Fr. John Breck Archives

The Thirty-Ninth Day of Christmas Advent: Celebrating Christ’s Nativity

12/23/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2006 With the hyper-commercialization of Christmas in American culture, it’s important for us to step away from the noise and tinsel, in order to hear once again what Orthodox Christian tradition tells us about the real significance of this feast. This takes us back first of all to the Nativity stories of the Gospels. To interpret those stories, though, we need to turn as well to the ancient liturgical

The Thirty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Incarnation to Parousia

12/21/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2009 Celebration of Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord, invites us to look in a fresh way at the intimate relation that exists between the Incarnation of Christ and his “Second Coming” in glory. Too often Nativity is taken as a feast in and of itself, a family festival so deformed by the season’s commercial pressures that two of its major emphases, cosmic and eschatological, become lost in a

The Thirtieth Day of Christmas Advent: Light into Darkness

12/14/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2005 The best way to prepare for a feast, I find, is to spend some time looking at and praying before the festal icons. Nativity offers a broad array of sacred images that spell out graphically the biblical Word of the incarnation, the coming of the eternal God in the person of a little child. One of the most striking aspects of those images is the way they blend

The Twenty-Third Day of Christmas Advent: The Eternal Mystery

12/07/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2004 I’m sorry this column can’t be accompanied by sound. One of the most precious components of Orthodox Christianity, perhaps especially in the Russian tradition, is its store of melodies to liturgical hymns that are heartbreakingly beautiful. I just came across a fine example, tucked away in the iTunes folder of this laptop. It’s a contemporary variant of a hymn sung normally at Annunciation, composed by Fr Paul Jannakos.

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Eternal God: A Little Child

11/28/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 1, 2007 Thanksgiving is over and we are moving toward what one of our wise and dedicated priests refers to as “Getmas.” He is as frustrated and dismayed at what exuberant commercialism and American popular religion have done to Christmas as I am with the relentless efforts to transform our national feast of Thanksgiving into “Turkey Day.” These campaigns are insidious and they’ve been highly effective: God—the true God who

The Third Day of Christmas Advent: Are the Stories of Jesus’ Birth True?

11/17/2022

By Fr John Breck, January 1, 2005 The Christmas season inevitably leads people in the media to speculate on whether or not the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ conception and birth are historically accurate. The question they raise in the public mind is whether these cherished stories are really “true.” A good, well-balanced example of this kind of reflection appeared in the December 13, 2004 edition of Newsweek. The article rehearsed a familiar array of parallels

The First Day of Christmas Advent: Caring for the Lonely

11/15/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2008 A woman in the parish recently buried her husband after his long and losing battle with cancer. A thirteen-year old girl still cries herself to sleep each night several months after her parents’ bitter divorce. A man off the streets, recently chrismated into the Orthodox Church, is waging a tentative battle with alcoholism, trying with too little support to keep himself in recovery. The priest’s wife, determined to

“Reign” or “Realm”?

10/19/2022

~By Fr John Breck, February 1, 2010 For a very long time interpreters of the New Testament have puzzled over the Greek expression basileia tou theou, which can be translated in various ways. The most common, and most literal, are “the Kingdom of God” and “the Reign of God.” As Jesus used the phrase (in his native Aramaic, subsequently translated into Greek), the basic idea is “lordship”: full dominion and authority over creation and human life.

As Loved Ones Die (3)

10/13/2022

By Fr John Breck, October 2, 2008 In the preceding column I raised questions about the terribly difficult issue of euthanasia, and specifically, whether in an Orthodox Christian perspective there could ever be a morally acceptable way to hasten the death of a dying person, when that person is consumed by uncontrollable pain and suffering. Fortunately, such cases today are rare. Palliative care and medications for pain management have been developed to the point that

As Loved Ones Die (2)

10/12/2022

By Fr John Breck, October 1, 2008 “Your mother has a very strong constitution.” The nurse is right. She does have a strong constitution. Four days ago they stopped giving her food and liquids. (Along with a DNR she had insisted, “No tubes, no forced feeding!”) Since then she has been fitfully asleep or semi-comatose, her emaciated body resting uneasily in the bed. Despite the extra oxygen, her breathing has become increasingly rasping and intermittent.

Archive

The Thirty-Ninth Day of Christmas Advent: Celebrating Christ’s Nativity

The Thirty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Incarnation to Parousia

The Thirtieth Day of Christmas Advent: Light into Darkness

The Twenty-Third Day of Christmas Advent: The Eternal Mystery

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Eternal God: A Little Child

The Third Day of Christmas Advent: Are the Stories of Jesus’ Birth True?

The First Day of Christmas Advent: Caring for the Lonely

“Reign” or “Realm”?

As Loved Ones Die (3)

As Loved Ones Die (2)

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