Sometimes people ask me where I get ideas for these blog posts. Usually they occur on my daily bike rides. Saturday morning, for example, I approached a four-way stop at which an opposing car was signaling a right turn, the car facing him had no signal on, and two of us were on bikes. Everybody froze, and nobody knew what to do, or how to communicate with each other. It reminded me of a self-driving Jaguar “Waymo” vehicle that froze the other day. No one could get it to move. Its algorithm switched on the car’s flashers and the vehicle just stood there like a paralyzed elephant in the middle of the street. Cars began to line up behind it, drivers looking passively at the situation or blandly at their screens, and nobody moving.
 
Decision-making, which requires logic and personal communication, seems to be distinctively challenging these days. People don’t seem able to “choose their lane.” In a recent homily to our young adults I was urging the men, in particular, to either enter a seminary or get married. There are boatloads of women in the parish who are just waiting for a man to commit to “a lane,” but the men seem stymied by indecision. After Mass the young adults were all talking about the “choose your lane” sermon.
 
How do we learn how to make decisions? Here are three recommendations: First, listen carefully, and that means mostly in the silence of prayer. “In the silence of the heart God speaks,” quoth Mother Teresa, and He usually offers decisive recommendations for those who listen carefully. Second, learn the rules of logic. Gaining the capacity to distinguish what is rational and true from what is false and irrational allows one to “choose a lane” with confidence. And third, practice making decisions. Try not to be afraid of making a wrong decision, which can usually be corrected later. At this juncture, it’s more important to make a decision than to make the right decision. Practice makes perfect, as they say.
 
Older people, like me, grew up with much less disposable income and fewer “options.” It was easier for us to make decisions, and in any case we had to make decisions or perish. Last night I parked my motor scooter on a sidewalk as an old man walked by. He called out as I pulled my helmet off: “How many miles to the gallon?” He saw that I was a priest, and we entered into a lively conversation about everything. He is 90 years old, attended my parish school in the 1940s, and walks the steep sidewalks of his neighborhood every day to keep his balance. What a lovely conversation we had! He decided to talk to a stranger, and he knew how to do it. I suppose he’s been decisively engaging life since his boyhood, and it never gets old. I encourage all of us to cultivate decisiveness! 

Our beloved national holiday of Thanksgiving recalls Plymouth Colony in 1621. The 53 surviving pilgrims of the Mayflower expedition had put themselves outside of the King’s protection and faced the wilderness alone. They had turned to the King of Kings for protection, but more than half of them died that first winter. God’s ways are mysteries.
 
The Mayflower Puritans had their issues, one of which (obtuseness) would lead to a series of “witch trials” in a town they founded six years after Plymouth called “Salem.” The Puritans loathed the Church that their Lord had established, which was in great need of reform then (as it is today, and ever will be). For all their issues, the Mayflower Puritans were pilgrims, seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty. When they landed at Plymouth Rock in November of 1620, they were the seventh attempted English colony in the New World, and the second attempt at Plymouth itself. All the rest had perished, and half of the Mayflower travelers would die that first year. But the King of Kings provided Squanto, a Native American brave who had been sold as a slave by the Spanish, escaped to England with the help of some Dominican friars, and converted to Catholicism. He served as translator and advocate for the Plymouth colonists to the native tribes around them. Through Squanto’s good will, the Wampanoag tribe helped the Puritans survive that first winter, and together they gave thanks to the Great King and the Great Spirit.
 
Despite our Puritan obstinacy, our anti-authoritarian, “question authority” mindset, even Americans yearn to live under the rule of a good king. Some of you watched the deeply-moving coronation of King Charles III last May. The Archbishop of Canterbury lifts the crown toward God and prays: “King of Kings and Lord of Lords, bless, we beseech thee, this crown, and so sanctify thy servant Charles, upon whose head this day thou dost place it….” The Archbishop then gently places the bejeweled crown upon the frail old man’s head to shouts of “God save the King!” It is clear throughout this ceremony, one of the last and most impressive vestiges of Christendom, who the King is. Christ is the King, and Charles is his viceroy. God is the Sovereign, and Charles is his emissary. Today we thank God, as pilgrims, in our great national holiday.
 
