PROBABLY the only person on the planet to have invited ISIS to dinner was lying propped up on pillows on a bed in a Port Elizabeth B+B last week.
“Have you actually spoken to ISIS?” I asked the Right Reverend Canon Andrew White, the world famous Middle East peacemaker, hostage negotiator and “vicar of Baghdad”.
“Yes, I invited them for dinner,” he said in a bizarrely offhand way.
“But they said if they came they would chop off my head, so I didn’t have them over.”
He shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
The 51-year-old vicar was on his bed “resting” between visits to churches on his first ever trip to South Africa.
As a multiple sclerosis sufferer he is compelled to rest. That’s the theory anyway.
While his body is constrained, he uses his telephone constantly to race across the continents, skipping up into the highest realms of political power with familiar ease, then darting back down to Baghdad to speak comfort to a congregant, or leaping to take a call from one of the six Iraqi children he adopted as orphans and single-handedly raised in Baghdad.
I was still struggling to get my head around the invitation to ISIS.
He must have seen the puzzled look on my face.
“It’s what I do. I make friends with the bad guys,” he said.
And White certainly has no shortage of those kind of friends, depending on which side of which fence you sit.
Of the late Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat he fondly says “my friend, Abu Ammar”.
Of Sadam Hussein’s former close advisor, Tariq Aziz, he says “I still visit him in his prison cell.”
But White misunderstood my surprise. It was not his choice of friends that I was battling to understand. Anyone who follows Middle Eastern politics knows that White carries the good, the bad and the ugly of the world’s most volatile and extreme region in his astonishingly expansive heart.
Resident in Baghdad since 1998 he has walked far more than he has talked his devotion to building peace for all in the region – Jews, Christians and Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) alike.
My question was more to do with how he managed to step beyond the wrenching pain of having lost half his beloved congregants to a terrorist outfit that operates like a combine harvester, and yet still managed to offer a hand to them with an invitation to dinner.
Bear in mind that for White, St George's congregation is no ordinary one. These are the people who have held his heart since 1998. These are the ones for whom he has sacrificed the safety of England and a life fully shared with his wife and two sons.
And as Baghdad has spiralled further and further into apocalyptic mayhem White has hung on, clad in his bombproof jacket and helmet, surrounded by a bodyguard of 36 soldiers, refusing to abandon this larger family, the cherished congregants who he refers to tenderly as “my people”, the ones who call him “Aboonah” (father).
Under his stewardship St George’s congregation grew from nil in 2005 to 6500 people. They established a clinic and a church.
They were flourishing, relatively speaking, but in early 2014 the great terribleness came.
To date ISIS has slaughtered millions of Iraqis – Christians, Shia Muslims, in fact, anyone who stood in the way of its rampant and still relentless surge for power and territory.
Included were 3000 from White’s congregation. Children not withstanding. Most of the men dead. Girls were kidnapped.
It has clearly broken his heart.
When he recounts how four small children who would not renounce their faith were beheaded he is near to tears: “My children, my children... When I heard about it I just cried and cried and cried for days ....”
The half of St Georges that has survived are now holed up in refugee camps, mostly in Jordan as ISIS continues its brutal onslaught, not only in Iraq, but also in Syria and parts of Africa.
“My people have been through so much. So, so much. Nobody can imagine,” says White, his voice barely audible. “They have lost everything. Everything. I love them so much. It is such a joy to serve my people.”
So how then could he invite ISIS for dinner?
“Aren’t you angry? I would be.” I said. “Very, very angry.”
“No,” he answered. “There is no point to getting angry. I just get sad. Very, very sad.”
But why even try to reach out when the entire region is collapsing under the strain of a complex web of wars and proxy wars? Why, when he himself sees things heading one way? Why approach a terrorist machine that seems insatiable in its bloodlust and is determined to ultimately usher in an apocalypse?
For White the answer is simple: “If you don’t try to do something, you give in and let destruction to have its way.”
I left after four hours of tagging along in his company, still trying to fathom the eccentric individual I had just met.
White is a startling contradiction of amazing grace and almost brutal frankness, of childlike simplicity yet has the savviness of a seasoned politician/businessman/arch wheeler-dealer.
It took me a few days to begin to come to grips – I think – with a man who has the breadth, complexity and gravitas of only one other I have met, Nelson Mandela.
And it was only after much pondering did White suddenly begin to make sense. He is, I think, above all things a father.
Not just to two sons in England, not just of six Iraqi orphans now scattered across the world, but determinedly the father of a gutted, little-wanted congregation that is trying to survive in refugee tents along the borders of other countries. For them he is “Aboonah”, absolutely and resolutely, wherever he may be, whatever the cost.
And possibly, he is father too, to some of the other thorny nations in that turbulent world, in the stripped down place where life is terrifyingly fragile and where only faith is left.
It is here that White continues to hold fast to his role of father with a grip of iron.
In doing so he is probably one of the world’s most radical versions of a post-post-modern father – and at the same time, a father in the most ancient sense too.
Revolutionary in his commitment and selfless in service, he is perhaps the kind of father who could change the world.
l White was in South Africa to raise awareness about the plight of the people of Iraq. He was a guest of Incontext Ministries.
