10th
Fox, Girard, & The Little Prince
This essay originally appeared in a book of reflections on the CPT hostage crisis compiled by Chuck Fager in 2006, called Tom Fox Was My Friend. Yours, Too.
“What does that mean— ‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”
from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (68)
I met Tom Fox at the natural foods grocery store where we both worked before he retired in 2003. When I worked with him, he had served the company for nearly a decade as a baker, a bakery team leader, and associate store team leader. At that time I had no reason to think he would be anything more than a boss like a hundred thousand other bosses. But in the course of our time together he shared with me concrete disciplines for putting first things first, living simply, and serving others.
In time we became friends, and I realized he was mentoring me. We shared bread, we hiked together, and as Quakers, we met in silence or reflected on the practical challenges facing our faith and community in a culture of war and terror.
I have heard a lot of people interpret Tom’s story into ideologies or political agendas. Those stories may be important parts of Tom’s impact on our lives, but they have nothing to do with the Tom Fox I know. What Tom shared with me, and many others who knew him, was something that often disappears when the conversation shifts to ideology and politics, something that I can only call Communion.
Breaking bread, sharing meals
The communion I learned from Tom is what Jim Corbett calls “’religio,’ a ‘rebinding’ into open society [that is] the distinctively human form of sociality and civility” (Corbett 106). In practical terms, this is about sharing meals and fellowship; or, as the fox said so aptly, “establishing ties.” If there is a single practice that unites Tom’s work and witness in all of the communities he served, it is that he brought people together to share bread and establish ties of fellowship. This strikes me as the original meaning of the Eucharist for the early Church, as expressed in the letters of Paul and the Didache, an early Christian “handbook”.
But Tom was also concerned about a great breakdown of communion that demoralizes human life in society. He spoke about this only with great humility and bewilderment, but I later found out that he had been struggling with this issue for many, many years.
Friend in the midst of Civil War
I am a member of Woodlawn Friends Meeting, which is the community where Tom’s family came to the Quaker faith over twenty years ago. Our meetinghouse was built by the family of Quaker Chalkley Gillingham before the American Civil War. During the war, the meetinghouse was “pressed into service” as an infirmary and military headquarters (even while Friends continued to worship there), and Quakers “lost their crops, livestock, fences, barns, and houses to marauding soldiers from both armies” (Nations).
Like many Quakers, Gillingham kept a journal, much of which recounts the wartime trials this small Quaker community endured. Tom found an unpublished manuscript, and was drawn to it, heading a committee to transcribe, edit, and publish Gillingham’s journal. Through this work, Tom traced the chronicles of violent contagion that surrounded this “Friend in the midst of Civil War.” It is now evident that, for Tom, this work wasn’t a matter of idle curiosity, but a meaningful study into one of the most significant challenges facing Friends today. It was a practical concern.
The contagion of Satan
The scope and nature of this challenge came into even clearer focus during Tom’s deployment with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq. In the blog that he began after he arrived in Baghdad, Tom included the word “Satan” in his vocabulary, a concept he’d never spoken about in our prior conversations, and one that I’d never taken seriously. “This force of war,” he said “…leads a person, or country, or ethnic group to walk away from God and towards the contagion of Satan.” [Emphasis mine.] The way he inflected the term seemed unique, but it remained a mystery until later.
After Tom’s death, I was given many of his books. Among these, the one with the most highlighter marks and notes was I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard.
As I began to read it, the parallels to the situation at hand seemed uncanny, even unnerving. Girard writes as an anthropologist, and his central focus in this text is the breakdown of communion that gives rise to menace, war, and terror in every age. He dispassionately describes a process whereby imitation of desire becomes rivalry, and rivalry becomes virulent throughout human society. At its crescendo, when rivalistic contagion must erupt into violence from which no one is safe, the process creates a single victim for the community to slay or exile as a scapegoat.