Today our nation thanks God, and on Sunday our Church acclaims Christ the King in the great Mass entitled in Festo Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis. All human authority is subject to this King. In 1976 a smiling peanut farmer from Georgia was running for President of the United States, and I was a freshman in high school. My imagination was fired by his words and I believed in this man! I appointed myself Jimmy Carter’s campaign manager for Big Spring High School and posted his gladsome image in every hallway. He won, and he wasn’t that bad as modern presidents go (it’s awfully hard to be a U.S. President these days), but he didn’t live up to my exalted expectations. Two years into his presidency I won an essay contest and joined high school students from around the country in Washington, where the President of the United States spoke to us in the Rose Garden. Seeing this exalted man in the flesh, I was surprised to find him so frail, and so unsure of himself. I remember him nervously licking his lips every few seconds, and this was only in front of a group of pimply high schoolers! I realized that the President of the United States is only a man of flesh. I realized that he must appeal to a Higher Authority as much as, and even more than, the rest of us. Today, we frail men and women give thanks to that Higher Power, rejoicing to be subjects of the Great King who can do no wrong. ¡Viva Cristo Rey!
​

​This morning, after Mass for the Adoration Sisters at their Haight-Asbury convent, I had $30 cash in my pocket and a sore feeling in my sinuses. So on the way home I stopped at the Whole Foods in the heart of San Francisco’s hippie district.
 
I picked up a bright bag of organic lemons and went to the checkout. “Good morning!” I greeted the lonely checkout girl. She didn’t look up but mumbled “hello.” Some employees at woke stores are angry, but most are just sad. This 20-something, overweight, slumped and vacant-eyed person was just sad. “Would you like a bag?” she whimpered. I tried to infuse some energy into our conversation: “No, but thank you!” She didn’t respond, but just waited for my payment. “How much is it?” I asked brightly. She dumbly gestured to the credit-card reader, which I had to swivel around to see (I surmise most customers at Whole Foods don’t need to know how much things cost).
 
I handed her a twenty and she asked plaintively if I wanted a receipt. I thanked her, but what I didn’t say was “God bless you.” And I’m so sorry I didn’t. What this sad daughter of God needed was not my money but my blessing, a kind word, someone’s witness that there is a God and He loves us all.
 
It’s easy to dismiss or, worse, to despise the “losers” in our culture’s race to happiness. San Francisco abounds with Amazon trucks, usually driven by young people of color being paid the minimum wage. Amazon’s vehicles make this promise, painted on the sides of their trucks: “Caution: contents may cause happiness.” That’s funny, because the drivers don’t look happy. Maybe they can’t afford Amazon products on their Amazon salary. It’s so easy for these “losers” to remain invisible, a brief irritation to us who like to imagine that we are overcoming inequality.
 
Yesterday I walked around the city block of our cathedral church praying the rosary with about 25 people. We walked past the Chinese embassy on the way, a massive fortress-like structure bristling with cameras and armed guards. Yesterday a dozen luxury limos were lined up outside. As we ambled by saying our prayers, several of the limo drivers smiled at us—most were Latinos and some were Asians, but I would guess that all were wage slaves of a capitalist system that pretends to be socialist. I glanced into their faces and felt, rather than the usual antagonism for “the enemy,” a burning love for them. It was a surprising grace of God for an old culture warrior like myself. Certainly the limo drivers are not “the enemy,” and even the rich and powerful Chinese government officials they drive around are not “the enemy.” No one is essentially an “enemy” if God gives us the grace to love every person made in His image.
 
Back to Whole Foods this morning: the sad checkout girl gave me my change, which was supposed to be 52 cents. But she gave me a dollar coin instead of a quarter, and Whole Foods lost 75 cents because their checkout girls are depressed. It made me think how quickly our economy—both in its narrow financial aspect but also in its broad human dimensions—falters when people are dehumanized. What has this poor checkout girl already suffered to make her so sad? Did her father abandon her, or her boyfriends treat her like a piece of meat, or her educators teach her that her country is evil and that there is no God? Did every social media post tell her that overweight women are trash, and that she was a loser?
 
She is not a loser. There is a God, and we can see His beauty in every human face, if we apply ourselves. As I get older, and learn better to be a father, I find it more natural to see this goodness in other people. Lots of prayer helps!

My dear father, God rest his soul, described himself as a Marxist. The only big argument we ever got into was over the legitimacy of Soviet Moscow over its satellite countries. My father had a four-foot red image of Mao Zedong hanging over his college office desk. As he rounded 85 years, however, Dad said at a family gathering that “the older I get the harder it is to deny reality.” That reminded me of an old Marxist college professor who taught us a course on communism: “If you are not a socialist when you are young, you have no heart. If you are a socialist when you are old, you have no head.” Christians are naturally attracted to ideologies that promise justice and the universal brotherhood of man, but in the end, Marxism and Christianity don’t mix. 
 
