Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Wisdom from Fr. John Breck

Now retired from teaching at St. Vladimir's in New York and St. Sergius' in Paris, Fr. John Breck resides in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He continues to serve the Church in many ways, including a regular column posted on www.oca.org entitled, "Life in Christ."

These words conclude his most recent offering:

If today's atheists, made such by fad or by conviction, could know and experience the God all of us have the capacity to know, they would fall on their knees and shed tears of joy. This is not romantic wishful thinking. It's not evangelical exuberance. It's a simple fact, based on a reality so well expressed one time by a sister in a Catholic monastic community: "God," she said, out of the wellspring of her own knowledge and experience, "has placed in the inner depths of every person an insatiable longing for himself!"

The God who fulfills that longing is the God who has brought all of us into being, who has sacrificed himself for us out of his inexhaustible love, and who continues to embrace us and to lead us into an eternal and glorious communion with himself. He is the God who, as those license plates insist, "loves us!" From the depths of his heart he strives to bless and to save all of us, without exception. All of us, and perhaps especially those who -- because of painful experiences with clergy, or because of hypocrisy on the part of Christians they knew, or because of the heavyhandedness of those who would browbeat them into a fictitious conversion experience -- profess themselves to be materialists, secularists, pastafarians or atheists.

Read it all here.