Forgive and don't forget.

On Jan. 7, 1985 in Beirut, Lebanon, Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, O.S.M., a program director for Catholic Relief Services, was kidnapped by Shiite Muslims, a fundamentalist sect who believed that Western influences were corrupting the Middle East. He was held hostage for 564 days.

Jenco, the author of Bound to Forgive: The Pilgrimage to Reconciliation of a Beirut Hostage (Ave Maria Press, 1995), is mindful not to "forgive and forget" his captors because "it doesn't work that way. I have all kinds of memories, and when I recall, I heal." Ten years after his ordeal, his message of dignity and forgiveness still shines. As he relates his compelling story of starvation, isolation, and beatings, he says that "people are not weeping for me. They're not crying because of the pain and suffering I've been through. They're touching on their own pain and suffering, their own lack of forgiveness they've been carrying on from generation to generation."

(Shortly before we went to press the editors were saddened to learn that Father Jenco has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer.)

What was going through your mind when you were capture?

I once taught a class on death and the different stages of dying - the last stage being the acceptance of our own death. But when I found myself on the verge of being taken hostage, I turned to God and realized that I didn't have the luxury to go through all those stages; I started to accept my own death.

The morning of my capture I was wearing a chain and a cross that meant a lot to me because I had received it for my 25th anniversary as a priest. When they threw me in the trunk of that car, the cross came off. For the next 564 days, I lived that cross.

During the trip to my first place of captivity I was tied up with packing tape and placed under a truck where the tires are stored. I couldn't see or even move, and the car fumes made it difficult to breathe. Certain prayers came to mind al most instantly such as the Jesus prayer - the process of inhaling and exhaling just simply saying, "Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." This prayer put me very much at peace. Even today, I still pray that prayer when I get excited - it puts me in a different place.

I also remember that there was a young guard standing next to me at one point, and I tried to look into his eyes. I looked into the eyes of hate. It is a look that stays with me constantly. He looked in my eyes and said, "You are dead."

Had you ever been trained how to handle a hostage situation in Beirut?

No. I had been given a brochure from the American embassy, which was in my luggage the morning I was kidnapped. I read it, but I didn't think I'd ever have to get caught up in any of that. What I recalled was that I should go along with what they asked because other people who rebelled were instantly shot.

From day one, though, when you're tied to a radiator like I was in my first prison, you have a sense of being an animal because they take everything away from you. You eat off the floor, you're allowed to go to the toilet when they decide you go to the toilet. When you are in that kind of a situation, you have to keep reminding yourself, "I am a person; I'm loved and redeemed, and I do have a destiny." You can never give into the mentality of "I am an animal." Once when one of the guards stood on my forehead with the full pressure of his body and was squashing my forehead, I had to say to him, "Listen, I am not an insect, I'm a person of worth, I am a person with dignity."

That's horrible. How did you keep from going insane?

I created a set of rosary beads out of pieces of string from a potato sack. And I had nothing to read so I would try to recall what God said to me in Hebrew and Christian covenants. I tried to remember as many verses as I could from the scriptures. I would take a piece of bread and celebrate the Eucharist and hide it so when things got lonely or sad, I could always cling to that Christ. When they moved me out of the original prison, I left behind the Eucharist. At least for a couple of months the Eucharistic presence of Christ was there.

How else did your faith sustain you?

My faith is very much a part of who I am. Many of the things that are imprinted upon your soul are from your earliest years. For example, the hymns that came to my mind as a hostage were hymns that were taught to me as a child. For some reason they were the only hymns I could remember.

I come from a very large Catholic Czech American family. We were very close to the church, to the priests and nuns. All these things bring you to where you are in that historical moment of being a hostage. In one of my prisons, I remember thinking that it must be Ash Wednesday. I took a piece of dirt and blessed it and anointed myself, "Remember man thou are dust and unto dust thou shall return." Then I worked out my days from that day on until I reached Easter. So I was on the floor, chained to a wall, celebrating Holy Week and recalling God's life, death, and resurrection behind the darkness of a blindfold.

The following year all five of us hostages were together. So we had Palm Sunday with a blessing of twigs. On Good Friday we all shared in reading the Passion, and we had the blessing of the Paschal Candle - our captors gave us a little candle. Ben Weir, a Presbyterian minister, created a little hymnal for us and taught us some lovely hymns. I taught them the Allelu prayer, "Allelu, Allelu, everybody sing Allelu . . ." We sang that before the gospel. And in the course of the day, I would hear the young guard in the corridor singing, "Allelu, Allelu. . ."

That afternoon, that same young guard came by and placed something on my lap. I looked down my blindfold, and there was a beautiful bouquet of flowers. My captor whispered, "Abouna [Father], Happy Easter."