Many of my parishioners have asked me what is happening in Rome with the “Synod for Synodality.” CNN, Reuters, and Fox all report that the Catholic Church is changing its 2000-year-old teachings on human sexuality, among other things. Well, what’s happening at the Synod, as best as I can see it, is "Marxism." A few people are consolidating power to themselves, in the name of "listening to the people." But the Church is not about power. It's about love—loving trust in God's Word—and that's why applying the Marxist dynamic of power to Church governance is not a good idea.

How does ideological Marxism work in practice? We have plenty of examples over the last 100 years: Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, and Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Each of these men consolidated power to themselves by claiming to give power to the people. The Soviet politburo renamed Russia, and its conquered lands, as “Republics” (the word literally means “a thing of the people”). Mao renamed China the “People’s Republic” (which is redundant!). Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez insisted that they were giving power to the proletariat by forcing their countries into dictatorships. But, as the historical record demonstrates, the people didn’t get the power. The state got the power, and the people got the poverty.
 
What’s happening at the Synod for Synodality, as best I can make it out, is that a relatively few people are consolidating power by claiming to listen to the people. A years-long “listening process,” however, has received responses from less than 1% of the world’s Catholics, and most Catholics I know either don’t care what the Vatican is doing or disagree with its pronouncements. Perhaps most of the Church’s middle management genuinely believes the Synod is following the Holy Spirit, but we would be naïve not to see the well-worn Marxist dynamic at work here.
 
At the end of the novel 1984, written by George Orwell in 1948 as he saw where the Soviet Union was headed, Winston Smith is told by his higher-ups that his precious “Ministry of Truth” is not about truth at all. It’s simply about power, the power of the State. By then, of course, it’s too late for Winston Smith. Is it too late for the Catholic Church?
 
I don’t think so, not least because the Lord promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. But even on a sociological level, older and wiser heads will prevail in the end. As my father and my communism teacher said, reality has a way of coming to the surface every time. The reality is that Jesus Christ is Lord, and He will provide for His bride, the Church.

​Last Wednesday their 9pm flight to Sydney was canceled. 200 nervous passengers were told to get off the plane in San Francisco as it was revving up for the 15-hour flight to Australia. Two Carmelites, in full flowing habits, deplaned with the rest of them and stood in lines until 7am the next morning. In this sea of airport misery, unaccountably, two Carmelites maintained a peaceful joy. A man ahead of them in line, no doubt agonizing over missed connections and meetings, asked Sister Thérèse why she was smiling. “Because I’m happy,” she replied. The man was amazed, and simply said “marvelous….” He was a little less hungry, angry, lonely, and tired because of their presence. Sister Thérèse really was happy, because she was on her way to their daughter house, serenely under holy obedience, with Sister Maria Immaculata. What could go wrong?
 
The sisters asked if I would offer Mass for them on Friday in the older usage, which was their custom. Offering Mass for holy women is one of the most striking graces of the priesthood. A priest knows that he is then at Calvary with Our Lady and the two holy women. Contemplative women, especially, understand what is happening in the Mass, and they communicate that intense longing back to the priest.
 
After Mass I asked the sisters to step into the schoolyard for a moment with the children. Upon entering the schoolyard, a group of students ran up to them, but I was amazed at one little girl in particular. She buried her face in Sr. Mary Immaculata’s habit, throwing her little arms around her. She took up Sister’s crucifix and studied it, locking her eyes on it for five minutes without saying anything. Some other girls, too, hugged the sisters, but this little girl, in particular, simply would not let Sister Maria’s habit go or take her eyes off her crucifix. I doubt that this child had ever seen a Carmelite habit or even a nun before, but she knew immediately and instinctively who Sister Maria was.
 
It took fifteen minutes to gently pry this little girl, and some other girls, away from the Carmelites. We were all amazed at this manifestation of a contemplative vocation at such a young age. Truly God will not cease calling hearts to His Heart. Knowing this, Sr. Thérèse and Sister Mary Immaculata keep on smiling, even while in an 8-hour line, in the middle of the night, at San Francisco airport.

