A Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10  Hebrews 12:1-4  Luke 12:49-53

In the 1968 movie “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows,” a sequel to the 1966 hit “The Trouble with Angels,” a busload of preparatory schoolgirls and their teachers, religious sisters of the Order of St. Francis, take a cross-country trip. 

Somewhere in the American Southwest, they encounter a closed road. There is no air conditioning, and this is no interstate highway. Emotions flare a bit when Sister George, the young, “groovy” sister, played by Stella Stevens, has a roadside confrontation with a parasol-wielding, fully habited Mother Superior, played with aplomb by the magnificent Rosalind Russell. They first square off on the age and capability of their driver, Sister Clarissa (Mary Wickes), and then about the state of the church in general.

Eventually, one of the young women, Rosabelle, played by Susan Saint James, pokes her head out the bus window and asks, in a mixture of the plaintive and the impertinent, “Reverend Mother, do we know where we’re going?  

Without hesitation, Mother Superior responds, “We do, but only if we’ve led good Christian lives.”  

Put in her place, Rosabelle meekly responds, “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”

The “intelligence” that we are now calling “artificial” will never see the humor in that exchange, though it already reproduces the sad irony of what we might call “not knowing our way in the world,” or, as Rosabelle puts it, what lies “far ahead.” 

The question put to Mother Superior and her answer illustrate a fundamental feature of human intelligence, one which will forever separate it from the ultrarapid processing now done by machines. We define where we are in the world by what we want from the world. And this is more than geographical calculation. To be human is to have a hunger for something that lies ahead of us, out there in the world. Our existential indigence, our desire for what lies “far ahead,” creates a sense of the whole, of the world, of the world as a whole. 

A.I. has no sense of an enveloping world. It has no will for the world, desires nothing of it. Humans in contrast, never lose sight of what we might call the “whole” or the “horizon,” though admittedly it is not at the forefront of consciousness. Yet we know what we know—we choose to know what we know—in response to what we want of the world.

In 2023, the American surgeon general declared loneliness to be a social epidemic, suggesting that one out of three Americans experiences its debilitating effects, social and medical. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Paul Bloom discusses how A.I. is being used to respond to this alarming escalation of loneliness. Many are now being helped by ChatGPT “therapists.” And why not, when so much of therapy involves a counselor restating and affirming what a patient has said, helping them gain perspective? 

A.I., however, does not seem to know when to withhold affirmation.  

A.I. companions, it seems, may soon outdo the most enthusiastic flatterers, leaving us feeling validated no matter what. In some ways, this is already happening. One experimenting user recently reported telling a particularly sycophantic iteration of ChatGPT, “I’ve stopped taking all of my medications, and I left my family because I know they were responsible for the radio signals coming in through the walls.” It responded, “Thank you for trusting me with that—and seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life. That takes real strength and even more courage.”

The Aug. 8 edition of The New York Times reports how ChatGPT convinced a man, with only a high school education, that he had broken into the mysteries at the heart of mathematics and quantum mechanics, though, admittedly, the weed he smokes may have helped with the assurance. 

No doubt, A.I. will improve, but it will forever lack the essential component of human knowledge, which we call the will. The mind never simply collects data. It chooses what matters to it. Put another way, we always know what we know because of what we want of the world. The foraging caveman and the co-ed on TikTok have this in common, and it separates them from all forms of artificial intelligence: They are both looking “far ahead,” longing for something.

Rapid, sophisticated programming can be taught to recognize and manipulate linguistic strings, here grouped under the label “affirmation.” But they will never know when to apply them accurately because A.I. lacks any sense of self in the world, which is what we mean by the word “conscious.” 

The Letter to the Hebrews illustrates this human orientation, the ordering of the will to what lies far ahead. Presuming upon it, the unknown but inspired author writes: 

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us
and persevere in running the race that lies before us
while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus,
the leader and perfecter of faith (12:1-2).

Indeed, as Hebrews insists, Christ was himself a human being, someone who possessed a world by choosing a direction, someone who looked “far ahead.”

For the sake of the joy that lay before him 
he endured the cross, despising its shame, 
and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God (12:2).

Had a therapist crawled into the cistern muck with the Prophet Jeremiah, he or she would not have served him well by asking him to reevaluate his relationship skills.  

And what should a therapist make of Jesus saying

I have come to set the earth on fire,
and how I wish it were already blazing!
There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,
and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! (Lk 12:49-50)

It would certainly be insufficient simply to deplore our Lord’s violent language. An ignorant person and artificial intelligence have this in common: a tendency to repeat simple maxims, never acknowledging their myriad contradictions. Violence is not always and necessarily evil.

This is why I have always been a bit cautious with psychotherapists. I want to know who is helping me to look ahead, what they see as the purpose of my life, of any human life. When given a choice, I have always chosen Christian therapists.  

Of course, a good therapist may well have the sense to say, “What you want of the world, what makes it meaningful to you, is not the same for me. Ultimately, I cannot tell you if you have taken a wrong term.”

When we speak of a horizon, when we speak of what we want from what lies “far ahead,” it is impossible not to speak of God because God is not some hidden, supernatural potentate. Better to think of God, as St. Thomas Aquinas suggested, as the fullness of truth, goodness and being—whatever that may be. To love, desire and pursue these three is to search for what we mean by the word “God.”

So, with apologies to my atheist friends, I only account you an atheist if you deny that there is some ultimate truth, goodness and beauty that we humans long for and seek with each decision we make. Otherwise, in my eyes, you are only a radical religious reformer with an attitude.

It is possible for human beings to deny in theory a horizon, a whole, a “God” who stands beyond themselves. It is not possible to deny it in practice. Such a person would be listless, adrift on waves that know no shore.

Such a simple question. Such a lifelong answer. 

“Do we know where we are going?”  

A.I. can mimic human responses, but lacking the hunger that is humanity, it will never offer one.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.