Daring to be father
“Have you actually spoken to ISIS?” I asked the Right Reverend Canon Andrew White, the world famous Middle East peacemaker, hostage negotiator and “vicar of Baghdad”.
“Yes, I invited them for dinner,” he said in a bizarrely offhand way.
“But they said if they came they would chop off my head, so I didn’t have them over.”
He shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
The 51-year-old vicar was on his bed “resting” between visits to churches on his first ever trip to South Africa.
As a multiple sclerosis sufferer he is compelled to rest. That’s the theory anyway.
While his body is constrained, he uses his telephone constantly to race across the continents, skipping up into the highest realms of political power with familiar ease, then darting back down to Baghdad to speak comfort to a congregant, or leaping to take a call from one of the six Iraqi children he adopted as orphans and single-handedly raised in Baghdad.
I was still struggling to get my head around the invitation to ISIS.
He must have seen the puzzled look on my face.
“It’s what I do. I make friends with the bad guys,” he said.
And White certainly has no shortage of those kind of friends, depending on which side of which fence you sit.
Of the late Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat he fondly says “my friend, Abu Ammar”.
Of Sadam Hussein’s former close advisor, Tariq Aziz, he says “I still visit him in his prison cell.”
But White misunderstood my surprise. It was not his choice of friends that I was battling to understand. Anyone who follows Middle Eastern politics knows that White carries the good, the bad and the ugly of the world’s most volatile and extreme region in his astonishingly expansive heart.
Resident in Baghdad since 1998 he has walked far more than he has talked his devotion to building peace for all in the region – Jews, Christians and Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) alike.
My question was more to do with how he managed to step beyond the wrenching pain of having lost half his beloved congregants to a terrorist outfit that operates like a combine harvester, and yet still managed to offer a hand to them with an invitation to dinner.
Bear in mind that for White, St George's congregation is no ordinary one. These are the people who have held his heart since 1998. These are the ones for whom he has sacrificed the safety of England and a life fully shared with his wife and two sons.
And as Baghdad has spiralled further and further into apocalyptic mayhem White has hung on, clad in his bombproof jacket and helmet, surrounded by a bodyguard of 36 soldiers, refusing to abandon this larger family, the cherished congregants who he refers to tenderly as “my people”, the ones who call him “Aboonah” (father).
Under his stewardship St George’s congregation grew from nil in 2005 to 6500 people. They established a clinic and a church.
They were flourishing, relatively speaking, but in early 2014 the great terribleness came.
To date ISIS has slaughtered millions of Iraqis – Christians, Shia Muslims, in fact, anyone who stood in the way of its rampant and still relentless surge for power and territory.
Included were 3000 from White’s congregation. Children not withstanding. Most of the men dead. Girls were kidnapped.
It has clearly broken his heart.
When he recounts how four small children who would not renounce their faith were beheaded he is near to tears: “My children, my children... When I heard about it I just cried and cried and cried for days ....”
The half of St Georges that has survived are now holed up in refugee camps, mostly in Jordan as ISIS continues its brutal onslaught, not only in Iraq, but also in Syria and parts of Africa.
“My people have been through so much. So, so much. Nobody can imagine,” says White, his voice barely audible. “They have lost everything. Everything. I love them so much. It is such a joy to serve my people.”
So how then could he invite ISIS for dinner?
“Aren’t you angry? I would be.” I said. “Very, very angry.”
“No,” he answered. “There is no point to getting angry. I just get sad. Very, very sad.”
But why even try to reach out when the entire region is collapsing under the strain of a complex web of wars and proxy wars? Why, when he himself sees things heading one way? Why approach a terrorist machine that seems insatiable in its bloodlust and is determined to ultimately usher in an apocalypse?
For White the answer is simple: “If you don’t try to do something, you give in and let destruction to have its way.”
I left after four hours of tagging along in his company, still trying to fathom the eccentric individual I had just met.
White is a startling contradiction of amazing grace and almost brutal frankness, of childlike simplicity yet has the savviness of a seasoned politician/businessman/arch wheeler-dealer.
It took me a few days to begin to come to grips – I think – with a man who has the breadth, complexity and gravitas of only one other I have met, Nelson Mandela.
And it was only after much pondering did White suddenly begin to make sense. He is, I think, above all things a father.
Not just to two sons in England, not just of six Iraqi orphans now scattered across the world, but determinedly the father of a gutted, little-wanted congregation that is trying to survive in refugee tents along the borders of other countries. For them he is “Aboonah”, absolutely and resolutely, wherever he may be, whatever the cost.
And possibly, he is father too, to some of the other thorny nations in that turbulent world, in the stripped down place where life is terrifyingly fragile and where only faith is left.
It is here that White continues to hold fast to his role of father with a grip of iron.
In doing so he is probably one of the world’s most radical versions of a post-post-modern father – and at the same time, a father in the most ancient sense too.
Revolutionary in his commitment and selfless in service, he is perhaps the kind of father who could change the world.
l White was in South Africa to raise awareness about the plight of the people of Iraq. He was a guest of Incontext Ministries.
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