CPTnet
22 March 2006
HEBRON REFLECTION: Shrinking hearts
by Donna Hicks
"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 sendoff, 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 Friday, 10 March. Saturday morning at 4:00 a.m. 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.
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