Progressing…to What?

I’ve often been accused of living in, or wanting to live in, the past, as if such thoughts were some kind of weird psychological aberration. After all, who would want to live in the past when the present is so very cool? And the future? Well, maybe we shouldn’t talk about that. Too many today expect to be overwhelmed by man-made climatic disasters. In truth, we face far worse man-made calamities resulting from our sinfulness. But that’s the subject of another time.

Anyway, I suppose this basic diagnosis of my mental state has some validity. The symptoms are there. For example, if you glance through my personal library, you’ll likely notice that many of my books were written before I was born. As of this week, I’m now 79 years old, so that cut-off date was a while ago. Then there’s my rather eclectic tastes in music. I listen to everything classical from Bach and Vivaldi and their Baroque buddies to Vaughan Williams and everything in between. And jazz? I’m locked into those remarkable early artists like the MJQ, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Byrd, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, and so many others. I’m also a fan of the big band music of the 30s and 40s, the doo-wop era of early rock ‘n’ roll, and even the folk music — Bud and Travis style — of the same period. I’m known as well for waxing eloquently about life back in the fifties and early sixties, when I came of age. 

All of this leads others to accuse me of being some sort of Luddite. Doesn’t technological progress translate to a better life? Is life with cable, satellite, and streaming TV, with the Internet, smart phones, email, Amazon, electric vehicles, and all the rest better than life without them? I think not. And this conclusion comes from someone with a couple of degrees in technological fields, who taught computer science at the U.S. Naval Academy, and piloted hi-tech military aircraft. Am I conflicted? Not at all. It all depends on how you define goodness. Is technology in itself a good or an evil, or is it neutral, inherently amoral? Does its goodness depend on application? Do the technologists even care about how their creatures are used? How did Robert Oppenheimer put it when reflecting on the development of nuclear weapons? 

“It was therefore possible to argue also that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.” 

Yes, indeed, from the researcher’s perspective, the technological challenge is so “sweet” it must be pursued, even if it might blow up the world.

I won’t even try to predict how long it will take, but the next “sweet” challenge, one that’s progressing with remarkable speed, is artificial intelligence. Where it will lead nobody knows, but many of its developers believe we’ve already passed the point of no-return. Now, I’m not all that knowledgeable about the state of AI today, although I did play around with it 50 years ago. When I was teaching computer science at Annapolis I used to drop in on the ArpaNet (a Department of Defense network that evolved into the Internet). I was intrigued by a program called Parry, developed by someone, as I recall, at Stanford Research Institute. Parry simulated someone suffering from paranoia and responded appropriately to questions asked by the online user. I played with it on and off and as a lark decided to write a poem-generating program. When the first version went public on the Academy’s network, it became our most popular program. The midshipmen would run it, generate a poem, and send it to their girlfriends. My first attempt was rather primitive free verse, but the second used an iambic pentameter rhyming scheme and was even more popular. One English professor actually examined some of its images in class. I assumed it was all tongue in cheek because the words were generated randomly, and any resulting “images” were strictly accidental. I was amazed by it all, but quickly realized there would be a real future programming human activity and thought. In those days I was pretty good at predicting technological advances, at least in a macro way. I recall once, back in 1974, shocking the midshipmen in my advanced programming class by predicting they would one day have computers the size of a cigar box, computers more powerful than the Academy’s mainframe computer. They didn’t believe me. 

Today AI has progressed far beyond my stupid little poems, and some of its developers strive for a consciousness that replicates and surpasses that of the human mind. The debate, of course, will ultimately turn to consciousness with or without a conscience. Personally, I don’t believe true human-like consciousness will be achieved before God steps in an ends it all. This view contradicts those espoused by folks like Ray Kurzweil — agnostic, futurist, and computer scientist — who believes we humans will soon live forever. He also looks forward to a transhuman future when nonbiological intelligence will prevail and surpass human intelligence. He believes this Singularity, as he calls it, will arrive soon because technological change is…

“so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.” 

My-oh-my, let’s pray that God spares us from such a future. But what really bothers me today is the true source of AI and what it portends. I have a hunch it didn’t drop down from heaven.

Maybe in my next post I’ll turn to the past in search of intelligence far greater than anything encountered today.

Reflection: Divine Mercy Novena - Day 6

Once, when I saw Jesus in the form of a small child, I asked, 'Jesus, why do you now take on the form of a child when You commune with me? In spite of this, I still see in You the infinite God, my Lord and Creator.' Jesus replied that until I learned simplicity and humility, He would commune with me as a little child" (St. Faustine's Diary, 335).

Many years ago, Fr. Adam Domanski, a Polish priest and friend, gave me a copy of St. Faustina’s Diary. I’ll confess, I didn’t read it right away, but when I finally got around to opening the book, I could hardly put it down.

