq was economic, and that by going to war the US has
"consolidated the base of terrorism." In politics, perceptions
should be taken as seriously as reality, he said.
"The U.N. is only as strong as its member nations allow it to
be," he said. Russia, China, the United States and the United
Kingdom have wanted to use the U.N. for their own national
purposes, he maintained, suggesting that a "move towards nations
giving up some sovereignty to the U.N." would strengthen the
international body.
Later, in an interview, Waite said that "this would be a good
time" to see the United Nations reconstructed. "We need to hear
more the voices from the Nobel Peace Prize winners," he
suggested. He thinks retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former
President Jimmy Carter and others could be helpful in restoring
morality to the life of international relations.
Prayers light the darkness
On Sunday Waite recalled how he kept hope alive during the years
he was imprisoned. "As a boy in church, sitting in the
quire--Sunday by Sunday--I thought often I was bored," he said.
"Often the sermons meant nothing to me. They seemed to float
over my head.
"I didn't think I was learning anything but, years later in
captivity, the language came back. I had no books, no prayer
book, but I could remember the services of the church: they were
there. They were stored in my memory, and I could draw on them."
He said he did not engage in extemporaneous prayer in the dark
solitude of his hostage life, fearing that in doing so he would
"give voice to depression and despair," so he resolved to stick
with his memorized collects.
"I reverted to the prayers that I had learned through the prayer
book," Waite told the congregation, "which were simple,
straightforward and balanced and, in that way, was able to find
some inner peace amidst the conflict raging all around. That was
a great and wonderful gift."
Those prayers and the services of the church, he said in an
interview, also gave him the opportunity to be in community even
during his more than three years of strict isolation. It was a
great comfort for him, he said, to feel part of the worldwide
cycle of prayer that Anglicans were saying with him each day of
his captivity.
One favorite prayer, which he recited before both groups, meant
a great deal during those times he was chained to the floor,
blindfolded and held in a room with no windows or artificial
light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by
thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this
night." It is one of the 84 collects of Cranmer that appears in
the Evening Prayer service in prayer books throughout the
worldwide Anglican Communion.
Overflowing peace
The gospel text for that Sunday, Luke 24:36b-48 , was the story
of Jesus' first appearance to the disciples after the
Resurrection. Jesus' first words to his disciples, "Peace be
with you," seemed to feed Waite's message to the faithful.
"Peace, if we discover it and we grow into it, must overflow to
others," he said. "In Cranmer's day, there were terrible times,
terrible times of conflict between religions. We see them today
and Cranmer knew them within the Christian faith. His fate was
to die at the stake. He was burned in Oxford for heresy. He
wasn't the only one. It was common practice in those days. How,
you say, can there be such brutality amongst people who claim to
possess Christian faith? It's a question worth asking."
Waite would later compare Cranmer's fate and the current
situation in the world, saying that "ultimately war cannot be
the way to resolve international conflict, no more than burning
someone at the stake--because he is seen to be a heretic--is a
way to resolve doctrinal differences within the church."
Waite told the congregation that the church has an important and
vital role "to ask the right questions about root causes and to
make a voice known. A voice of peace, not a voice that gives way
to everything, not a voice that appeases, but a voice that
speaks out clearly and confidently with the message of Christ."
"Jesus said: My peace be with you. My peace I give unto you.'"
Waite urged the congregation to embrace that peace, remembering
"as we do so, it will make demands on us. It will ask us to be
critical in love, generous in spirit, wise in our
understandings."
It's just life'
After his release Waite returned to England, where he currently
a fellow at Cambridge University. Waite heads up a group called
Emmaus that enables homeless people to come into community and
restore their dignity through work. He says the idea is based on
the principles of a religious community "without being overtly
religious." He will meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair and
other government officials regarding help for the homeless in
Britain.
What drives him, he says, is life. While others with a similar
experience might be tempted to withdraw from a public life of
service ,Waite, now 63, continues to work in Kosovo and other
parts of the world.
"It's just life," he said in an interview. "I couldn't just pack
it in. How could you possibly retire?"
------
Waite's sermon text is available at
http://www.episcopal-ut.org/waite.htm.
--The Rev. Dan Webster is director of communications for the
Episcopal Diocese of Utah.
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