A Life Defined By Matters of the Heart

Have you seen street robots delivering food? What about those driverless cars? Have you taken a ride in one? Friends, we live in an era of robots, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. ChatGPT, the most famous AI assistant, has become widely used among scientists, professors, businesspeople, office workers, students, digital creators, and ordinary individuals. I’m sure many of you are already using it.

But does AI have all the answers to our woes and worries? Can it address every question we ask? Can AI fulfill the soul’s longing and capture every human expression? I hope you would say “no.” While artificial intelligence can help us work faster and more efficiently, it cannot fully encapsulate the human spirit.

Artificial intelligence is a product of human intelligence. Thank God for people who have been gifted with intelligence to create it. However, even human intelligence has its limit. For life is not all about the mind; it is about the heart also—perhaps even more important oftentimes than the mind. 

It was Pope Francis who said, “A smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy—these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories kept deep in our hearts.”

In our Second Reading last Sunday, St. Paul talks about the primacy of the heart in human relationships. In his letter  to Philemon, we hear him embracing Onesimus not as a slave anymore, but as a son. He tells the slave owner Philemon, “I, Paul, an old man and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus, urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment. I am sending him, my own heart, back to you.” St. Paul talks from the heart and shares his own heart to Philemon. 

Paul exemplifies how we should treat one another, especially those on the margins of society. We must treat everyone as brothers and sisters in Christ. Robots and algorithms do not possess the hearts to show us love and compassion. Only we human beings can make others feel truly valued. No artificial intelligence can replicate human connection and sharing of hearts. 

Furthermore, intelligence, be it human or artificial, must be used to promote the dignity of every person. The late Pope Francis and our current pope, Leo XIV view it as a tool for human flourishing, to enhance human capabilities, improve quality of life, and benefit the common good, particularly for the most vulnerable. 

But human intelligence and its product, artificial intelligence, have their limits. We cannot rely entirely on them. We also need divine intelligence. Here lies the wisdom of the Scripture Reading last Sunday from the Book of Wisdom. The thoughts of mortals are miserable, the book tells us, which means human intelligence has its limitations. We’re fools if we rely solely on it. 

We need God’s Spirit. We need God’s wisdom. We need God’s actions in the world. And we need his wisdom through the Words of the Scriptures and the testimonies of men and women, like St. Paul, Mother Teresa, and our new young saints, St. Carlo Acutis and St. Pier Giorgio Frassati to guide us how to live our lives well here on earth. We need God’s wisdom to navigate the challenges of life and deal with the mysteries of the human condition. It’s why we gather at Mass, Sunday after Sunday, to make this profession of faith: we need God, we need faith, we need one another’s faith to inspire us, we need prayers, we need hearts full of love for God and other people. We need to hear the Scriptures, to hear the promises of God the Father for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

The Gospel last Sunday urges us to commit ourselves to putting God and His ways above all things, including human and artificial intelligence. “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” These words of Jesus must be understood hyperbolically. They cannot be taken literally. Through these words, Jesus is commanding us to put God at the center of every human effort and enterprise, to bring God’s heart—his love, mercy, and compassion—in every relationship to fellow human beings and all of God’s creation. In light of the words of St. Paul to Philemon, we cannot afford to be heartless individuals, nor can we be a heartless society or nation.

In Christ’s love and mercy,