And when I read those words you just heard, I thought immediately of St. Therese, the Little Flower. For she, like St. Faustina, came to understand the necessity of approaching our God with the humility and innocence of a small child. Indeed, as St. Therese wrote:

 “…I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection…then… I read these words coming from the mouth of Eternal Wisdom: ‘Whoever is a little one, let him come to me.’ And so I succeeded. I felt I had found what I was looking for… for this I had no need to grow up, but rather I had to remain little and become this more and more.”

Such an attitude, of course, goes against everything the world tells us. Can anything be more countercultural? To try to remain childlike…but not childish. For as our Lord taught St. Faustina, to be childlike is to embrace simplicity and humility.

So often you and I try to complicate our relationship with God when all He wants from us is our love. To love God is to embrace the simple truth of the Gospel. It’s not complicated. You don’t have to be a theologian; in fact, that’s probably an obstacle.

Realize, too, that humility is simply the byproduct of reality. As St. Faustina reminds us, our God is “the infinite God, my Lord and Creator.” Knowing this, accepting it, believing it can do nothing but drive us to humility.

These two holy women, then, have taught us so much about becoming a spiritual child. We must learn and accept our total dependence on our God, so we can lead a life of trust and abandonment. We need to let God carry us to holiness. As Saint Therese confessed:

"What pleases Him is seeing me loving my littleness and poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy."

Childlike trust is possible only by God's merciful love towards all sinners. His mercy is bigger than any sins we may have committed. Let us always try to approach God with love, and with confidence in His mercy. To live in simplicity and humility is to rid ourselves of all that draws us away from God. When we've sinned, we must throw ourselves, like a child, into the arms of God's mercy. That's the beauty of the sacrament of reconciliation. God always waits for us with open arms.

Anxiety comes from worry, worry about that over which we have little or no control. Don’t worry about the past or the future. Live in the present moment as a child does. Interestingly, the older I get, the more I come to accept this. Children and saints seem to find lots of joy by living in the here and now. Let's join them, forgetting the sins of the past, and trusting that God will take care of our future.

Homily: Thursday, 21st Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Cor 1:1-9 • Ps 145 • Mt 24:42-51

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Today we celebrate the memorials of two saints. The first is St. Louis -- or Louis IX, King of France -- one of the many great saints of the 13th century. He was also one of the few truly saintly kings, a man who cared much for his people's material and spiritual welfare. He also took an active part in the Crusades to reclaim Jerusalem and Our Lord's Tomb, a crusade that took his life.

The other saint we remember today is St. Joseph Calasanz, a saint of the 16th and 17th century who devoted his life to the education of the poor. 

We are truly blessed to to celebrate these saints today...now my homily.

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“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” [1 Cor 1:3].

Don’t you just love that greeting? Right there in the beginning of our reading from St. Paul. He extended it to the community of Christians, gathered together in that southern Greek city of Corinth. And what a wonderful greeting it was…really a blessing. Until now, I’ve never extended that greeting to anyone, but I think I might start using it, especially with those in spiritual need, which I guess includes all of us.

Yes…grace and peace, living signs of God’s love for us – that God wants to touch us with His grace so we can experience His peace. It’s really the only antidote, the only cure, to the anxieties and fears that plague us in this life.

How often are we truly at peace? We probably spend too much of our time regretting the things of the past or worrying about the unknowns of the future. Paul, like Jesus, is trying to get us to look at and act in the present.

“Stay awake!” Jesus commands us…certainly not yesterday, and not even tomorrow, but now! He always seems to draw our attention to the present. The past? It’s gone. We can’t change it. Oh, we can try to rewrite it, but that doesn’t change the reality. God is the only perfect historian, the only one who really knows all that has happened and why.

When Jesus addressed the past, it was usually in the sense of fulfillment, of something that had to happen to bring forth the present. As He read from the prophet Isaiah, what did He tell the people in the synagogue at Nazareth?

“Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing” [Lk 4:21].

Yes, it is the present, the fulfillment of the past, to which Jesus turns our attention.

He also warned us about our obsession with the future; for the future, too, is out of our hands. God is not only the perfect historian, but He’s also the only true futurist. We Christians often forget this. Like the disciples Jesus addressed, we make lots of plans, thinking we know what’s going to happen. How did Our Lord put it?

“You do not know on which day your Lord will come” [Mt 24:42].

He then tells them to “be prepared.” If you think about it, being prepared means doing what is necessary in the present. Being prepared isn’t planning; it’s doing.

