Max Carter from the Back Bench: on Tom Fox

As Tom Fox’s body was being prepared for transport back to the United States from Iraq, colleagues from the Christian Peacemaker Teams kept vigil over him and read passages from scripture. Among those recited were Mark 8:34-35, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” and John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

While those passages bring some measure of comfort, the circumstances around Tom’s peacemaking mission to Iraq, his kidnapping, confinement, and subsequent murder are still deeply troubling to many. People could be excused for wondering how Tom’s life was “saved” by his brutal sacrifice or what light can emanate from such darkness. There are, indeed, very disturbing questions that can be asked.

How are we to understand the nature of people who could be in the presence of someone like Tom, witness his magnanimous personality, hear clearly from the Muslim world that he and the CPTers were on a peaceful mission in opposition to the Iraq invasion, and not only resist what must have been Tom’s attempts at appealing to “that of God in them,” but, in the end, murder him in a vicious and callous way? It challenges the very core of Christian faith in love overcoming hate, good overcoming evil, and the Quaker testimony to the presence of the inward Light in all people.

I have had to ask myself those questions and have struggled to comprehend a sensible answer. In general terms, I have to respond that Christian faith is just that: faith. I have faith that, in the end, good does overcome evil. Certainly the Lenten and Easter seasons instruct us in that way. As Tony Campolo so famously says, “It may be Good Friday, but Easter is coming!” The darkness of Jesus’s own brutal torture and execution was followed by the light of the resurrection and the faith of the early Christian community that death had been swallowed up in victory.

Wrestling with clear evidence that Tom was unable to “answer that of God” in his captors is also tough, and Quaker lore ill equips us for such failure. Our typical stories are of Quakers’ “leaving the latchstring out” and having Indians pass by their frontier homes on raiding parties; of John Woolman’s appealing successfully to slaveowners’ sense of right; of Elizabeth Fry’s moving unmolested among the “howling crowd” of prisoners in Newgate Gaol; of Rufus Jones convincing the Nazis to let Friends help Jews get out of Europe.

We are well advised to enter into work such as Tom’s with a healthy respect for the possibility of failure. Quaker theology teaches that the inward Light can flicker, dim, and be extinguished if resisted consistently. Early Friends said that we are guaranteed but “one day of Visitation,” and if we do not become children of Light, we may become children of darkness. While people are not born good or bad, we make choices throughout our lives that place us under the influence of good or evil. I am perfectly comfortable in saying that Tom’s captors were not under the influence of good when they killed him. Tom, however, was under the influence of good in offering his life as a living sacrifice for a truth that transcends his own life.

In that way, he did save his life even while losing it, for his life, in biblical terms, was “caught up in Christ,” and the Christ spirit in which he lived could not be killed. To lapse into Hinduism a bit, “the Eternal in us cannot kill and cannot die.” In that sense, Tom’s life and death is a light that continues to shine in the darkness, and the darkness cannot put it out. And I must also not give up the hope that perhaps, in some way, Tom was able to reach that of God in others — if not in his captors, then certainly in the many thousands around the world who were moved by his witness.

Contemplating Tom’s death, I have been reminded of the story of Fr. Maximillian Kolbe, who volunteered to take the place of a prisoner condemned to the starvation bunker in one of Germany’s concentration camps. Reflecting on Kolbe’s sacrifice, a fellow prisoner later wrote:

“It was an enormous shock to the whole camp. We became aware someone among us in this spiritual dark night of the soul was raising the standard of love on high. Someone unknown, like everyone else, tortured and bereft of name and social standing, went to a horrible death for the sake of someone not even related to him. Therefore it is not true, we cried, that humanity is cast down and trampled in the mud, overcome by oppressors, and overwhelmed by hopelessness. Thousands of prisoners were convinced the true world continued to exist and that our torturers would not be able to destroy it. More than one individual began to look within himself for this real world, found it, and shared it with his camp companion, strengthening both in this encounter with evil. To say that Father Kolbe died for one of us or for that person’s family is too great a simplification. His death was the salvation of thousands. And on this, I would say, rests the greatness of that death. That’s how we felt about it. And as long as we live, we who were at Auschwitz will bow our heads in memory of it as at that time we bowed our heads before the bunker of death by starvation. That was shock full of optimism, regenerating and giving strength; we were stunned by his act, which became for us a mighty explosion of light in the dark camp night….” (_A Man for Others_, 178)

We are, finally, accountable for living up to the Light we have, of doing what we know to be right, not determining our actions on the inability of others to live up to their best lights. It is a task not to be taken lightly.