Dear Pope Francis,
 
I am writing to you in the spirit of parrhesia, a biblical word you have used several times to encourage us to speak freely, boldly, and without fear of disagreement. In your opening speech to the Synod delegates on Wednesday, you said that “everyone needs to express themselves freely.” Please receive the following words freely, not from Rome, but from the peripheries, from a simple parish priest.
 
My Papa Francesco, I must tell you that you are making my job as a parish priest difficult. I work in one of the declining parishes of San Francisco, California, a city that prides itself in having evolved beyond faith in God. In my city, the faith is openly mocked and attacked, and my parishioners are struggling to believe in Jesus. Most of their family members, friends, and co-workers have abandoned the Christian faith. My parishioners cannot wear a cross or speak the name of Jesus at work for fear of losing their jobs. Our schools teach their children from kindergarten to doubt the natural goodness of their bodies, and to despise marriage and family life. My parishioners are clinging to the simple truths of our faith, especially the Church’s teachings about the human person.  
 
When you promote homosexuality, Holy Father, you hurt me and my parish. When you do not speak clearly, you make my priestly task very difficult. You have said that two men cannot “marry,” and that homosexual acts are wrong, but you also encourage bishops who bless same-sex unions. A female student from my parish, who attends a Jesuit-owned university, “married” another woman according to United States law. She later surgically removed her breasts and uterus to appear like a man. She hates her mother for raising her Catholic, and her mother grieves the loss of her daughter and grandchildren. But this college student points to you, Holy Father. She says you permit blessings for homosexual unions in Germany, and that you favor priests and cardinals who promote homosexual relations. She knows that you have appointed a European cardinal who promotes homosexual unions to lead the Synod.
 
You are my spiritual father, Papa Francesco. Please know that you are hurting me, and hurting my parish. We need you to teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ clearly in a time of great confusion and hurt. We need you to teach the simple truth of the first book of the Bible, that God made us male and female, and for this reason “a man clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh.” If you do not teach this clearly, we parish priests cannot evangelize our people well, and all the people suffer.
 
Fr. Joseph Illo, Star of the Sea Parish, San Francisco, California, United States of America

Last month I returned from three weeks in the wilderness with an unshakable confidence in God’s providence. The fear that we will “wreck the planet” diminishes after a week among towering mountains and mighty redwoods. One gets the peaceful conviction under big skies that, long after our moment in history has come and gone, the sun will still rise over snowy peaks and shimmering rivers.

My few weeks hiking through the granite cathedrals of the Sierras also put our current ecclesiastical dramas in perspective. Doubtless, there’s plenty of malfeasance among the Catholic clergy, but God has made Holy Mother Church ​indefectible.  We can’t sink this ship. One recalls Cardinal Ercole Consalvi’s moment with Napoleon in 1807. The undefeated emperor assured Pius VII's eminent Secretary of State that he would "destroy the Church." The Cardinal smiled. “Pas du tout, Emperor. Not even we cardinals have been able to do that.” Seventy-nine years after Consalvi's observation, Leo XIII asked all priests to lead a prayer to St. Michael after every Mass. God sends this mighty champion of His angels to protect the Church, and it is St. Michael the Archangel we celebrate today. We must have every confidence that God will preserve the Sacred Body of His Son, strengthened each day by His Sacred Blood. 
 
My peace was a little compromised last week, however, at a catered luncheon. I was chatting with the Mexican chef, a likeable fellow who produced the finest quesadillas I’ve ever tasted. “I was in the seminary myself,” he said. “But I don’t practice the faith anymore.” And he told me why. Another student, who happened to be the Cardinal’s nephew, demanded that he perform a sexual act on him, threatening to have him removed from the seminary if he refused. He did refuse, and was dismissed from the seminary and, as it were, from the Catholic Church. I’ve heard this same sad story told many times by many different people.
 
Same-sex attraction is a cross many people carry, especially in the current culture of chaotic sexual saturation. Many carry this burden heroically, with great sanctity, but some allow this weakness to dominate them. The current culture promotes sexual sin, and many suffer the misery of social disorder because of it. The priesthood, in particular, is not for a man with this particular weakness, as the Catholic Church has clarified in a 2005 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education:
 
"In the light of such teaching, this Dicastery, in accord with the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, believes it necessary to state clearly that the Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question,  cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called “'gay culture.'”
 