Who were your captors?

They were young men ranging in age from 18 to 22. They had grown up in a Beirut that had been in constant turmoil. These young me gave up their formal education at the age of 10 and had been given guns instead of books to carry. I hand to listen to some of their tapes of propaganda - they were messages of hate.

Four guards stayed with me all this time. One of the guards told me that he didn't like this job at all and that he repaired refrigerators and air conditioners for a living, but there weren't any refrigerators or air conditioners to repair. He had a family and needed the money. He was the kind of guard who would come in and whisper, "Open your hand. My wife made you some cookies." And one day when they were taping my mouth shut and I said that I couldn't breathe I'm sure it was this man who ripped the tape and pulled the cloth out of my mouth - he had that sense of compassion. But I think some of the guards were mentally ill - I gave them the names "Sicko" and "Psycho." I'm sorry I did that, but to me they were sick; men aren't normally that violent and brutal.

How long did it take for you to start feeling forgiveness?

I would suspect that it was from day one. I really didn't have any great animosity toward them. However, there were times I was very angry with them. In a letter I wrote to my family on Christmas Eve - when we were supposed to go home - I wrote that if I were to die, I would hope that I would die with the words of Jesus on my lips, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."

When you read the scriptures, God's words of forgiveness appear throughout, especially in the New Testament. Most of the former hostages I speak to have no sense of vindictiveness or hate. Forgiveness is a great gift; I don't know how else to explain it. I would say that it came to me naturally.

It's hard to believe that forgiveness was almost your immediate reaction.

Well, if you don't forgive, you end up with a tremendous amount of hate and anger and resentment.

If you had a weapon available to you at the time, do you think you would have fought back?

No, not really. We hostages talked about that - and we certainly thought about it. Once, my captors thought that I had seen them, and they brutalized me. Scripture says, "Curse no one, only give a blessing," and I remember standing against the door, blindfolded and chained, and I said in Latin "in whose honor you shall be burnt, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." I found myself telling God that this wasn't a curse but a blessing.

I would think, I'm a person of worth and dignity, why do you do this to me? I am not your enemy; I have no animosity toward you; I want to be your brother. The guards would come in and I'd say, "I don't want to touch any of your instruments of violence; I have no desire to be violent to you." But they would mock me about those instruments of violence and place the guns on my lap. And they would show me where these weapons were made - the U.S. and Israel.

In my heart I was and am opposed to any violent resolution - my whole life has been about that. I worked so hard against the war in Vietnam. It has always been a part of my tradition - my family, my order [the Servites], and the Catholic social encyclicals made indelible marks upon me. And after having worked in the refugee camps in Thailand, I saw the remnants of violence and cruelty. It resolves nothing.

You must find your antiviolent stance terribly ironic considering the extreme violence you got caught up in.

You can take a Jesus stance with that. Jesus was nonviolent in his own violent death. Jesus' was a liberating death in that it liberates us from a sense of vindictiveness or retaliation.

I tried to make excuses for my young captors. I told them that I would love to take them to America because their education had been so limited. I would say, "My gift would not be to imprison you but top educate you. For the good of Lebanon, I would like to see you do something constructive, not destructive, for this nation."

I would suspect that because all the hostages took the same stance, our captors were amazed that there was never a violent reaction - although there were verbal reactions.

There was a scene once that involved my fellow hostage Thomas Sutherland. In my captivity I hadn't received any letters from my family at all, but in February the guards came in and gave us letters from home. As I was reading mine, I noticed that Tom Sutherland, who was chained next to me, was crying. He told me that they didn't give him one.

That morning I was reading scripture that told me to be slow with my anger, but this time I got very angry. I immediately got up and pounded on the door. I told the guards that they could have my letter back, "Why do you torture this man this way? I don't want the letter unless you give him one." All of the Americans got up then and gave their letters back. And a couple hours later, they gave all of us three letters each.

Does being able to forgive negate being able to get angry.

No, anger is a good emotion. The Lord Jesus himself got angry. But I think when anger turns into rage, it's destructive. You have to move beyond your anger and allow grace to enter in, to allow the spirit of Jesus to take over your whole person and allow the words to be spoken, "Father, forgive them."

What immediate effects did your captivity have on you?

I would ask myself why someone would do this to me. And I questioned my own self-worth. But I started working on this right at the moment of my captivity.

And I didn't forget any of this. People say, "Oh, forgive and forget" as if it's a mandate from God, but it doesn't work that way. I have all kinds of memories, and when I recall, I heal.

It's important to realize that you just can't forgive and forget - it's contrary to human nature. Allow the memories to come forth, to look at them, and heal. Say, "God, heal that for me or allow me not to get caught up in it."

That's not easy, is it.?