Back in my consulting days, I often had to remind company executives that developing plans was certainly a necessary aspect of their work. But to bear fruit, their plans for the future must be translated into work carried out in an ongoing, continuous present. And it was work carried out not by them, but by their employees. If they ignore their employees, or belittle their work, they might as well ignore their customers too. The quality of the work accomplished in the present always determines the level of future success.

But as we prepare, Jesus tells us how to view the short-term future:

“Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself” [Mt 6:34].

Yes, it’s the present, the next step we take, that’s important. As hope-filled Christians, then, we must think of the present as a kind of emergency. In an emergency we don’t ponder the past or think about the future; we act!

But our Christian faith isn’t a business. We don’t need a business plan to achieve salvation. Salvation’s a gift. All we need is faith lived well, and the Presence of God in the Church and its sacramental life. We don’t need a marketing plan to evangelize. We need only trust in the Holy Spirit Who, as Our Lord promised, “will teach you at that moment what you should say” [Lk 12:12]. We need not advertise. We need only bear witness and manifest the fruit of God’s unconditional love as He moves in our lives, changing us, forming us, making us His own.

“Stay awake!” Jesus commands us.

But when you go to sleep, as you must, thank God for the present, the present of the next day that will greet you when you awaken.

COVID-19 Bible Study Reflection #13: This Is the Day

“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad” [Ps 118:24].

We all know these words, don’t we? And I’m pretty sure most of you have sung them, since they form the lyrics of that peppy little hymn written back in the 70s, “This Is the Day.”

What some folks don’t know is that those words come right out of Sacred Scripture, from Psalm 118. And because the psalms were written to be sung, and were indeed sung by Jews, including Jesus and His disciples [Mt 26:30], it’s fitting that we too should sing these same inspired words.

The psalms form a major element of the prayer life of the Jewish people, for they tell the story of God, His People, and their prayerful relationship. Although the Book of Psalms forms an integral part of the Old Testament, we encounter many references to psalms throughout the New Testament. In fact, included among the “Last Words” of Jesus, spoken from the Cross, are several direct quotes from or references to the specific psalms. [See Ps 22:2,16-19; 31:6; 69:22]

The Church considers the psalms an extremely important part of its liturgical prayer, so important they’re included in the Liturgy of the Word throughout the liturgical year. And if you pray the Church’s daily prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours, you’ll find yourself immersed in the psalms.

As you might recall, we addressed the psalms in one of our earlier reflections (Reflection #8), in which you were encouraged to include them in your daily prayer and Scripture reading. One of the wonderful things about beginning to read and pray the psalms is that you encounter so many familiar expressions and phrases and find yourself saying, “Oh, that’s where that came from…”

I’ve always believed the psalms offer us a unique view of the ever-changing relationship between God and His People, between God and you and me. That relationship changes constantly not because of God, but because of us. The psalms are filled with questions, our questions, the kind of questions you and I ask of God every day:

Why did this bad thing happen?

Has God abandoned us?

How does He want me to live?

Will God protect me and those I love from evil?

How should I relate to others, especially to those who despise me?

Will God forgive me?

These and so many other very human questions are all found in the psalms, along with many of God’s answers.

The psalms can sometimes outrage and offend us because of the attitudes expressed by the human writers, attitudes we don’t expect to encounter in prayer. And yet, are these attitudes really so different from those you and I sometimes harbor secretly in our hearts? The difference between the psalmist and us is his willingness to express them openly in his prayer, to lift them up to God as if to say:

“Lord, this is how I feel in the depth of my heart. If I am wrong, correct me. Help me to deal with all that afflicts me. Teach me Your ways.”

I really believe it’s this deep humanity found in the psalms that makes them so readable, so captivating, and brings us back to them again and again. They overflow with human emotion, every emotion you can imagine: anger, empathy, fear, despair, faith, uncertainty, joy, sadness, hope, loss, gain, revenge, forgiveness, happiness, hatred, love…it’s all there in the psalms. The transparency with which these raw emotions are displayed for all to see can shock us, for so many of us are accustomed to hiding our passions beneath a protective veneer. In the psalms it’s all out in the open, up close and personal.

We should, then, savor the psalms as we encounter them in the liturgy; but too often we just breeze through them, don’t we? We join the cantor and sing the response; then go on to the next reading. And yet, throughout the Liturgy of the Word, only in the Responsorial Psalm is the congregation actively, vocally involved. How often do we really listen to the words we pray, the words we sing? These words are the Word of God and offer countless insights into God’s love for us and the response He seeks from us They must, then, be important.

Let’s return to the beginning of today’s reflection, to those words from Psalm 118:

“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.”

