[saymaListserv] CPT update

[Steve Livingston]

Dear Kristi and other Friends,

I have thought about Friend Tom Fox and his compatriots frequently since 
their capture, and followed their story closely. I join with Kristi and 
other concerned people of faith all over the world in holding them, and 
their work, in the Light. I read a longer statement from the CPT website 
this morning, it is still posted at 
http://www.cpt.org/iraq/response/06-07-03statement.htm. I wanted to 
share two quotes from that statement that address the value of having 
peacemakers rather than warmakers in an area where there is lethal 
conflict going on.

First, according to the CPT statement

Tom wrote on the day before he was taken, “We are here to take part in 
the creation of the Peaceable Realm 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.”

The statement goes on to say

Iraqis have asked us to tell their stories in our home communities, to 
share with them our own experiences of peacemaking, to assist them in 
building nonviolent institutions in Iraq, and to accompany them as they 
seek justice for detainees and others suffering from the oppression of 
Iraq. We seek to promote what is human in all of us and so to offer a 
glimpse of hope in a dark time. This hope springs from our own faith 
tradition. We have witnessed a similar hope within the faith traditions 
of the people of Iraq.

The Christian Peacemakers epitomize a new paradigm wherein people are 
freed of the bondage of thinking in terms of "war" or "absence of war". 
If one hundred thousand of our troops had been replaced by ten thousand 
such peacemakers, the violence in Iraq would have long since abated. The 
path of peacemaking is a path we must take if we are to find the "Earth 
Restored" that we seek.

Steve
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