BREACH

Chris Cooper plays a conflicted character in this newly-released movie about a real life American spy who sold huge security secrets to the Soviet Union. We are shown a man of highly-developed family values and fervent religious principles. At the same time, his fascination with lurid pornography as well as his deliberate betrayal of his countrymen leading to their execution is revealed to us.

We are left to wonder what made Richard Hanssen do what he did? No answers are forthcoming in this vivid portral of a man who breaches the most basic of human ethics in his pursuit of subliminal political goals as well as the money he decries as unimportant.

The breach apparent to me is with his own conscience. It is so savagely-seared that he can peacefully co-exist with the innocent love of his grandchildren and the open-affirmation of his faith in God while at the same time navigating a course of eventual self-destruction.

There is a potential breach in all of us of what is good and right and ethical. It is fed and nurtured by our sinful and self-destructive nature. We cannot avert its inevitable destruction unless we submit to the voice of God and the wooing of the Holy Spirit calling us to true faith in God, the One who made us for so much more than what we often settle.