In 2002, a “gay friendly” bishop asked his priests for their input. He was on his way to a meeting of American bishops in Dallas to deal with the newly-revealed cases of clergy sexual abuse. One priest said, “if the bishops don’t talk about the significant number of actively homosexual priests, you won’t have much credibility.” Many priests bravely made the same point to this bishop, but his response was the same for each one: stony silence. The subsequent bishops’ meeting in Dallas did not talk about it either. Instead, a fairly open homosexual, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, was entrusted with drawing up a “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.”
 
“Where sin abounds,” St. Paul claims, “grace abounds all the more.” Two weeks ago, our troubled Catholic hierarchy beatified the Ulma family, all nine of whom were shot in 1944 for sheltering Jews. On March 23 of that year, Joseph and Victoria Ulma had six children and one on the way. They had taken in eight Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives, and sure enough, the Nazi police arrived that evening with guns drawn. First they shot all eight Jews in the head, and then shot the children’s parents, Joseph and Victoria, in front of their children and neighbors. Finally, the Nazi's shot the screaming children, and their bodies were dumped into a pit in the front yard.
 
All nine members of the Ulma family were declared to be of heroic sanctity on September 10, the first beatification of an entire family (and one of them an unborn child). The names and faces of their killers have been forgotten, but the heroic goodness of the Ulma family will radiate through history. Good has overcome evil, and will always do so. Long after the particular sins and disorders of our historical moment have passed, the brilliant goodness of the saints will be remembered. No matter how bad things get within the Church and without, the goodness of God will prevail.
 
So strive to be a saint. Since we can't sink this ship, let's sail it bravely. We can be sure that our little crew of willing sailors can find a path through the stormiest of seas. Let's all be saints together, like the joyful Ulma family, focusing our minds on God’s perfect order, and bending our energies to God’s perfect will. All the rest will pass.

​Down a dirt road, surrounded by cornfields, between two lakes, not far from a small country cemetery, rests a monastery. It began in San Francisco, then went to Las Vegas, and finally settled in Nebraska. Many monasteries locate in cities, but I think the best place for contemplative communities is under the wide blue sky.
 
Last Monday Holy Mother Church remembered St. Joseph of Cupertino, the “flying saint.” It was a third-class feast—nothing special—and the nuns would normally not chant the Mass. But as I waited inside the darkened sacristy for the monastery clock to reach 7am, their 29 voices were still singing the last verses of lauds, in exquisite counterpoint to the tower bells, which ring continuously until Mass begins. The sisters concluded their morning song as the great bell faded. Silence descended, punctuated only by the faint sound of crickets outside, still awake as dawn spread her soft light over the fields. The server’s hand reached out tentatively for the sacristy bell, then grasped it for a firm shake (good servers know that it’s all in the wrist). Vested in magnificent vestments, we moved from the darkened sacristy into the blazing light of the sanctuary, and the sisters surprised us with a sung introit.
 
Every Holy Mass with contemplative sisters, and every day in the monastery, is filled with wonder. In most of Europe’s history, the powerful knew where their bread was buttered. They dedicated part of their wealth to contemplative communities, who usually built their monasteries on high places just outside city walls, where the bells would ring out over village and city alike.
 
The world still needs monasteries. Our imaginations, our hearts, and our endeavors wither to mere existence without the divine mysteries, delivered most wonderfully by monastic communities. In this Carmelite monastery just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, one cannot see the nuns, as they are behind an enclosure. But one can hear them, and one can hear the bells ringing out over the cornfields. I’m back in San Francisco now, but I know that adoration of God and contemplation of the mysteries continue unceasingly in a monastery on 20 acres of farmland in Nebraska. And for that matter, in several monasteries here in the City. Unnoticed but always flowing, like our bodies’ own circulatory systems, the monastic communities are the lifeblood of Church and City alike.

​Today the city streets are quiet, and the parish office is dark, but we are gathered in this well-lit place at God’s altar. On this Labor Day we thank God for the gift of honest work. The green vestments I’m wearing might remind us of dollar bills, and the laborer certainly deserves his pay. But the fundamental purpose of labor is not to make money. God has given us strength and intelligence to glorify His awesome majesty, and to build up a well-ordered human community. A man once told Mother Teresa that he would not do what she was doing (picking worm-infested people out of Calcutta’s gutters) “for a million bucks.” She replied, “neither would I.”

