Today’s Gospel leaves me staring at one of the strangest sentences ever spoken:
“I came from the Father and have come into the world. Now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.”
The sentence sounds almost casual, as if Our Lord were merely announcing that He had stepped out for a walk and would soon return home for supper. Yet hidden inside those few words is the whole staggering drama of Christianity. God came into the world. God entered mud, taxes, politics, arguments, hunger, splinters, and Roman bureaucracy. God took the terrible risk of being surrounded by people like me.
And then He speaks of leaving the world, not because the world is evil in itself, but because the world was never meant to become His permanent lodging. The Incarnation was an invasion, not a relocation. Christ entered the world to redeem it, not to be absorbed by it.
It has been observed that the danger of the modern world is not that it is too worldly, but that it is too small. The modern man builds himself a little mechanical universe and then calls it infinity. Jesus enters the world without becoming imprisoned by it. That is the miracle I am trying to learn.
2. Meditatio
Rendering of Fermi America’s data center (Courtesy: Fermi America)
Today I find myself asking a question that feels both ancient and painfully modern: How do I come into the world each day from the Father and still remain capable of leaving the world and returning to the Father?
Yesterday someone sent me an article about Project Matador, a proposed $100 billion AI data-center and private power-grid campus rising out here in the Texas Panhandle near Panhandle and Pantex. The project promises limitless computational power, dedicated energy systems, and enough digital infrastructure to make the desert hum like a second Babel.
There is something almost biblical about the ambition of it all. Men once attempted to build a tower into Heaven with bricks; now we attempt it with processors and cooling towers.
And here lies the uncomfortable comedy of my own soul: I am writing this very Lectio Divina while using the same technology I question. I am employing artificial intelligence to meditate upon the spiritual dangers of artificial intelligence. That fact makes me feel like a hypocrite—or perhaps merely a modern man caught between wonder and warning.
The paradox reminds me of Chesterton’s line:
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason, but the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
That may be the great danger of our age. We can calculate almost everything and contemplate almost nothing. We can cool a server farm in the desert yet forget how to kneel in silence. We can summon oceans of information while dying of thirst for wisdom.
Yet I cannot simply condemn the machine while typing upon it. A hammer may build a home or crush a skull. The moral question is not merely whether the tool exists, but whether the soul wielding it remains properly ordered.
Can I come into the world each day from the Father, use the tools of the world honestly, and still leave the world at day’s end capable of returning to the Father?
I do not possess a tidy answer, but I do believe I possess a guaranteed path.
That path is the Mass.
For the Mass is the place where Heaven and earth continuously exchange gifts. At Mass I leave the world and return to the Father through Christ, and then, having encountered Him there, I am immediately sent back again into the world with the words,
“Go forth.”
The Mass is not an escape from reality but a rescue from unreality. It reminds me that the world is not ultimate, that technology is not salvation, and that efficiency is not holiness.
The Eucharist is wonderfully inefficient. It cannot be optimized. It cannot be scaled. It cannot be mined for metadata. It simply must be adored.
And perhaps that is why the technocratic world finds worship so irritating. Worship reminds us that the universe is not raw material. It is gift.
The Mass guarantees that no matter how entangled I become in the machinery of the modern world, there remains a doorway back to the Father—and a doorway back again into the world rightly ordered. It teaches me how to enter the world without belonging to it entirely, and how to leave it without despising it.
3. Oratio
Lord Jesus Christ, You came into the world without belonging to its vanities, and You left the world without abandoning it.
Teach me to live likewise.
Let me use the tools of this age without becoming their servant. Keep my soul from becoming mechanical while my hands remain busy with machines.
When I become fascinated with power, remind me of humility. When I become intoxicated with efficiency, remind me of love. When I mistake information for wisdom, lead me again to Your altar.
Grant that I may come from the Father each morning and return to the Father each night with my soul still capable of wonder.
The strange thing about Christianity is that it neither worships the world nor despises it. The pagan worshiped nature; the nihilist trashes nature. The Christian alone kisses the world goodbye properly.
Christ came into the world because the world mattered. Christ left the world because the world was not ultimate.
That paradox is the key to sanity.
The technocratic age tells me either to flee the world entirely or to merge myself with it completely—to become either a hermit or an algorithm. Christianity proposes something much harder: to live in the world sacramentally.
A saint uses the world the way a pilgrim uses an inn: gratefully, briefly, and without attempting to carry off the furniture.
And perhaps that is why modernity grows increasingly anxious. We have built gigantic systems capable of storing humanity’s thoughts, but we no longer know what humanity is for. We have achieved omnipresent communication while losing the ability to pray. We stand surrounded by glowing screens while starving for transfiguration.
The Christian answer is not to smash every machine like an angry peasant. Nor is it to kneel before technology like a golden calf. The Christian answer is to place every tool beneath the Cross.
For the Cross alone reveals the proper scale of man.
5. Actio — In Light of Laudato Si’ and Synodality
The destruction of the human environment is extremely serious, not only because God has entrusted the world to us men and women, but because human life is itself a gift which must be defended from various forms of debasement.
The family represents a fundamental cell for integral ecology: it is a school of life, in which people are gradually educated in “the covenant between humanity and the environment” (cf. LS 209). This education requires growth in human virtues because “only by cultivating sound virtues will people be able to make a selfless ecological commitment” (LS 211). Starting from our families and virtuous relationships, “we first learn how to show love and respect for life; we are taught the proper use of things, order and cleanliness, respect for the local ecosystem and care for all creatures. In the family we receive an integral education, which enables us to grow harmoniously in personal maturity” (LS 213).
Pope Francis warned in Laudato Si’ against the “technocratic paradigm” that reduces creation to an object for manipulation rather than a gift to be received. Synodality requires that we resist becoming isolated digital consumers and instead become people capable of discernment together.
Action:
So today my action is simple:
Before I use technology, I will ask whether it helps me love God and neighbor more deeply—or merely distracts me from both.
I will remember that stewardship means limits. I will remember that efficiency is not the same thing as holiness. And I will remember that no artificial intelligence can substitute for a rightly ordered soul kneeling before God.
A song that sounds almost naïve until one realizes that only a man who has suffered can sing sincerely about wonder. Armstrong reminds me that the world is not saved by endless analysis but by grateful vision. The trees are still green. The skies are still blue. Grace still slips quietly into ordinary things.
A film about trying to navigate the absurdity, danger, comedy, and heartbreak of modern existence without entirely losing one’s humanity. Like Garp, I often feel bewildered by the world; unlike Garp, the Gospel insists the bewilderment is not the end of the story.
