All Beings Are Interconnected


Being held captive in Iraq helped James Loney solidify his sense that he wasn't alone


I believe in mystery.
I believe in family.
I believe in being who I am.
I believe in the power of failure.
And I believe normal life is extraordinary.
This I Believe.

Our feature, This I Believe has spawned a sister series from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And our essay today comes to us by way of the CBC. It's from James Loney of Toronto. In 2005, he was working as a Christian peace activist in Iraq when he was captured by militants. Here is our series curator, independent producer Jay Allison.

For almost four months, James Loney was held hostage in a small room in a residential neighborhood in Baghdad. He was confined with three other humanitarian workers, one of whom was killed. Loney and the other two prisoners were rescued by a special team of coalition forces. Such an experience might shake a person's fundamental beliefs, for James Loney, it reinforced them. Here he is with his essay, for This I Believe.

I believe all things and all beings are interconnected. I saw this most clearly in the time I was a hostage. For 118 days, our world was reduced to what could be heard and said and done, while handcuffed and chained with three other men in a cold, paint peeling, eternally gloomy, 10-by-12-foot room. But despite being vanished off the face of the Earth, there were times the walls around us would dissolve. And I could see with perfect blue sky clarity that everything I needed to know about the world was immediately available to me.

One day our captors treated us to some Pepsi. We were very excited. More about the bottle than about the Pepsi because it meant we could now relieve ourselves in urgent circumstances. As you might expect, it's not easy to relieve yourself in urgent circumstances when your right and left hand are handcuffed in some else's right and left hand.

Sometimes, despite our most careful efforts, we ended up with an unfortunate mess. On a later day, after bringing us a particularly greasy lunch, fried eggplant rolled up in a tiny bit flat bread. The captor we called uncle needed to clean his greasy fingers. He saw a rag hanging on the back of a chair and used it to wipe his hands. He did not know that it was our unfortunate mess rag and that had been used earlier that morning. In that moment, I saw how everything we do, even the things that seem most insignificant, cleaning up a mess or wiping our hands, affects everything and everyone else.

Uncle thought he was simply rubbing some grease off his fingers, but in reality, he was soiling himself in the squalor and degradation of our captivity, without him knowing it or us intending it.

Uncle was one of our guards with keys in one hand and gun in the other, his power over us seemed absolute, but he was not free. He says so himself on one of those interminable days when we asked him if he had any news about when we would be released. He pointed glumly to his wrists as if he himself were handcuffed and said," when you are free, I will be free. "

I believe there are many ways we can hold one another captive, it might be with a gun, an army, a holy book, a law, an invisible free market hand. It doesn't matter how we do it, who we do it to or why. There is no escaping it. We ourselves become captives whenever we hold another in captivity. Whenever we soil someone else with violence, whether through a war, poverty, racism or neglect, we invariably soil ourselves. It is only when we turn away from dominating others that we can begin to discover what the Christian scriptures call "the glorious freedom of the children of God."

James Loney with his essay for This I Believe. Loney remains involved with the Christian peace movement in Canada. If you are interested in contributing to our series, visit our website NPR.orgthisIbelieve or you can find out more and see the more than 30,000 essays that have been sent in.

For This I Believe, I am Jay Allison.

Next Sunday, on weekend edition, a This I Believe essay from a native American poet, Joy Hardier.

Support for This I Believe comes from Prudential Retirement.