The Measure Of A Man

It's long after the fact, but it's never too late to recognize an individual whose life's orientation helped to make the world a better place. One such individual is the British-born man, Terry Waite, whose work on behalf of trying to ease misery in places as diverse as the African continent, Asia and the Middle East brought him recognition and high regard, but also great suffering, in a twist of fate beyond absurd, but totally in keeping with the kind of twisted world we live in.

Mr. Waite felt a strong personal draw to lend himself to charitable enterprise through working with Church charities and missions. He never felt that he could himself become a man of the Church, yet he was so held in its powerful draw that he saw his life revolving around the work that those who devote their lives to helping others endure the misery that geography and happenstance left them with, as a personal mission, that most of his professional life was spent aiding others.

While he was and remains Anglican of the Church of England, he made common cause with the Catholic Church when his growing expertise in administering difficult church matters was seen to be an asset to that church, and worked in tandem also with the American Episcopalians. His work led him to life in Uganda with his young family at that very historical juncture when Milton Obote was removed from power through a military coup led by the monstrous Idi Amin.

But it was his preoccupation with his mission as an envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to free Western hostages - John McCarthy, Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland - that forms the backbone of his experience as a negotiator in a sinister landscape of civil war, sectarian violence, abductions and remorseless cruelties which culminated in his own captivity over six years of mostly solitary confinement.

During which time he suffered horribly, abandoned by fate to the caprices of Islamists in Beirut whose hatred for the United States in particular and the West in general, led them to abduct a man whose sole interest was in helping to free other abductees. Despite his fear in dealing with the incendiary, battle-hardened terror groups, he forged ahead with plans to secretly meet with faction heads he thought could aid his cause.

His intent to bargain with the captors of the three being held, trying to balance on a unweighty scale their determination to use their Western captives as a bargaining tool for the release of members of their own apprehended terror factions in the commission of their state-destroying missions in the Middle East, encouraged Mr. Waite to hold out promise of assistance to the abductors, in releasing their own men from the likelihood of the death penalty in Kuwait.

Knowing, even as he set up these dangerous meetings that he hoped would lead to an agreement, that he was placing himself in danger. While he had a premonition that things might go awry, he still pushed himself, despite his unease, to complete an assignation. Which did in fact, result in his being abducted, blind-folded, bound, taken to one dismal holding cell after another.

Deprived of any kind of comforting hope for his own situation, he yet worried at the failure of his mission to free the other captives. He understood that if he submitted himself to self-pity at his plight his captors would have gained great advantage over his spirit, and he resolved to insulate himself however he could against self-pity. Rather difficult, given the straits of his circumstances.

Huddling in misery for a period of time in a foetal position, bound with chains, both hands and feet. Most of his time was spent with one leg chained to an iron loop in the floor of wherever he was held. No warmth in the winter, no cooling in suffocating summers. Becoming ill with skin conditions, with infections. Having to resort to using his mind and his memory to educate and entertain himself as the hours smoldered into days, then months and finally years of captivity.

Pleading with his jailers for some relief from the hopeless tedium of his meagre existence. His only relief from the chain a few moments each day occurred when he was temporarily unchained and led to a privy where he would be permitted to perform toilet in a foetid, filthy chamber. Unable to wash, to clean his teeth, to eat perishable and healthy foods, his health suffered, and his spirit declined, but he prevailed, almost miraculously.

He was constantly distracted by thoughts of his family, his friends, imagining their torment, and the torture of those thoughts convinced him not to linger long with them. Instead, he conducted a slow and steady inventory of his life, compiling in his head a manuscript for his autobiography. When he was finally freed and wrote an account of his imprisonment that narrative was interspersed with the story of his life and his life's work.

Throughout his ordeal, he blamed himself for everything that occurred to him, through unheeding stupidity of choice, despite warning signals, as though anyone could foresee the entire potential for disaster when reacting in good faith to bad-faith situations. His feelings of complete discomposure, loss, desolation threatened to completely submerge him in waves of despair from which he might never surface.

His constant speculations about the misery that others, through history and contemporaneously suffered as innocent victims of political abduction and long imprisonments that seared their souls, brought him back to his own hopeless-seeming position, and he would lecture himself that if others who suffered far more than he had could surmount their suffering, then so he could also.

He conducted long conversations with his id, during which he admonished himself for insecurity, vulnerability, immature wishes for acceptance, despite which he was never quite capable of reaching peace within himself. It's a story of one who answered to a passion to believe in his fellow human beings, despite clear evidence time and again that too few of them merited that belief.

During the harshness of his imprisonment and his belief that he would die there never to see his family again he struggled with himself and with his belief in God:

"Can't you pray?"

"What the hell is prayer? Nothing more than a way of attempting to soothe myself by believing everything is fine. 'God is in control. don't worry, old boy, He is at hand. Pray and trust, trust and pray'. You tell me to pray while I am drowning? You tell me to pray while my head feels as though it will explode? How dare you to tell me to pray?"

"You are a child. Your prayers are the prayers of a child. Your faith is nothing more than superstition. Your love is self-love. You had better grow up."

He admonishes himself sternly. And as he lies there, helpless, unable to communicate with anyone, unable to see the sky, the world outside his prison, he hears, wherever he is being held, in the middle of Beirut, the mechanical tones of prayer from a mosque: 'God is great, God is great', and, he writes, a darkness descends over him, and he wants to die.

It's the story of an extraordinary, meritorious human being, of which this world has far too few.