Jim Loney

Hanging on my fridge are two photographs. One is a picture of my dear friend Jim Loney holding up another photo of an Iraqi who, at the time the photograph was taken, was being held without recourse to any system of justice or due process, without a voice, utterly vulnerable to the cruelty and humiliation that we all saw so shockingly manifested in the images from Abu Ghraib prison. But for Jim’s arms holding his image high in the air, that Iraqi might simply be one of the thousands who remain invisible to many of us in the west whose governments are responsible for their fates. The second photo was taken some time later—it depicts a Palestinian child holding up a picture of Jim and the three other peacemakers who were taken hostage on November 27th. They too are now being held without recourse to any system of justice or due process. There is a terrible symmetry between these two photos, a symmetry that attests to the nature of the dance of violence and fear that binds the west to the middle east.

But there is also another, more graceful symmetry between the photos—just as that Iraqi is an “other” to the Canadian Jim Loney, a foreigner, and, from the point of view of Jim’s own civilization, a suspicious outsider, so was Jim, to that young Palestinian, an outsider, an “other,” a foreigner. And yet, in each photograph, there is an image of one human being simply assuming responsibility for the fate of another. In both photos the line which often divides each of our worlds into “us” and “them,” “mine” and “not-mine,” is erased. Both Jim and that Palestinian child have strangely expressionless faces. There is no dramatic outrage or defiance; rather, there is a simple, wordless testimony to the compelling reality of the beings whose images they are carefully holding in their hands. It is as though their own faces, their whole bodies, are given over to the other for whom they are bearing witness. This more graceful (grace-filled) symmetry attests to the otherwise unthinkable possibility that the dance of violence and fear might one day give way to an embrace, a gesture of peace.

In the media coverage of this hostage-taking over the past few weeks the question has occasionally been asked: what were they doing there in Iraq in the first place? The answers ventured in newspapers and on TV have gone between hagiography (‘they must be saints’) and patronizing diagnoses of their reckless naivete. Having known Jim Loney for 13 years I can say with some authority that neither answer is accurate in his case (and I suspect, from my knowledge of CPT as an organization, that the same is true with respect to the others as well). The image, on my fridge, of Jim holding up the photo of that Iraqi detainee’s face is the image of a mature, sober, prayerful, wise, but ordinary man taking responsibility for the violence of his civilization and for the vulnerability of his brothers and sisters.

When the villagers in Le Chambon, France, who had rescued hundreds of Jews during World War II, at great peril to themselves and their families, were asked why they had done it, why they had taken such a risk, many of them answered simply and matter-of-factly: “what choice did we have?” They experienced the moment in which they assumed responsibility for those refugees on their doorsteps, not as a moment of calculation or decision, but as an irrecusable claim made on them. They did not see themselves as anything but ordinary people doing an ordinary thing. And Jim, like those French villagers, was certainly not unaware of the dangers that he faced. He knew well the fear and violence that is an everyday feature of life in Iraq. He was simply doing what he felt he had to do.

I have heard journalists acknowledge that much of their reporting from Iraq is done from hotel rooms inside the so called “green zone”—and who can blame them if they are not always willing or able to chase down a lead into those areas of the country where unarmed foreigners may well be viewed as a particularly “soft target” for the rage of violent men? But the sense of responsibility which binds Jim to the work of peacemaking, and to the people of Iraq, includes a particular willingness to take such risks, a willingness to live with the kind of fear that is an everyday reality for millions of Iraqis. I have another picture of Jim on my fridge—he is writing names down on a clip-board outside of the Abu Ghraib prison where he is surrounded by a small crowd of the families of detainees all anxious about their disappeared loved-ones, perhaps hoping that these CPTers will be able to get some information for them. That’s the kind of thing Jim does. In the picture he looks workmanlike, matter-of-fact, responsible. And when he has come home from this kind of work in the conflict-zones of Palestine, Iraq, or Grassy Narrows, he, like the other CPTers, shares the stories that the media often overlook, the stories that awaken in us, who gather in meeting rooms, kitchens, union halls, or church-basements to hear them, a sense of responsibility for our sisters and brothers. By way of this truly personal contact we experience a world beyond the headlines and statistics, a world of mothers and fathers and siblings living under the constant threat of violence, a world that stakes a claim in us, that calls us to be serious, to be moral grown-ups.

Around the dinner table at the Catholic Worker house, or years ago working together in the kitchen at the Good Shepherd refuge, at the worker co-op sawmill where we also worked together for a time, or paddling an Algonquin park lake in a canoe, Jim and I have often talked philosophy. In particular, we talk about the 20th Century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas was a Jew who survived a German prison camp during the war and who subsequently developed an existential philosophy based on the ethical responsibility of one human being for another. As a corrective to Descartes, who famously based his philosophy on the self-certainty of the “I think therefore I am,” Levinas claimed that we only find our way to ourselves through responsibility to and for “the other.” It is only in being exposed to the vulnerability that is wordlessly manifested in the face of the other human being, only in responding to that other, in saying “Here I am,” that I find the meaning of my own self-hood. Without words, according to Levinas, the face of the other, in its very exposure to violence and suffering, announces to us the command: “Thou shalt not kill!” My self is a gift bestowed on me by the one whom I cannot leave to face fate alone.

The two photos on my fridge—Jim holding up the image of the face of that Iraqi, and the Palestinian child holding up the images of Jim, Harmeet, Tom, and Norman—depict human beings who have awakened to what is most human in them, human beings who bear other human beings in their arms, who will not let anyone be forgotten or left alone to their fate. They are not saints; they could be any of us.

Jim Loney and Scott Marratto have known each other for 13 years -- 10 of those years Scott was a member of the Catholic Worker community in Toronto. Scott is currently a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada).

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