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Friends United Meeting |
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May/June 2006
No Greater Love
By Trish Edwards-Konic
Langley Hill Friends Meetinghouse looks like many other whitewashed country churches, a sleepy sort of Currier and Ives image. Yet, they cultivated a generous heart in Tom Fox, a generosity that included a willingness to lay down his life for his friends.
Among Friends for 22 years, Tom learned to listen more closely for God and learned to respond to God. In working with children and youth, he cultivated their young lives and passed on to them how to listen and how to respond to the voice of God they heard.
And yet, he was an ordinary man—a father, a grocer, a man who played the clarinet and recorder, a man who loved and was loved by others.
David Boynton, a member of Langley Hill Friends Meeting where Tom was also a member, said that “Fox was a softspoken man who liked to play with the children at Quaker events…he was never the most charismatic speaker in the meetinghouse…But the passion he had for peace and the people of Iraq was inspiring…He was a man who listened to what God said and did it. And that means any of us can do that.”
Fox, 54, was born in Chattanooga and graduated with a double degree in music performance and education from George Peabody College for Teachers, now part of Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Unable to fight in Vietnam because of conscience, he did not flee nor demonstrate. Instead he joined the Marine Band and played his clarinet with them for 20 years.
After seeing the devastation from the 9-11 attack, he saw in his mind the vision of George Fox—a sea of darkness and flowing over it a sea of light. Tom said, “While I knew very little about Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), at the time I had a clear sense that I wanted very much to find some way to pull us out of the darkness and move the world (even if it was the movement of one human being) towards the light.”
Christian Peacemaker Teams asks the question, “What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?”
CPT Co-director Doug Pritchard said at an April 2 memorial service in Toronto: “I first met Tom Fox at his Christian Peacemaker Teams training in Chicago in the summer of 2004. He was a quiet, self-effacing man, who took the steps along his life’s journey carefully and prayerfully. At the training, he said that his spiritual turning point came during a Quaker meeting for worship 20 years earlier when an elderly Friend gave a one sentence message. She said, ‘I feel that in all things we need to keep to Jesus.’ This message went deep into Tom’s heart and he said that he relived the moment of receiving that message every week. ‘I feel that in all things we need to keep to Jesus.’”
In 2004, Fox quit his job as assistant manager at Whole Foods in Springfield, Virginia and joined CPT and worked with both the Iraq and Palestine teams. He was abducted in Baghdad, Iraq on November 26, 2005, with three other CPTers, and his body was found March 9, 2006.
“Why are we here?” asked Tom. “If I understand the message of God, his response to that question is that we are to take part in the creation of the Peaceable Realm of God. Again, if I understand the message of God, how we take part in the creation of this realm is to love God with all our heart, our mind and our strength and to love our neighbors and enemies as we love God and ourselves. In its essential form, different aspects of love bring about the creation of the realm.”
Sheila Provencher, a CPT Iraq member, wrote: “We met in October 2004, right after Margaret Hassan had been killed…and we talked about kidnapping, what could happen to us and if we should stay in Iraq. You wrote a statement of conviction that included the words, ‘If I am ever called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice in love of enemy, I trust that God will give me the grace to do so.’ You did it, Tom. You were faithful until the very end. I imagine that even when you were about to die, you looked with forgiveness at the man who would kill you.”
The Langley Hill website says in part: “Tom was a member of our faith community for over 15 years. He was a former Clerk and loved working with children and young people. When he last returned from Baghdad in the summer of 2005, he spent time serving as head cook at a Quaker camp near Winchester, Virginia. His death is especially hard on the children who knew and loved him. We express our love and concern for them and particularly for Tom’s own children who grew up in our Meeting.”
“Tom Fox’s life was not taken from him,” wrote Peggy Senger Parsons in her UPI Religion & Spirituality column March 13, 2006. “Tom Fox laid his life down a long time ago. He surrendered it into the hands of the Divine. Because he knew it was safe there, he was able to walk unbound by fear, letting the Light within him control and impel him forward into the work of peace. Tom’s life was safe in the hands of God before he went to Baghdad, it was safe in Baghdad, it was safe in captivity and it is safe now. The loss is ours to bear. But it is a temporary, perceptual loss. For we have also put our lives into the hands of the Divine, and so our lives and his remain together.”