Tomorrow is the deadline for the lives of the CPT workers, including Quaker Tom Fox, being held in Iraq. They've been close in our hearts in these last few days.
There is a wonderful article on Salon called Love your Enemies. You don't need to suscribe to Salon to read it, you just have to watch a short ad, usually for Law and Order or something. The article excerpts a statement drafted by Tom Fox and others before their capture about what they would do in the face of a hypothetical kidnapping:
"CPT will attempt to communicate with the hostage takers or their sponsors, and work against journalists' inclinations to vilify and demonize the offenders. We will try to understand the motives for these actions and to articulate them while maintaining a firm stance that such actions are wrong ... We reject the use of violent force to save our lives, should we be kidnapped, held hostage, or caught in the middle of a violent conflict situation. We also reject violence to punish anyone who harms us ... We forgive those who consider us their enemies, therefore any penalty should be in the spirit of restorative justice rather than violent retribution."
The sheer humanity and strength of true Christianity in this statement blinds me with tears of hope and with tears of shame. Hope and inspiration in the fact that there are people who are living out Jesus' radical message of love and forgiveness, and shame that I rarely act with that much forgiveness and peace in my little daily trials.
There was another quote in the article that I found especially sane and moving:
Kindy knows pacifism isn't a shield in a war zone. But dying in pursuit of nonviolence is a worthy sacrifice to Christian Peacemakers. Kindy says he suspects and hopes that, whatever happens, Christian Peacemakers will maintain its presence in Iraq. "One of the things we need to learn from the military is that there are risks that are important to take -- risks worth putting our lives on the line for," he says. "If, in our peacemaking, we can't have that same level of commitment, that would be sad."
I was also moved in another way, reading this:
The litany of horrors Fox kept hearing -- coupled with all the other torments visited on Iraq -- clearly got to him. On his blog, he wrote about trying not to simply shut down in the face of so much anguish. "The ability to feel the pain of another human being is central to any kind of peace making work," he wrote. "But this compassion is fraught with peril. A person can experience a feeling of being overwhelmed. Or a feeling of rage and desire for revenge. Or a desire to move away from the pain. Or a sense of numbness that can deaden the ability to feel anything at all."
He continued. "How do I stay with the pain and suffering and not be overwhelmed? How do I resist the welling up of rage towards the perpetrators of violence? How do I keep from disconnecting from or becoming numb to the pain? After eight months with CPT, I am no clearer than I [was] when I began. In fact I have to struggle harder and harder each day against my desire to move away or become numb. Simply staying with the pain of others doesn't seem to create any healing or transformation. Yet there seems to be no other first step into the realm of compassion than to not step away."
Fox didn't step away. The day before he was taken, he wrote a brief missive, posted on the Web site Electronic Iraq, titled "Why Are We Here?" He concluded, "We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls."
To outsiders, such faith can seem naive or even foolishly reckless. Rush Limbaugh, for one, was pleased by the Christian Peacemakers' kidnapping, saying, "Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality."
I was very sad to read Limbaugh's quote, and as I felt a tide of anger rise up in me at his callousness and flippancy in the face of pain, I was called back to centeredness by Tom's words:
We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.
I wish there was some way I could give some of that loving spirit to Rush Limbaugh, to keep him from dehumanizing "lefties", to keep him from dehumanizing himself. I realized that I must not dehumanize him in my own heart, no matter how good a job he seems to be doing on his own soul. May I not step away or turn my face from the ugliness, so that I may step into the realm of true compassion. I pray for peace for Rush Limbaugh, for the kidnappers, and for our friends who are so surely being held up in the Light as they suffer for all that is good, all that is beautiful, true and holy. They are suffering for the truth that war and hatred and pain are not the ultimate reality, that there is something greater, a Divine that yearns and broods over us, longing to have us restored to peace and harmony and love, longing for our salvation, teaching us the way to peace, the way to pull ourselves up out of the hells that we have built. These four men have refused to be blinded by the false "reality" that the world would have us see and despair at, and instead have turned their eyes to the deeper hidden truth of the triumph of Love, and have offered their lives in witness to that truth. All the differences of religion and ideology and language stripped away, this Divine principle of Love is what remains, and is what must be guarded and cared for by the Children of God, even to the point of laying down our lives. Like many of us watching this witness from afar, I am thrown into deep reflection about how seriously I myself take this responsibility in my safe and quiet life.
