Peacemaking

Shrinking Hearts

"Buffered as we are from the violent crises that cost Perpetua and her companions their lives, passion shrinks to pettiness, and love grows cold.  Many of us can protect, or at least distance, ourselves from the dangers of discipleship.. Yet life is as dangerous for some today as it was for Perpetua. And the deaths died today are surpassingly violent.  There is not compelling evidence that the world or its problems have grown any smaller; the planet is much the same size it has always been and poverty, disease, and warfare are as rampant now as ever.  I marvel that such a story as Perpetua's can be so reduced that I can hold it in my hand. How easily our hearts shrink." - from Brightest and Best: A Companion to Lesser Feasts and Fasts, by Sam Portaro, for the feast day of Perpetua and her Companions, martyrs at Carthage, 202

On Tuesday 7 March I heard these words at the noon eucharist at my church in Durham, North Carolina.  I shuddered.  What a fitting send-off, I thought, as I was leaving the next day for a month's service with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron.  The Sunday before had marked one hundred days since my CPT colleagues Tom Fox (a Quaker), Norman Kember, James Loney, and Harmeet Sooden had gone missing in Baghdad.

I got down to Hebron on the Friday.  Saturday morning at 4:00am I got the telephone call I had been dreading.  "Tom Fox's body has been found in Iraq and has been positively identified."  The team gathered and comforted one another and got to work.

Perpetua and her Companions were martyred for their faith. Tom Fox died because he was living out his faith.  In August 1999 Norman Kember sat in the silence of a Quaker meeting at the Greenbelt Festival in the UK.  He spoke out of the silence: "Quakers don't believe in the Bible, they try to live it."

We in CPT know that what happened to Tom Fox could happen to any of us.  We take the risks because we believe that God calls us to love our enemies and our neighbors and to seek out that which is of God in each person we encounter.

I pray that our hearts will not shrink so easily, but open and swell to what God is calling us.

Hebron
16 March 2006

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