Peacemaking

Watching and Waiting

There's a voice in the wilderness crying, a call from the ways untrod:
Prepare in the desert a highway, a highway for our God!
The valleys shall be exalted, the lofty hills brought low;
make straight all the crooked places, where the Lord our God may go!
- James Lewis Milligan (1876-1961), alt.

In March 2000, I traveled to Baghdad with a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation.  As we sped along the straight and seemingly endless highway from the Jordanian-Iraqi border to Baghdad, the text from Isaiah on which this Advent hymn is based came into my head.  When we visited Babylon, we walked a processional way - a paved, straight road.

On 26 November 2005, the day before Advent began, four colleagues from Christian Peacemaker Teams, of which I am a part, went missing in Baghdad.  Tom Fox.  Norman Kember.  James Loney.  Harmeet Sooden.  It's Norman Kember I know.  I met him in 1998, when the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and the Episcopal Peace Fellowship walked a peace pilgrimage to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops meeting in Canterbury.  Norman did logistics and support.  A member of the Baptist Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation,  he staffs the Peace Zone at Greenbelt, the Christian arts festival held August bank holiday weekend.  The theme this year was the Tree of Life, and Norman created a 'walking tree' to which people could attach leaves on which they had written a prayer for peace, as the tree 'walked' around the Greenbelt campus.

Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, CPT has concentrated on "working for the human rights of the detainees of the illegal occupation", accompanying family members of detainees in their efforts to locate and visit their loved ones, taking the testimony of those released, publishing a detailed report documenting the treatment of detainees and their families by occupation forces, and starting a world-wide campaign to end the abuses.  

In a release dated 8 December 2005, CPT states it "will remain committed to challenging the injustices of the occupation, and telling the stories of those forced to live under it.  We sincerely hope that our teammates James Loney, Tom Fox, Harmeet Sooden, and Norman Kember will return to us and help us do our work."

It is 13 December, the middle of Advent, a season of watching and waiting.  I ask your prayers for my teammates, for their families and friends, for all working to resolve the crisis, for those who know their whereabouts, and for their safe return home.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.  Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.  Amen.

13 December 2005

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