I take up John Woolman's prayer:
“There is balm; there is a physician! and oh, what longings do I feel that we may embrace the means appointed for our healing; may know that removed which now ministers cause for the cries of many to ascend to Heaven against their oppressors; and that thus we may see the true harmony restored!”
5 comments:
Wonderful news, the deadline has been extended, and Hamas and other Palistinian organizations issued a loving note, asking for the CPT members releace, which speaks of, among other things, the fact that CPT members faced beatings by the Israeli forces, stood in front of tanks and bulldozers, and escorted Palistinian children to school when Isreali settlers threatened them.
There is hope. The real hope is that Tom lives so fully in the light. The effect on his heart is so clear.
Rush, on the other hand, does need our prayers. His pain is so obvious in his hatred, in the tone of his voice and so much in his life. We must and will pray that Tom is soon home with his brave and loving daughter, but we should also pray that Rush comes home to peace.
Thine in the light
lor
For years now, I've been reading CPT's frequent bulletins. The most painful ones have been those describing the humiliation of people under occupation as witnessed and sometimes photographed by CPT members. Every time I read yet another episode of cruel or capricious treatment, it hurts. A long time ago I wanted to send every such story to my congressional delegation. More recently, I've been tempted to delete these bulletins without reading them, but the reading has become a discipline for me.
It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to see these episodes first-hand over and over again. Refusing to objectify those involved, however tempting it is to do so, is a precious act requiring great strength. Thank you for your clear and tender post, touching on many dimensions of this witness.
This Friend speaks my mind.
This one, also:
Refusing to objectify those involved, however tempting it is to do so, is a precious act requiring great strength.
..and love.
Love and Light,
Claire
Amanda and others--
Thanks for having ears and eyes in places I do not venture, for one reason or another, on the internet or in the world.
I'll be adding a link to The Good Raised Up to draw readers to your post, Amanda.
Blessings,
Liz, The Good Raised Up
As an aging veteran (vietnam era) I've held/bitten my tongue/"pen" thus far during the commentaries on war and the warrior. Not because it is a discussion that I would avoid in the company of calm, fair-minded people, but because I lack that extra bit of true talent it takes to express the nuances of my thoughts in a literary format. No matter how I tried to couch it in written form, I couldn't seem to get past or around an adversarial hardness of tone that I don't truly feel toward those that believe strongly and sincerely in a non-violent path as an expression of their convictions. On the contrary, even in those times I felt a greater affinity toward those willing to sacrifice and suffer exile and imprisonment rather than serve than I did towards those who mindlessly waved their little flags as a show of support. I had nothing but contempt for those who paid lip service to anti-war slogans, demonized the warrior, and were only there for the "chicks and the beer".....knowing that the deferment (laminated) tucked into their wallet would keep them nice and safe. Perhaps that stems from the belief that the right to worship and express oneself freely according to the dictates of his or her conscience was won and is held safe by the continued emergence in every generation of those individuals, fighters and dedicated pacifists alike, whose commitment to the preservation of those and other liberties is so fierce as to compel them into harm's way in the name of that commitment. You worship in peace and discuss in the light not just as a bequest of those who died fighting, but also those who died rather than fight.
As for Rush Limbaugh, he was a satirist,a comedian, a buttoned down Howard Stern....who fell into the ego trap of taking himself seriously when he came to the realization that his audience accepted him as the real thing....you're right in seeing something pitiable about someone whose whole sense of self has come to reside in and depend upon the exercise of clinging to an image that he knows isn't supported by or founded in reality. Sort of like a professional wrestler.
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