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Sharing a prayer for peace with a captive audience
THINK of Terry Waite and it's easy to visualise the bear-like man who went into Beirut to negotiate the release of Western hostages as the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy back in 1987.
Waite had had successes elsewhere, including Iran and Libya, but on this occasion the father of four disappeared, captured by Hezbollah militia, and was kept both shackled and blindfolded in solitary confinement for the best part of four years. He was interrogated for a year, and regular torture rituals included vicious beatings on the soles of his feet.
The final months of captivity were spent caged with hostages he had been trying to release – including John McCarthy and Brian Keenan from the UK and the American Terry Anderson.
It was a very different Terry Waite who emerged – emaciated, bewildered and dazed by the glare of the world's flashbulbs – in November 1991. He had been on an arduous physical, psychological and spiritual journey. It took the then 53-year-old a couple of years to adjust to ordinary life with the help of his wife Frances and his family.
He became a fellow commoner at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, lecturing and writing best-selling books about his experiences. He would pop up in news interviews from time-to-time, as and when other hostage situations hit the headlines. But generally he has maintained a low profile in the last 18 years.
In the public imagination Terry Waite is still bound up with his then employer Archbishop Robert Runcie, on whose behalf he'd travelled to areas of conflict, part of the Anglican Church's worldwide outreach. Most people probably thought Waite was a priest himself but, although he did study theology, he decided against a career as a clergyman. He opted instead to spend his life as a lay employee of the Church in various capacities, before becoming advisor on international affairs, then peace envoy, to Dr Runcie.
Today Terry Waite is a Quaker, a regular attender at the Friends' Meeting House in Bury St Edmonds, and an enthusiastic unofficial envoy of the Society of Friends. He's in Yorkshire to talk to a group of sixth-form students at the Quaker Ackworth School near Pontefract and Friends from the local community.
His pay-off to an hour in which he has taken them on a journey from Uganda, where he and his family were caught up in the coup led by Idi Amin, to Northern Ireland (where he supports and counsels those still traumatised by the Omagh bombings) by way of the heart of darkness in Beirut, is that suffering need not destroy.
It may have taken him a few years to piece together whatever it was he was supposed to learn from captivity and silence, but what he learned did, he confirms, help him on the path to Quakerism.
As with so many spiritual or political shifts, a move can be as much about the shortcomings of where you were as the allure of the place you are travelling to.
"I've found it increasingly difficult within Anglicanism, where you to go services and it's almost as if every clergyman feels he has to act as a game show host or compere. It's so noisy – no space for quiet reflection.
"In the old days you'd go to church and participate and didn't always have to make these verbal and bodily responses. You could be quiet, and that was something I found the Quakers really understand. There's something refreshing on a Sunday morning about going to a Quaker meeting and sitting sometimes for three-quarters of an hour or an hour before someone speaks.
"I have been attracted to Quakerism for many years – first of all for its strong ethical position, its 'straight and plain dealing'. And you don't have to be a total pacifist, by the way. I lean towards pacifism, but I believe that in certain circumstances, when all else has failed, then it's justifiable to use force as a last resort."
Waite says that, before his hostage years, he used to long for peace and quiet. When he found himself alone, his mind would still churn and he couldn't relax.
A positive result of spending 1,760 days in captivity was, he says, that he learned to embrace quietness and use it creatively.
After the first phase of repeated beatings, interrogations and fear of the jangling of keys, he took what he could from the experience to preserve his sanity. He has often described how he came out of the cell in Beirut with his first book Taken on Trust almost completely realised. He had explored and analysed every inch of his past, and the book was written once he was free.
The spiritual journey since 1991 has led him not to throw off his Anglicanism entirely, but to lean away from it towards those who value silence and simplicity.
Despite dire experience, Waite still quietly gets involved in conflict resolution and has recently been on a mission to Nigeria. He won't elaborate, saying publicity is only sought when it might be useful. He says that these days, the Archbishop of Canterbury does not have a Waite-style envoy.
"There was respect that I was a representative of a church figure and respect within Islam for Christian leaders. I think that respect has diminished in recent years, and the reason is the way the West has behaved towards Islam, particularly in the Bush/Blair era. 'Kingdoms of evil' for God's sake... All those derogatory statements that came out of the White House, supported by Tony Blair. I think that hastened the deterioration of relationships and they require a lot of building up again."
He's critical of the account of itself the Anglican Church gives in response to high-profile critics like Oxford academic and atheist Professor Richard Dawkins.
"I don't want to condemn all clergy out of hand, but some don't understand the church's history and are not well read in the scientific field. I don't feel threatened by him (Dawkins) but it seems that the Church is unconsciously in retreat into a little box, occasionally shooting over the parapet."
At 71, Terry Waite is forever on the move. He works with Hostage UK, the charity he set up to support families of hostages. He's also patron of Emmaus, which helps the homeless back into community life, patron of the Butler Trust which campaigns for prison reform, president of the international development and relief charity Y Care International and patron of the Llangollen International Eistedfodd.
He has a dinner date with the sixth formers and staff at Ackworth. He offers a bear hug as he leaves, but not before asking if his earlier talk had gone down all right. He seems to ask it in all humbleness. The answer is that his audience had been utterly absorbed.
And, naturally, very silent.
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