No, it isn't. Once after my release, I was having dinner with the American hostage Joseph Cicippio. He told me that he had learned to forgive and forget. I told him, "No, Joseph, you can't do that." After dinner when I was giving a talk, I heard this heavy sobbing in the audience. It was Cicippio. He was remembering the pain and the suffering - he didn't forget.

It may be because one guard would kneel on my pancreas with his full weight that I went through acute pancreatitis recently. And I have a 20 percent hearing loss. There are all kinds of pain that enter into our lives. But I don't want to lug my pain on so that it becomes the focal point of my history. My history is much more than 564 days of being a hostage in Lebanon. My history took place 61 years ago, and my history continues.

Yet people keep asking you about it.

Right. No one asks me about my 33 years as a priest; no one asks me about my experiences in Lebanon or Thailand or India or with the farm workers in California.

I think my life has received great nourishment - the nourishment of the sacraments and of others. Today I was nourished by God's word at Mass, nourished by God's table. I look out and I'm nourished by the people here. And my fourth nourishment is a good sense of humor.

Can you think of an instance when your nonviolent reaction surprised your captors?

The shedding of tears. The only response to them was to cry, a quiet cry, tears that just dripped down my cheek. There was utter silence when I cried, and then they would back off.

At one point during my captivity they put a new door on our prison, and I thought that I was going to be set free.

But what they were doing was putting a sealed door on that prison cell. I lifted my blindfold and looked up and saw the new door and knew that they were not sending me home - it was going to be even longer. One of the guards came in and asked me why I was crying. And I said, "Because you speak of setting me free, and then you put this door on."

What happened when you were set free?

When they told me I was going to go home, there was that fear that they were kidding me; I was so used to having them tell me that that I couldn't cope with it any more. On the eve of my release, one of my captors massaged my shoulders and there was a touch of love - this was the same man who the morning of my kidnapping had told me that I was dead. And one of the young guards gave me a cross on the eve of my release. That cross is something I treasure very much, but I don't wear it for fear that I might lose it - even though in my life I find myself saying, "Cling to nothing, they'll take it away anyway."

When they released me, they dumped me on the side of the road leaving me with five Lebanese pounds to catch a taxicab. For the first time in 19 months, I saw God's creation and began the prayer of Daniel, "Out of the fiery furnace, blessed Lord all creation." I started walking down the road, not knowing where I was going. I finally made it to a police station where I sat down and just started to cry. They couldn't cope with tears - men do not cry in that part of the world - so the police brought in an English-speaking woman who said to me, "You don't have to worry; you're free."

I didn't feel truly free yet because I was afraid if I said anything, the other hostages would be harmed. I still had to work for Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland and the other hostages to be released. I would turn the radio on every morning hoping that there would be some news. I accepted all kinds of invitations to speak just to make sure that the hostages weren't forgotten because that was a covenant promise I had made with Terry Anderson. He had said, "Make sure I'm not forgotten."

When Terry Anderson was released in 1991 and called me from Wiesbaden, Germany, he said, "Father, would you welcome me home?" I went to New York and was the only person allowed on the tarmac to meet Terry. That began my closure.

Do you wonder where your captors are now and how this experience affected them?

I would like to meet them and see what they have done with their lives. I would like to ask them what they think they accomplished by all this violence to others. One guard's wife, the mother of two children, was killed in a car-bomb explosion. I would like to know what happened to his children and if he remarried. And I'd like to know whether or not he still believes the propaganda that was part of his growing up or whether he went back to school.

Did you find out anything about yourself that you weren't in touch with before your kidnapping?

I began to have a sense of guilt. I thought back to when I worked in the refugee camps in Thailand. Maybe I was not sensitive enough to these men, women, and children in bondage and God was teaching me a lesson. I'm sure God doesn't work that way, but perhaps my sins were a cause of this. Maybe I didn't live a good enough life and God was giving me this opportunity to reflect upon my own personal life to prepare me for death.

But I would say the greatest revelation that God gave me is pretty basic: you express your love for God by loving our brothers and sisters - and that means our Muslim brothers and sisters as well.

Reconciliation and forgiveness are very difficult words. They never use the word war in Lebanon, they always say the "recent events." After a while, I realized that recent events were as recent as Cain killing Abel. What we are doing is lugging around our hate and prejudices from generation to generation. It's truly a gift to say to a child, "You are to love one another." We have to learn how to look at each other and say, "I'm sorry for what I've done to you; I ask your forgiveness."

You don't wish your captors to be in prison?

No, I don't. When I was released I was shown pictures of different people they thought were my kidnappers. Not one looked familiar. I asked all the American hostages and they all said that, no, they also didn't see a familiar face.

Did any of your captors ask for forgiveness?

