By Kathleen Kern

I thought I was going to feel elated when I got the news on March 23 that my Christian Peacemaker Teams colleagues Jim Loney, Norman Kember and Harmeet Sooden had been freed in Baghdad.

Instead, I felt a heaviness, because I learned they heard only after their release about the death of Tom Fox — a man who had encouraged them through weeks of fear and excruciating boredom and helped pass the time by teaching music theory.

I met Tom at our CPT fulltimers’ retreat at Strawberry Island, Ont., in 2004. On the ride back to Toronto, he told me that of all the presidents he had played under in the White House band, he liked Ronald Reagan the best.

“But Tom,” I said, and began listing all the atrocities that the Reagan administration had committed in Central America in the 1980s.

He persisted: “I disagreed with Reagan on almost everything, but of all the presidents I played for, he was the only one who always remembered to thank the band.”

I’ve replayed that conversation in my head a lot over the last few months.

I thought if anyone could transform the hearts of his kidnappers, it would be this gentle soul who thought the best of others. That he had elevated this personality trait to a moral principle was evident in a statement he wrote the day before he was kidnapped:

“As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

“Why are we here? . . . We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God’s children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.”

Because I had to deal with the media flurry after Tom’s death, I had not yet fully grieved for him when the glad news came that Jim, Norman and Harmeet were free. This time, instead of a flurry, the media response was a cyclone that sucked us into a whirl of misinformation and false accusations.

They said we had been ungrateful to the soldiers who rescued our guys, that we were dupes of Saddam Hussein, that we allied ourselves with insurgents, that we didn’t care about the lives of other Western hostages. They invited Iraqis who had never met our team and Western pundits who lacked the most basic understanding of what we do to comment. (This information is easily available at www.cpt.org.)

We struggled to respond in fits and starts. Fortunately, Jim and Norman’s first statements to the media in Toronto and London dispelled much of the misinformation.

Afterward, I remembered that we had originally planned to wait until we had some facts about the rescue before we commented publicly. But the media attacks had made us respond defensively before we really knew what had happened.

While trying to drain energy from the cyclone, I looked up Scriptural texts about truth. Consulting the Bible made me stop, shake the muddle from my head and think, “Oh yeah, it’s Jesus we’re about, not the spin.”

Media headlines constantly change. We will try to tether ourselves to the eternal gospel as we seek to work on behalf of the least of these.

And I will try to imagine the magnanimous things Tom Fox might have said about those who vilified us.