A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus proclaimed aloud, whoever puts faith in me believes not so much in me as in him who sent me, and whoever looks on me is seeing him who sent me. I have come to the world as its light to keep anyone who believes in me from remaining in darkness. If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I am not the one to condemn him. For I did not come to condemn the world, but to save it.
Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words already has his judge, namely the word that I have spoken. It is that which will condemn him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own, no, the father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to say it. Since I know that his commandment means eternal life, whatever I say is spoken just as he instructed me. This is the gospel of the lord.
Praise be to you, Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. In the oration, the prayer of this mass, which is usually the keynote of the liturgical service, we prayed to God to fill our emptiness, To fill our emptiness. Do you or have you ever thought much about that? Now, of course, the first thing we do is make a big mistake.
When we think of emptiness, we think of a bottle which has nothing in it. But how about the bottle that's a third full, or a half full, or three quarters full, or 85% full? There is still emptiness there. So what do we mean when we say pray We know this is business. We pray to God to fill our emptiness.
What are we talking about? What is this emptiness? What is it an emptiness of? You have a container. You can't have an emptiness, I suppose, without, in a sense at least imagining, a container of some sort.
I know this isn't quite true, but generally speaking, that's the way we our imagination works. We think of a of something which has nothing in it. What's it supposed to have? You look at a bottle of Scotch and you say it's half empty, what do you mean? Well, I suppose you mean that it's it's a half full of Scotch whiskey.
But on the if it holds it may have a label on it, but supposing it has turpentine to clean your paintbrushes. So what is it what are we praying for when we say, Oh God, fill my emptiness. Well, suit yourself. You can answer that question according to your own pleasure. But these are worthy considerations.
What is god's what are you asking god to do for you? Now my one thought that I'd like to offer is this, whether it be joy or sorrow, whether it be success or failure, whatever we try to do, whatever measure of success we have, whatever measure of lack of success we have, there's always in anything we do some kind of emptiness of the thing we're doing. Clive Staple Lewis, C. S. Lewis, wrote a book called Joy Observed, and it's a sort of an account of his his journey from being well, I suppose you can call him a Christian.
But anyway, he became a good God fearing atheist, a very sincere, honest to God atheist. Then he moved on to a position of of theism, and finally became a very fervent, intelligent Christian. Now his definition of joy is something like this. It's the heart of his this is a very fundamental concept of Lewis, that joy is unfulfilled desire, which in itself is more desirable than anything else. Unfulfilled desire.
Emptiness. But the the definition of the emptiness is in terms of the desire which is unfulfilled. Now, the point I want to make is and his point, of course, I I don't know whether that means much to you, but I read that about a dozen years ago. And it it's Saint Augustine has has something like that when he says, Oh God, in in the very first paragraph of his confession, Saint Augustine of Hippo, when he says, oh god, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts will not be at rest until they rest in you. Now that doesn't mean you don't have a half filled bottle.
That doesn't mean you don't have a 95% filled bottle. It means that the bottle's not filled. There's an emptiness. And that emptiness is defined in the terms of whatever it is. And you see, this is a tremendously important truth to get a hold of, That whatever we have and this isn't a this isn't a doctrine of pessimism or cynicism.
This is just an the the facts of life. That anything we want seems so desirable in the wanting that that that we think if we get it, everything will be just wonderful. Now we may not put this into words, and I'm not just talking about romance. That's only one aspect of life. How about a man or a woman who wants a particular job, who wants to succeed in a particular venture?
Or in some little thing who wants who's making a cake and wants the cake to come out just right? Or is blowing some glass up at the Stuban glass factory who wants a perfect piece of glass. You know it never comes out perfect. There's always an emptiness. Always an emptiness.
Well, how do we handle this emptiness? Now that's the point. Notice we are praying to God in this mass to keep to help us to fill that emptiness. To fill that emptiness. And to me, this is frightfully important because no matter what we put our hands to, no matter what we want, no matter whether we get it or don't get it, there's always a fly in the ointment.
This you can quote me on. And you and you all know how true it is. You want a certain house, and you you and your wife or your family and everybody, you sacrifice to get it, and you get the house, and the first thing you know, the plumbing goes bad, the furnace goes bad, some electrical work goes bad. Of course it does. There's an emptiness.
And of course when we don't get what we want, no one has to tell us about the emptiness. We know it. How do we handle these emptiness? How do we preserve ourselves from being cynics, of throwing up? I remember being at Maria Loch, a very famous monastery near Bunn, not far from the Rhine, near Ondernach, on the Rhine.
And as I was leaving, the guest master took me well, he asked me to sign this big book, you know. So I went in and I signed it, and he said, Would you mind translating this? And here somebody, just above the well, just a little before I'd arrived, had written the following: Life's a bowl of cherries. What the hell's the use? It was signed by a man I knew at Catholic University.
He asked me to translate that into German. I kindly told him that I think he could do as well as I could. How do you translate that into German? How do you translate that into life? Life's a bowl of cherries.
What the hell is he used? See, it's so easy to have that attitude because anybody with a little experience knows that whatever we have, whatever we get, whatever we don't have, whatever we don't get, there is an emptiness. Oh god, said Saint Augustine, you've made us for yourself, and our hearts will not be at rest until they rest in you. There's the answer to the emptiness. There's the emptiness that we create by false expectations.
It's only the very young child who knows that if they get that miniature train, their life with joy will be complete. You don't have to be out of grammar school to know that the train will not give you complete joy, whether it's a little train or a big train or whatever. It doesn't take much experience of life to bring this home. And so, you see, the point I'm making is Christianity is not a it is not a way of life that leads to pessimism. It is not for the dour.
It is it is a joyful religion because it is, in the best sense of the word, optimistic. Because its optimism is based upon God almighty, not upon wishful thinking or some kind of a day by day I'm getting better and all that nonsense. It's based upon the solid truth that God exists. He made me for himself. I am not going to find completeness.
I am not going to find complete fullness. I am not going to be fulfilled completely except in him. That's the whole and but you see, we can't achieve this on our own. We can't say, yes, God. This is the way life is.
Now I know. Now I know. That's not enough. Knowledge is not enough. How do you interpret that knowledge and transform that knowledge into your daily living?
You look at your families, you look at your achievements, you look at your failures, you look at your successes, you look at things which aren't so successful. How do you react to them, actually? What's your emotional? What's your sentiments? What's your feeling about these things?
Are you depressed? Are you going around saying, oh, God, what did I do wrong? Why have I what have I done to merit this? What have I done that you're punishing me? What have I done that you're giving me this fine reward?
You see, because it works in every way. We come back, you can't do it alone. Without me, Christ said, you can do nothing. That's what Jesus said. So we spend half our life driving trying to prove him wrong.
Let's not waste our time. Let us realize that only by God's help can we realize that prayer. Oh god, fill my emptiness. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.