pull up a chair

by mid-morning the other day, after a lava flow of bumbling words had frothed from my mouth, after fumbling through apology and course correction that led me to nowhere, abruptly finding myself in a remarkable tizz, spinning wild and wildly into the cattails and weeds, i found myself yearning for an etch-a-sketch day.

that is: utterly drenched in your fallible, flailing, decidedly flappable self, you long to give a shake to the day, clear the screen, dispense with the scratch marks you’ve left in your wake, and start all over again. clean slate.

oh, that it were so doable. that our foibles were so very expungeable.

that we could erase our blunders, reset our starts.

my sins, such as they were, amounted to little more than worries let loose, a storm of what-ifs infusing and infecting an otherwise placid launch of the day. i feared, though, they might be contagious, that the someone to whom i was blathering might soon come down with a similar case of the shakes. and i loathed my frazzled old self for flinging my woes with such reckless abandon.

oh, to take a deep breath, a pure cleansing breath, and aim to be stalwart and steady afresh.

so it is, here in the land of the human. we are but an amalgam of shortfalls and bumbles, with only the occasional triumph to claim for ourselves.

and as much as we might drown in the muck of that unvarnished truth, there might be much more to the story.

consider the utterly human condition, our magnificent fallibility.

yes, magnificent.

lest the abrupt turn here catch you off guard, let me explain: it is against the backdrop of a papal encyclical (for me, who woke early monday to read it, the big news of the week) that i found myself catching a glimmer of something i’d only before seen as a shortfall. and therein is the beauty.

as chicago’s own father bob, aka Il Papa, Leo XIV, so lucidly put it, it is the very fact of our imperfection, our bruises and soft spots, that not only make for our lusciousness but give us our reason for being. we are here to work through the kinks. our majesty is in our not knowing, our awkward pauses in silence whilst the wheels of our brains gurgle and churn, sputter and eventually spew.

it’s this fleshed-out portrait of humanity that leo holds up against the blemishless facade of AI, the newfangled sphere where answers come swiftly (nay, instantaneously) and stripped of question or wonder or doubt. it’s the realm of the certain, the acquisitive grab of all recorded text, that produces, like a slice popped from a toaster, whatever you wanted to know about whatever you might have otherwise pondered and wondered. musing not wanted nor needed here.

and what’s lost?

cue the encyclical, paragraph 99, with special emphasis on the artificial that’s twinned with the intelligence:

“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

we humans, his holiness goes on to note, are creatures who are “shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”

choices, mistakes, forgiveness, fidelity.

oh, the litany of all the above that has marked me and molded me, made me into the scarred, the limping, the daffy body and soul that i am. that we all are.

we needn’t erase any or all of that whom we are. we’ve all gotten here the bumpy way. the trial-and-error, the forgive-me-i’m-sorry, the let’s-take-it-from-the-top way.

we are born, all of us, without instruction manual (a fact that becomes alarmingly notable when handed a newborn outside the nursery, and told to figure it out as they point us toward the door). we bumble our way. we try, most days anyway, not to get in the way of ourselves. not to hurt those in our path. and certainly not the ones we love most.

we blow it. squelch opportunity. drop the ball. miss the mark. strike out. chicken out. spazz out.

we all have days we want to start all over again. moments we wish we could play in reverse. lines we’d do well to stuff back into our mouths. looks we wish hadn’t flashed ‘cross our faces.

but then we would be so artificial. so unmistakably automaton. our intelligence, really, would be poured from a jar. diluted with water, and stirred.

an efficient facsimile of some fraction of human.

in the end, upon actual brain-fueled consideration, i’ve come to conclude: i’ll take my days messy, mistake-y, and utterly fallible.

no need, after all, for the etch-a-sketch.

have you considered the ways your soft spots and bumps have made you more beautiful? as you look back across your life, do you see the dead ends and potholes as all part of the wonder?

here’s but one line from the encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity,” worthy of deeply human pondering, musing, meditation:

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.” 

and think not that moral complexity is at the heart of humanity. here again, a line from the encyclical worthy of long meditation:

“Even when persons dehumanize themselves and bring about tragedy, a small light continues to shine within humanity, one that can be rekindled, with God’s grace, along paths of conversion and reconciliation. As Viktor Frankl rightly observed, in moments of horror, ‘we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.'”