LOUISVILLE — Last week, Princeton Theological Seminary grad Beth Pyles was filing Personal Information Forms (PIFs) in West Virginia and awaiting a call from a pastor nominating committee.
Today she got on an airplane to Jordan.
If she gets any job interviews in the next three months, it’ll be by long-distance call to Amman.
Or maybe Baghdad.
Pyles is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. Her assignment is to support team members working in Baghdad, or relieve them, if necessary.
Four members of the Baghdad team are presumably still being held by kidnappers, who threatened them with execution last Saturday unless the Iraqi government freed all prisoners from its jails and the U.S. and British governments left the country.
No one has heard a word about their whereabouts since then.
A previously unknown Islamic group called Swords of Justice apparently kidnapped one American, one Briton and two Canadians at gunpoint in a carjacking near Baghdad University when the men were on route to an appointment.
They are Tom Fox, 54, Norman Kemper, 74, James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Sooden, 32.
CPT, an organization of non-violent Christian human-rights activists, issued a statement on Dec. 13 asking supporters to write letters and op-ed pieces on 1) “the suffering of our Iraqi friends and CPT’s work to address injustice” and 2) “the power and conviction of Biblical non-violence and risky peacemaking.”
The team in Iraq, it said, is asking the media to redirect attention from the personal lives and fate of the hostages to “telling the human rights story” of Iraqis in detention and under occupation.
“As we all continue to pray and work for the safe release of our friends still missing in Iraq, we recognize that we have a momentous opportunity to bear witness to the non-violent commitments of Tom, Jim, Norman and Harmeet, and thousands of friends and partners with whom CPT works around the world,” it said.
CPT keeps teams in Baghdad, the occupied territories in Israel/Palestine, Colombia and parts of Canada. It asserts that Christians should devote the same self-discipline to non-violent peacemaking that the military devotes to war.
The Baghdad team focuses it work on helping detainees and their families.
Pyles, 50, has been to Baghdad before. She finished up a rotation with CPT in October, and said then that she intended to return for at least six weeks after Easter.
But events compelled her to leave now.
She said the decided to go just 10 days before Christmas because “they asked.”
“One time an elder in my home church in Parkersburg, West Virginia, told me that how you know the voice of God, how you know you’re called to something … is sometimes the simple fact that someone asks you. … But I had offered before, that if I was needed I was available.”
She’ll be working with at least two other CPT peacemakers from Amman.
Pyles, the mother of three grown children, admits to being nervous and says her family is less than thrilled with her decision. “Certainly, with the situation as it now exists, everybody is concerned, but … well, there is no but; they are concerned,” she said by phone while packing for the trip. “And I’m concerned, too. But there are four men held in captivity, and a nation of Iraqis still held in captivity and under occupation. The situation hasn’t changed (for them) just because it has gotten more dramatic for us.”
Besides, she says, she can still respond to prospective employers by email, and her mother has promised to help with correspondence.
Earlier this year, she did one employment interview over the phone from Baghdad — and says she can do that again if need be.
Presbyterian Anita David, of Chicago, is a CPT member in Baghdad.
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