Some
Thoughts on the Liturgy
OVERCOMING
THE EMPTINESS
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You may be familiar with this person:
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he was called the “hatchet man” in President Nixon’s
administration
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he had an office next to the President, a 6-figure income, all
the comforts of rich living
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then after he had been caught in an illegal action, something
deep inside of him began to bother him
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some emptiness, “a gnawing hollowness” is how he later
described it
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and he understood that he was nothing more than a common thief
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his name: Charles “Chuck” Colson, confidant to President
Richard Nixon
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His autobiography—one of many that came out of Watergate—is
called “Born
Again”
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his book is different from all the others because he admits
his guilt and asked God to help him
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he writes: at that time, “I
prayed my first real prayer: ‘God, I don’t know how to
find you, but I’m going to try. I’m not much the way I am
now, but somehow I want to give myself to you. Take me.’”
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and he gave himself completely to God, accomplishing
incredible things with his life
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by way of a footnote, he wrote another book called Loving
God
and in it he spoke of his vocation (after he had received a
lot of accolades for what he had done with his life) this way:
“The
real legacy of my life was my biggest failure—that I was an
ex-convict. My greatest humiliation—being sent to
prison—was the beginning of God’s greatest use of my life:
He chose the one experience in which I could not glory for His
glory.”
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he died in 2012, and is a modern example of a person we have
come to know as the good thief
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The good thief who was crucified with Jesus knew he was wrong
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he was likewise experiencing an emptiness, hoping that this
man Jesus who was being crucified with him had something to
help with his mental pain,
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he addressed Jesus with words that are filled with faith and
hope
Remember
me when you come into your kingdom.
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This feast of Christ the King presents the Someone who was
responsible for taking away the emptiness in the good thief’s
and Colson’s lives
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a person prefigured by King David (first reading)
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a person who is the image of the invisible God (the beautiful
hymn in Colossians, the second reading)
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a person able to forgive others even as he is wrongly
convicted (Gospel)
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Jesus, Son of God, King
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this is the king that you and I have chosen as someone to
follow
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Our problem comes in how much we have chosen the Lord
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the fact is that there is some “criminal” in all of us
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not completely maybe, as was the case with Charles Colson and
the good thief, but we become so involved and engrossed in our
world that we forget about God
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and eventually some kind of emptiness begins to develop in our
lives
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what might be described as “something wrong,” the title of
the first chapter of Colson’s autobiography
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incidentally, it is the topic of the number 1 pop song in
America right now (2022) called “Anti-Hero” by Taylor
Swift
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singing about the “monster on the hill”, that is all the
bad stuff that makes up her life
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To overcome that feeling of emptiness, we need to pay
attention to the good thief in the Gospel and to Chuck Colson
as he reflected on what he had done
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and follow their path
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- admit the possibility of a wrong
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whether big or small, there is always something that needs
corrected in our lives
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the chances are that there is some evil there, usually having
something to do with how we act toward others
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- do some soul-searching
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take the time to look at ourselves in light of what we read in
the Gospels
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- call on the Lord to help
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the good thief said the words: “Remember me”
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Colson said, “Take me”
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– respond to the moment: do something
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the
good thief did the only thing he could: he gave himself to the
Lord
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Chuck Colson was eventually released from prison, but it was a
long process
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the judge that sentenced him gave him a longer time in prison
than any of the other Watergate criminals
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at first quite disappointed since he thought he would be
released, he looked upon it as an opportunity, and founded one
of the most important Christian ministries in the Christian
world—Prison
Fellowship,
a means for prisoners to convert to God
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in general, following the path of the good thief and Chuck
Colson means reaching out to the Lord with real worship in
here, and real worship out there by proclaiming him to be our
king with our behavior toward ourselves and others
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According to a recent survey, one quarter of all adults suffer
from chronic loneliness and depression,
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my guess is that most of us feel loneliness and emptiness at
one time or another
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much of it happening around Thanksgiving and Christmas
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we celebrate the answer to that emptiness right now: Jesus is
with us
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our prayer must be to accept him a little more into our
lives.
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