Here the psalmist sings of the present -- not the past, not the future. “This is the day,” he prays; and because the Lord has made this day, and because all that the Lord creates is good, this day must also be good. This, then, is reason to rejoice, “to be glad.” The present is a gift, not a time for worry or for fear.

Jesus tells us the same thing, doesn’t He? Recall His Word from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear…Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself” [Mt 6:25,34].

Talk about counterintuitive and counter-cultural words! We all worry about tomorrow, don’t we? In fact, we have built multi-billion-dollar industries focused on just that. Consider, for example, the insurance industry, completely dedicated to lessening our worries about what might happen tomorrow. In today’s increasingly complex, materialistic, and unpredictable world, we insure almost everything — car, home, life, health, businesses, even pets — out of fear that these might be taken from us, leaving us with nothing but our immortal souls.

And here’s Jesus telling us those souls are far more important than everything else [Mt 16:26]. Don’t worry about tomorrow, He commands; focus instead on today. Does this mean we should cancel all our insurance policies? No, I think we can continue to pay the premiums. Indeed, in a sense I suppose a few insurance policies can help us respond more positively to Jesus’ command not to worry. I’m certainly not going to question an industry that tries to free us from some earthly worries. I’ll let the moral theologians tackle that one.

The future – our earthly future -- will always remain a mystery. In truth, we can only guess what will happen. And the past? Well, it’s already happened. It’s gone and irretrievable. Although we shouldn’t dwell on the past, we can learn from it and avoid mistakes already made – a good reason to make a daily examination of conscience, a good reason for the sacrament of Reconciliation.

I suppose we’re stuck with the present, aren’t we? It’s really the only part of time – the time of our lives -- over which we have some control. The present is where we are. The decisions and choices of the present can help us overcome the faults and confusion of the past and lead us to the future God desires for us. “This is the day…” He challenges us, “Rejoice!”

In our hearts we know this is true. We should rejoice. We should be glad about it. And do you know why? Of course, you do. Because we are loved. We are loved by our God who created each of us, who gave each of us the gift of life in a unique act of love. He wants us to rejoice in that gift, even in the midst of life’s challenges, even as we face the uncertainties of the future. So often, though, our response is littered with many of those emotions found in the psalms. And it’s here that we encounter the vast disparity between God and us. God only loves!  He can do nothing else because of Who He is. As St. John reminds us, “God is love” [1 Jn 4:8,16]. He despises none of His children, even those who have fallen prey to the worst of evils. He extends His forgiveness and His mercy to all. We need only repent and accept His gift of grace.

What does all this mean? How do we deal with it? How do we live this life that God’s given us?

First, let’s get back to the basics. We were created in God’s image and likeness. And because “God is love,” we were created to love, to be imitators of God, to be as generous and as giving of ourselves as God is. We were created to do good and reject evil.

We encounter this plea to be imitators of our God throughout Sacred Scripture. In the Torah, we hear this command, this call to holiness:

"Sanctify yourselves and be holy; for I, the Lord, your God, am holy" [Lv 20:7].

It’s a call repeated throughout the New testament. For example, Jesus instructs us:

"So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect" [Mt 5:48].

Jesus also teaches us to live the Beatitudes: to be humble, merciful, meek, compassionate, and righteous [Mt 5:3-12]. He commands us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, comfort the sick, visit the imprisoned – to see Him in all who are in need [Mt 25:31-46]. But that’s not all. Jesus also tells us:

"If you love me, you will keep my commandments" [Jn 14:15].

In His Sermon on the Mount He reveals the depth of meaning, the spirit of the Ten Commandments, and later goes on to instruct us that "The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments":

"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" [Mt 22:37-40].

Now that’s a lot of stuff we’re asked to do. But it's not impossible. For with God, and fueled by His grace, all things are possible. And that’s the key: we need God’s help.

Remember, too, we are called to do all this because of God’s promise to us, that we are His children, adopted sons and daughters who will share in Christ’s glory. St. Paul describes it well

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, "Abba, Father!" The Sprit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him [Rom 8:14-17].

Note that suffering, too, will accompany us on our journey. But we do not suffer alone. It is a suffering with Jesus -- "To take up our cross daily and follow Him" [Lk 923] -- in which He shared our burdens and out suffering [Mt 11:30].

The fulfillment of God’s promise, though, is beyond our imagining:

"What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, I have prepared for those who love me" [1 Cor 2:9].

Living a grace-filled life, then, is not impossible. Through prayer and the soul restoring grace of the sacraments, God provides us all we need to live holy lives. When our journey on this earth is over, when we stand before the Just Judge, we all hope to hear the words of the Lord saying:

"Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" [Mt 25:34]

Let us, then, learn from the past, not worry about or fear the future, and live this day in faith, filled with God’s grace. Let us rejoice and be glad!