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Jim Douglass, an American in Baghdad, rose as the sun flooded the city with the first orange light. He shuffled through the soft grass to his favorite spot for reflection, and began to pray.

"I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death ..."

The first bomb hit in mid-prayer, Douglass recalled, shaking the ground beneath him. Within seconds, the muezzin of a nearby mosque took to his loudspeaker, blaring over the rooftops of cowering Baghdadis, "God is great!"

Explosions thundered on through the dawn, and the gray-haired Douglass carried on, "I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

The prayer-caller carried on, too "Thanks be to God!" as flames and black smoke leaped over the central city.

It was an indelible moment. "He's chanting his prayer from the Quran. I'm reciting my Thomas Merton prayer," Douglass said. "It was a harmony of prayer from two faiths, in response to an overwhelmingly powerful attack."

For Roman Catholic author James Douglass, a veteran crusader for nonviolence, how was it to be in a Baghdad under bombardment by his own nation? Did he "fear"?

"There were times," he said in his quiet, priest-like manner, "when I was inspired."

Douglass, 65, of Birmingham, Ala., spoke with a reporter Wednesday in the Jordanian capital of Amman after emerging with a dozen other activists who recently spent anywhere between one week and several months in Iraq to show support, they said, for the Iraqi people.

He and others left because Baghdad authorities, finding too many Americans in their midst, pressured the Christian-based Iraq Peace Team to reduce its numbers to a manageable core of 14. Some other foreigners are also in Baghdad as "human shields," supposed deterrents to bombing stationed at power plants and other civilian locations.

Douglass, who has visited Iraq five times since 1991, is a former University of Notre Dame professor who has published four books on religion and nonviolence and long been active in the Catholic Workers Movement. He and his wife, Shelley, run a Birmingham homeless shelter.

After driving to Baghdad from Jordan last week, Douglass and fellow activists found the city's skies an ominous blood-red from a huge sandstorm, mixing with the hellish black of oil fires set as a defensive smokescreen.

Then, at night, U.S. missiles and bombs struck government buildings and other targets, mostly across the Tigris River, rocking the Americans' little hotel so much they thought it might collapse.

Douglass, observing Iraqis finger their prayer beads, occasionally slip away for prayer time and hear the muezzins' call across the city, decided his hosts had found some inner peace.

"Their faith has strengthened them as a people and the Iraqi Christians, too in response to this attack," he said.

He disavows Iraq's authoritarian, violent government, but seems to hope the war can be stopped some diplomatic solution found before a devastating final offensive on Baghdad. He places his ultimate faith in the head of his church.

"The miracle I had hoped for was that Pope John Paul II would go to Baghdad," he said regretfully. "Now I hope he goes to the U.N. General Assembly and appeals for an end to the war."

photo credit and caption:

An ambulance races to the scene of an explosion during air raids over Baghdad Wednesday April 2, 2003. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

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