Today’s Gospel from Matthew 6 just happens to contain these words: “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Either we work for money, or we work for the sheer joy of serving the Almighty’s perfect will. “Therefore,” Our Lord continues in His Sermon on the Mount, “I say to you: do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor for your body, what you will wear…. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither labor nor do they spin,” and yet God provides for them. How could our labor improve on God's natural beauty, and yet He commands us to join Him in sacred work. Honest work is our privilege, and today we celebrate labor by thanking God, first of all, for giving us the capacity to build and to plant.
 
The work is God’s, not man’s. A friend of mine here in San Francisco is an illegal immigrant. He has been trying to get a “work permit” for several years, begging the government permission to join America’s labor force. The bigger the US Government gets, the harder it is to get a work permit. Certainly governments must do their best to rightly order the societies entrusted to their oversight. But “it is better to trust in God than to trust in men,” as every piece of money in our country states: “In God we trust.” Government can only do so much to order our lives, and truly the government that governs least governs best. In the words of St. Philip Neri, “He who wishes to be perfectly obeyed, should give but few orders.”
 
Today’s Mass includes these words in the gradual, from Psalm 117: “It is better to trust in the Lord, than to trust in men. It is better to trust in the Lord, than to trust in princes.” We don’t have “princes” in America, but we do have 20 million government employees. They do the best they can, I’m sure, but their ability to regulate labor, and every other aspect of our lives together, is quite limited. Obey just laws, certainly, and respect civil servants, but put not your absolute trust in anyone but God. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His justice” Jesus tells us in today’s gospel, “and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Bruno Chaouat, professor of French and Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, has written an illuminating article on ChatGPT (you can read it by clicking on the button above). His immediate concern is that students write their own papers rather than having ChatGPT “write” them. How can he teach his students to think for themselves if they let algorithms do the “thinking” for them? The “T” in ChatGPT stands for “transformer,” but it’s hard to see how using algorithms to write a paper “transforms” anything. All it does is regurgitate. Dr. Chaouat writes:
 
"ChatGPT concerns the essence of learning, which, along with reading and writing, pertains to the realm of experience. Experience is transformative: If I climb a mountain, I will not be the same person after my experience as before. I will have gone through a physical and mental effort and have presumably taken some risks. (“Experience” shares the same root as “peril.”) … To read (and to think and write) is to flirt with the abyss. When we read a monumental book, we are not guided by GPS. We are in uncharted territory and must surrender ourselves to the guidance of the author."
 
Two weeks ago I climbed Mt. Whitney with two friends, and I for one am still recovering my physical strength. Having struggled for three weeks on the John Muir Trail to reach that mountain, crossing snowbound passes and swollen rivers, carrying my pack up steep trails littered with shattered trees and rocks, asking myself each morning how I could keep going for two more weeks, I am a changed man. The physical exertions have changed my body, and the mental strain has changed my thinking. The severe beauty of three weeks in the Sierra Nevada has made me more human, and closer to the divine.
 
Climbing a mountain is a human experience. AI is not a human experience. It’s one more removal of ourselves from experience. The foot, being shod, feels not the earth as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins pointed out. Climbing a mountain, or writing an original thought, on the other hand, is transformative. Working through things ourselves rather than having “the government” or “technology” do it for us, exposing ourselves to calculated risks so as to discover things, transforms us. We become more like God, who made us in His image by endowing us with intellect and will, by actually using those gifts. The good news is that we are free. We can simply say “no thanks” to government agencies that want to act for us, and we can simply refuse technologies that want to think for us. We can write our own papers.
 
Most backpackers bring GPS technology into the wilderness these days. We made the conscious decision to rely only on a map and a compass (we also wanted to save money). One of us, misreading the map, got lost for a day. Neither he nor the other two of us were the same persons when we found each other 24 hours later. We realized how fragile we are in the cosmos, how stubborn and stupid we can be, and how much God provides for us. We are most grateful to the park rangers and other hikers who helped us find the lost hiker, and it was a truly human experience. A GPS would have pointed out the trail for us every three feet, but it was better for us to use our intellects and our wills, and to accept the help of other people, to find the path.
 
Dr. Chaouat’s article on ChatGPT is instructive, and Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem, ​God’s Grandeur, is beautiful:
 
                                             The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
                                                  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
                                                  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
                                             Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
                                             Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
                                                   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
                                                   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
                                             Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
 
                                             And for all this, nature is never spent;
                                                   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
                                             And though the last lights off the black West went
                                                   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
                                             Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
                                                   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.