Artificial Intelligence has been quite a hot topic since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022. The impact of AI has been profound, far-reaching and is tangibly changing the world around us at a dizzying pace. Although the technology has been hailed as a force for good, more often we hear about its negative and even damaging effects. There have already been some scandals involving the use of AI to produce legally impactful documents. For example, the AI-supported report produced by West Midlands Police prior to the football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv cost the chief constable his job. To cut a long story short, the AI provided some data that turned out to be made up. In a tragically comical way, although not by design, in certain situations, artificial intelligence behaves like the human brain: it hallucinates. We are sensory creatures, and we need various stimuli to engage our senses to make our brains work. Some studies have been carried out when individuals were put into sensory-deprived rooms. After a while, for lack of any external stimuli, they started to experience various hallucinations produced by their sensory-deprived brains. It’s a phenomenon known since time immemorial to those exiled to remote, hostile areas or islands, locked in old-fashioned prisons or modern-day solitary confinement. The need for a near-constant stream of sensory information explains the unabating popularity of art in different forms and shapes. It also explains why every religion – no matter how austere its beginnings were – over time develops sensory-rich rituals that effectively serve as vehicles for expressing the inexpressible and experiencing the intangible.
Our Creator understands that well. Although we are called upon to participate in spiritual realities, here on earth, we have a deep need to hold on to something or someone tangible. The lack of that is the spiritual equivalent of a sensory-deprived environment. One of the threads weaving through the Old Testament was an astonishingly stubborn, recurring pattern of the people of Israel returning to idolatry. The most well-known was the golden calf episode. According to the biblical narrative, Moses led the Israelites out of the idol- and sensory-rich environment of Egypt to the middle of the Sinai desert, to the foot of Mount Horeb. Then he left for the mountain and stayed forty days and nights there while the Israelites idled leaderless in the sensory-deprived rocky desert. So, they created a golden calf and produced some rituals, the idolatrous equivalent of hallucinations. This tale is often told as a story of obstinacy and fickleness of the “born-again” Israelites, at which Moses went absolutely berserk. However, when his anger subsided, he learnt an important lesson and, as a result, built a mobile, tented, sensory-rich temple with the Arc of the Covenant as its centrepiece. That temple was always set up in the centre of the Israeli camp, providing a physical presence among the people in a literal sense and a reminder of God’s presence among them.
Some would uncharitably say that Moses’ temple was an afterthought, a remedy created after the horses had already bolted. The New Covenant, Christianity, had the necessary tangibility in its design from the very beginning. The famous prologue of St John’s gospel presented in a very poetic way the ever-existing Son of God in His ethereal form: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2) But then the unimaginable happened: “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) Jesus’ bodily, physical, incarnate presence was like Moses’ physical temple in the middle of the Israeli camp – a proclamation that God was with his people in a sensory-rich way. Before his arrest, passion, resurrection and return to the Father, Jesus took great care to leave his followers with a tangible presence for centuries to come. On the night of the Last Supper, he established the sacrament of the Eucharist, his presence in the tangible, sensory-rich physical form of bread and wine. Those two simple foods are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ, the source of life, as we heard in today’s gospel: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” From the very beginning of the Church’s existence, this sacramental, Eucharistic presence of Jesus has been at the heart of spiritual life.
Consequently, the Church has always taught that Sunday Mass is a spiritual necessity, not an optional, skippable religious activity carried out at our leisure. Jesus himself warned us in today’s gospel: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) When we disconnect from the Eucharist, we put ourselves in danger of creating our own idols – a spiritual equivalent of hallucinations. They might seem attractive, fulfilling, or entertaining at first, but what would they offer when life inevitably proves hard? In the first reading, Moses told the Israelites shortly before they were to settle in the Promised Land: “know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” We too must take these words on board.
Image by lininha_bs from Pixabay
