(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/BIC-Mass-Blog-for-the-Fifteenth-Sunday-in-Ordinary-Time.mp3)
Christ taught St. Thomas to believe in a God we can’t see or hear. And by his doubt, Thomas taught us that we can’t see or hear God if we choose not to. Instead, we 21st Century Thomases have surrounded ourselves with high-volume, high-visibility gods that make us deaf and blind to the One Who is True.
This Sunday’s readings teach us that just as invisibility is not the absence of God’s presence, true silence is not the absence of God’s voice. Our free will is key to God’s wisdom making a home within us. But we’d better reach for that key soon because this world is rapidly building for itself a multi-room condominium for a demigod called artificial intelligence. AI multiplies and manipulates varied experiences, serving them up to a multitude of isolated consumers along a worldwide web. True wisdom requires communities of individual consumers to be one with God—and thus be unified in their service to each other.
We can only find that unity with God’s help. But the very technology invented to unite the world has made us blind and deaf to God’s Spirit in each other. Walk any busy street during lunch hour and you’ll see people looking down at their devices rather than up at the other souls sharing the street with them.
Sunday’s gospel reading shows us this is not new. Technology is only the newest way we deal with our oldest enemy: Fear. In Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), we see a priest and a Levite walking down a street choosing to be blind and deaf to the needs of a fellow soul who’s in trouble. Too bad they didn’t have portable information devices to blame for not helping this stranger. Fear was the only scapegoat that could bear their guilt. By contrast, by bearing this unknown and beaten brother to safety, the Good Samaritan conquered fear and the guilt it always brings.
We moderns can prepare ourselves to face fear of service by realizing the author of this parable was the scapegoat who bore our beaten souls to safety. Such a realization is born of a quiet wisdom that artificial intelligence won’t and can’t offer. As Moses implies in Sunday’s first reading (Deuteronomy 30:10-14 ), God’s wisdom is not up in the skies above us or across the seas separating us, but within each human heart.
God gave us the power to make this Holy Spirit visible and audible to each other by embodying it, as Christ did. As Paul tells us in Sunday’s second reading (Colossians 1:15-20), Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, and “in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible.”
St. Mother Teresa taught the modern world where to start any search for our silent, invisible God, and she was able to do it even in the noisy slums of Calcutta. Look within.
“Face God in prayer and silence, [and] God will speak to you,” she suggested. “Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”
The sound of silence can make God hearable to each of us nothings. We can then go out and make God real to a world burdened by the artificiality of artificial intelligence.
–Tom Andel
We’ve been taught by Saint Paul that our real battle in this life is against the powers and principalities, in other words the devil who is real and waiting for us to drop our guard. In the world of noisy communication and distraction, the devil sees his opening and prepares to strike. He is cunning, he is successful, he is real!
The antidote is so simple. Have the faith of a child. Jesus said ” do not let your hearts be troubled, believe in God and to believe in me.” Much easier when we actually turn all that stuff off and actually try to connect with our Lord and creator. We have to choose to make this time, to find a quiet place away from the noise and chaos the devil specifically uses to distract us from growing closer to Christ. The adoration chapel is the ultimate decompression chamber.
We all have a choice to make. Choose Christ, and witness the peace that only He can give!
Faith is like a muscle. We have to use it–to work it–for it to stay strong. You’re right, Thomas, nurturing a childlike faith is key. Everything we do as a child is more spontaneous and less calculating. Living our faith, too. As adults, we can calculate and plan those moments when we choose to face God in those quiet spaces. But sometimes God demands to see who we are amidst life’s noise. This weekend’s floods in Texas offer the perfect example of living faith in the face of death. These floods didn’t give people time to calculate. The river rose quickly and demanded instant faith of the campers and their counsellors who only a few hours before had said their evening prayers and gone to sleep. Suddenly the lives of many of those children had to be saved by adults who didn’t think twice before risking their own lives while pulling them to safety. In some cases, this cost them their lives. I can only imagine the peace of Jesus’ words filling their heart, overpowering the chaos in their head: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” Absorbing those words in the quiet spaces of our lives is good training for when we’ll need to live by them in a crisis.
Ai is only as evil as the person who
Programmed it. That is why, I guess, it
Scares me.
That’s a healthy fear, Chris. So is fear of our Lord. The evils of this world are of human artifice, meaning designed to deceive or defraud. They can’t withstand exposure to the Intelligence that is true: God’s Holy Spirit of Wisdom. God’s Wisdom is given voice in Sirach 15:13-16: “Abominable wickedness the LORD hates and he does not let it happen to those who fear him. God in the beginning created human beings and made them subject to their own free choice. If you choose, you can keep the commandments; loyalty is doing the will of God. Set before you are fire and water; to whatever you choose, stretch out your hand.”