The Passion of the Christ, according to Girard, is a single lucid example of this process, and it seems that the murder of my friend Tom, amid countless others killed in Iraq, is another. Violent tension explodes out of infectious rivalry, triggering the need for a sacrifice. Because the process almost always yields a single victim for the community to demonize and accuse, Girard calls the process Satanic: “The devil, or Satan, signifies rivalistic contagion, up to and including the single victim mechanism. He may be located in the entire process or in one of its stages” (Girard 43). [Emphasis mine.]
But why doesn’t Satan present himself as an impersonal principle … ? Because he designates the principal consequence of the single victim mechanism, the emergence of a false transcendence and the numerous deities that represent it. Satan is always someone. (Girard 46) [Emphasis in original.]
That last sentence was highlighted by Tom in the text: Satan is always someone. When violent contagion has the whole community in its grip, someone must be accused, someone must be taken down, someone must be lynched, someone must be killed, someone must serve as a focus for the community’s hostility— or else the community will annihilate itself. A fleeting sense of relief from the snowballing of rivalries only arises when the community unites in the sacrifice of a single victim.
Tom’s colleagues in CPT attest that he thought heavily on these subjects; Norman Kember mentioned that during their Bible study sessions in captivity, Tom shared a great deal from his reflections on Girard. But no one I’ve talked with really knows what Tom made of this study, and perhaps we never will. Recalling that Tom’s life was taken in events that morbidly illustrate Girard’s thesis makes it that much more difficult to get my head around.
Taming and being tamed
What I know of Tom, and I can practice in my own life, is building communion. As a thoroughly flawed human being in a community divided by politics, ideology, wealth, and privilege, my way is difficult, and averting apocalyptic tension seems hopeless. But my struggle with Tom’s legacy is defined by communion and service: sharing bread and establishing meaningful ties of fellowship where fellowship is strained by mistrust, menace, war, and terror. Establishing the Peaceable Realm of God, as Tom put it, means loving, serving, and healing my neighbor through real human contact.
Communion is more than a passive undertaking; it can be an active resistance to the contagion of Satan. As a community practice, communion may erode the foundation of rivalistic tension and redeem real people from dehumanizing and demonizing others. Perhaps that is too much to hope. As a covenant I inherit from a cherished Friend, the difficult practice of taming and being tamed reminds me that I am still the learner, and the Fox is still my teacher.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed” (Saint-Exupéry 74).
Notes
- The Didache is the oldest existing document that served Christian communities as a sort of “Church manual,” providing instructions for prayer, fasting, baptism, Communion, and other matters. It’s advices are still mostly observed by Orthodox Christians throughout the East. It’s prayers connected to the Eucharist include the following verse: “Just as this broken bread was scattered over the hills and then brought together and made one, so let your assembly be brought together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom” (Ehrman 315, in plain speech).
- Girard’s terms were “mimetic desire,” and “scandal,” the latter being derived from the Greek skandalon and skanalizein, words that designate mimetic rivalry in the Greek New Testament (16).
Sources & Further Reading
Citations of René Girard in the above text refer to I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, below.
- Buckman, Christine, Christy DeButts, and Tom Fox eds. “The Journal of Chalkley Gillingham: Friend in the Midst of Civil War.” Fort Belvior: Alexandria Friends Meeting at Woodlawn, 1989. (The publication date is given in note 15 on page 38.)
- Corbett, Jim. Goatwalking: A guide to wildland living, a quest for the Peaceable Kingdom. New York: Viking, 1991.
- Erhman, Bart D. The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
- Fox, Tom. “The Force of War and the Force of Peace? The Same Force Moving in the Opposite Direction?” Waiting in the Light. 14 Feb 2005.
- Girard, René and Yvonne Fraccero trans. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
- Girard, René and James G. Williams trans. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002.
- Nations, James. “Short History of Woodlawn Meeting.” Alexandria Friends Meeting at Woodlawn. 7 Jan 2005.
- Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de and Katherine Woods trans. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, 1971.
