The Faith of a Foreign Correspondent

I’m a journalist for all those banal reasons - reward, fame, recognition, other human crass things. But, on a more serious note, I do think, at a very profound level, journalism matters. I think if you shine a light on things they get better. I think the truth counts. There is only one truth and that is, in my view, the truth of God.

I believe it is this truth that we can stumble towards with the knowledge that it’s impossible to achieve. The idea that we can try and live in a perfect way, that we can try and be like a perfect being with the absolute knowledge that we’ll never achieve it, is potentially rather consoling. It’s about striving to achieve it.

I continue to strive with the knowledge that perfection is impossible. But, I wonder if I get further along the road towards a better view of the truth than some people who have a more objective, scientific or rational way of looking at events.

Christians live with the knowledge of life and death in a much more visible way all the time. How one sees life and death is probably different to people who don’t have a sense that there is some other thing beyond this life. I was very struck watching journalists, police officers, firemen and people like that who were interviewed after 9/11 in New York. All of them said, having had this near death experience, ‘I now see life differently’.

I have never questioned my relationship with God because of what I have seen. I see my Christian faith as a significant support and strength in the kinds of places that I’m in. It’s the rock on which I live my life. I do, and I have, prayed for the life and death of individuals who I’ve seen die in front of me or recently dead. I see it as my way of responding to what’s happened to them. I think, in a way, I use my prayers as a sort of comfort for myself, as well as honouring the soul of that person.

I had a rather classical Church of England background. I sang in the church choir and my father was a churchwarden. I became a profound atheist during my student years. Then, in my last year at Oxford I went back to the Anglican Church - but my faith didn’t settle for four or five years.

I became attracted to the Catholic faith when I went to Poland in the Solidarity years. Later on, I was there when the Polish Pope was elected, and went back again to report on his first trip to Poland as Pope. The Catholic faith seemed exciting, and that’s when I decided to convert. So, in a way, because of being a travelling correspondent, I became a Catholic.

My faith has helped me to get close to people of different faiths. I actually believe that my faith gives me an advantage over non-believing journalists. For example, I have sat down with Muslim guerrillas who put their AK47s on one side and talked about the Godlessness of the West. When I told them I’m was a Christian they replied, ‘Oh well, you too are a man of the Book - we share the same Book’.

Because of my faith, I also understand there is a spiritual aspect to conflict. For instance, the Taliban were first and foremost an Islamic revolution. At the heart of their appeal to a pretty substantial cross-section of society was their promise to restore Afghan Islamic values. It wasn’t just about locking up women, it was about God-fearing , and Koran reading, and spiritual renewal.

And I think that conflicts do have a spiritual heart, which we rather miss in our reporting. My faith gives me a handle on things to be able to explain exactly what’s going on. I don’t know whether the audience understand it because I don’t think much of our audience has a lot of spiritual understanding. But I think it’s a lever into the humanity of the individuals who are fighting.

The ability to disengage from the worst of life, I think is valuable human and spiritual comfort. That’s something that I try and do. I don’t think it makes me generally cold and hard – in the sense that these events don’t matter in the big scheme of things.

But, there was one particular violent death which was hard to deal with because I was responsible for….actually, ‘responsible for’ are the wrong words. I was involved very, very intimately in the death of a man.

He stole our television camera in the North of Afghanistan and was killed in front of us by the local authorities – a summary execution - in order to bring back some kind of justice at a time of great disorder. It seemed that stealing our television camera was a capital offence, and even though I pleaded for his life, he was shot in front of us.

That was a particularly shocking, violent death because my presence there led directly to this young man being killed. So I was implicated, in a sense, although I wasn’t to blame for his death.
It was a pretty profoundly shocking and traumatic experience. And one of the events, in my life as a journalist, I sought trauma counselling for.

Sometimes, I’m extraordinarily struck by the ability of humanity to heal itself, even after appalling things have happened. Go to Rwanda nowadays, after a million people have died in a most appalling slaughter, and see the ability of human beings to forgive each other. It’s quite awesome. And that’s probably about as bad a place as there has been on the planet over the last few years, in terms of large numbers of people cut to pieces for no good reason, other than they had the wrong shaped head, or whatever.

I don’t despair at humanity at all. Rather the opposite. I despair at the extraordinary lack of imagination of the world to deal with some of these things. I despair of the sort of globalised ignorance of American money. I despair about lack of imagination – I think that’s the biggest human crime.

I go to Church in all sorts of odd corners of the world. I’ve been to Catholic Church in Libya, and Moscow – right in the Communist period. Often in an Islamic country there’s a Chapel you can find, and you can go to mass, which is terribly valuable. My faith is part of my whole identity. It’s part of what makes me a person. I can’t make any sense of my existence, my part in humanity, my existence as a human being without there being a significant role for God in it.