Yes, the guard Sayeed did. And I said to him, "I have to ask for your forgiveness because there were times I hated you." But some of the guards would share with us why they hated us. We would play cards and they would tell us that cards are evil, music is evil, art is evil, everything's evil. And one time I finally said to them, "But isn't kidnapping evil?" They didn't respond.

Do you think you can tell someone that they ought to forgive?

You must ask God for that gift. We are constantly going to God to ask for forgiveness, so why don't we ask God for the generosity to forgive as God forgives? It's so easy to confess sins and to do your penance, but it's the third part - like the old prayer says "by the help of Thy grace to confess my sins and do penance and to amend my life" - that is the hard part. "I am sorry, please forgive me" also implies that a change of heart and compensation is required.

What do you say to the people who would say all this forgiveness stuff is nice, but we live in a real world and a Christian message of forgiveness is foolishness?

I say, "You might consider me naive, but that's the cost of being a follower of Jesus." You have to learn how to make Jesus' message a part of your life. You have to be the sacrament to the world of Jesus' love.

Is forgiveness a practical political agenda?

I wish the church for one would make forgiveness its foreign policy.

We have such powerful Roman Catholic leaders, and I wish they would speak out more - there are more important things than sexual sins in our world. For example, I wish the church would speak out more about the death penalty. And shouldn't we be saying that war is evil and get rid of our just-war theory? All war is evil.

Do you have any anger toward the way the church or US. government handled the hostage situation?

As a hostage, for six months I had no information at all. I was in total isolation. After the hostage Ben Weir was released, we were allowed to have newspapers and a radio. But in all that time, not one article on the hostage situation was ever written on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, my order, Catholic Relief Services [CRS], or the Associated Press. The only news from the government we ever read was that the U.S. would not negotiate to secure the release of hostages. The only articles that ever appeared about the hostages themselves were those that our families were writing.

After I was released, I asked CRS if I could see their files on the hostage situation. They showed me many files on what they were doing; they just took a different avenue than our families tried. And I later learned that the Servites had worked for my release. But I was angry because my brothers and sisters told me that it was difficult to get church hierarchy to listen to the pleas of hostage families for an awareness campaign of prayer. For one thing, my family wanted the National Council of Catholic Bishops to have a national day of prayer for all the hostages, but they were told by the bishops that they didn't want to get political. But, as my sister asked, when the pope goes to Poland, isn't he political?

People forget that hostage families also were held in bondage for all those months - they have things to work out and need closure, also. For example, when Terry Anderson was released, my sister Sue just cried all day. That scene on TV of the embrace between Peggy and Terry Anderson triggered some emotions within my sister that she still needed to work out.

How did you feel about the circumstances surrounding your release - the Iran-contra arms deal?

I totally disapproved of it. Why should they sell arms to secure the release of one man, breeding violence to hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and in Nicaragua? What a horrible thing to do to secure my release with the sale of arms. Oliver North is not my hero.

When I came out with my disapproval in the press, I received all sorts of hate letters. I even received an airline ticket to Lebanon with a letter telling me to go back where I belong. I wrote back to this person and said, "I would wish that you use this money for a poor family in Nicaragua or someplace else."

Why do you think the church was invisible during this time?

I don't know. When I came home, they were very visible, but I think the so-called experts told them that it's best not to get involved.

Not many of us are likely to end up being hostages. What do you think we should learn from your experience?

The essence of my faith commitment is love, and the core of that is forgiveness. When I speak., people are not weeping for me. They're not crying because of the pain and suffering I've been through. They're touching on their own pain and suffering, their own lack of forgiveness they've been carrying on from generation to generation, family member to family member.

I may go into church and someone will say, "Father, my sister and I go to Mass every morning. We haven't spoken in 40 years. She sits on one side of the church, I sit on the other just in case at the kiss of peace I might have to extend peace to her." Now think about it, what good is going to Mass every morning when this is going on?

Did you ever talk to your captors of your own faith?

One day while I was up on a rooftop being eaten up by mosquitoes - chained and blindfolded with an automatic weapon at my head - Sayeed said to me, "Abouna, you must become a Muslim in order to get to heaven." I replied with a story.

When I lived in Yemen, I used to work with Mother Teresa's sisters. I would go down to the compound to celebrate Mass every morning and an old leper man would open the gate for me as I parked my car. He would then place his prayer mat behind my car and face north to Mecca and pray. One day I asked one of the nuns what he was praying for. And she told me, "He loves you so much that he wants you to become a Muslim so that you, too, can go to heaven." What a marvelous prayer. And I told Sayeed that I have come to the conclusion that God is a God of love who excludes no one from God's eternal love and grace. The Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on - no one is excluded from God's presence. I told him that I would see them all in heaven. And none of them ever brought it up again.