Love yourself endlessly

In recent days I met an astrophysicist who told me about the wonder of the universe, planets and galaxies. If the entire history of the earth were condensed into 24 hours, man would only appear in the last 2 seconds. I said to myself: how small we are! Almost to disappear. A few days later instead I listened to a conference on Artificial Intelligence. I saw the potential of human intelligence and creativity.
Man is a fragment of the universe, yet his heart and his mind contain within them all the greatness of God. The unfathomable immensity of creation and the perfection that every single man contains sent me back to God, as he expresses well Psalm 8: «What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care about him? You truly made him little less than a god, you crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him power over the works of your hands, you have placed everything under his feet. O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is your name in all the earth!” (Ps 8,5,7-10).

What is man? The smallest, yet the greatest in the heart of God. Precisely in every single man, God the Father has placed his divinity by making him a son.
A beloved son, cared for by the Father; a son to whom he has entrusted the responsibility of taking care of creation: the youngest, capable of governing the greatness of creation. The man of the Bible knows this very well!

The biblical man asks God his questions: «Who am I? Who am I in the face of the majesty of creation?” and seeks his identity in God. He is very clear that he has received life and every resource he has at his disposal from God.
God does everything for man and the heart of man, in his freedom, can welcome this "everything" which makes him truly "great". If, however, man's intelligence and heart move away from God, confusing the creature with the Creator, everything is turned upside down. And this is what we are experiencing in this time of separation between man and his God: the risk is great drifts, errors that can put the whole of humanity at risk.

The decision to use the fruit of human intelligence to improve life or to crush it always depends on the choice of each individual man, on his ability to use his potential to investigate life, make new discoveries, perfect them, apply them but, above all, direct them towards the common good. As Paolo Benanti reminded us, there is no tool that cannot become a weapon and there is no weapon that cannot be transformed into an instrument of peace, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us.

The new frontiers of AI open us up to this challenge, to the responsibility of giving ourselves rules in using it at the service of man without ever forgetting that only God is the Creator! Let us not forget that we are and will always be creatures, of who we are, where we come from and where we are headed. We are and will always be loved and made to love, but if we separate our intelligence and our heart from God we will subvert the order of things.
We will go towards a future in which we will question a machine to seek from it the answers to our thirst for meaning, to have answers to our existential questions; we will make him an idol who will govern us, a kind of soothsayer who we will ask to read and direct us. God is not like that, he sets us free because he loves us and love, if it is true love, frees. We are made to love and only love gives meaning to our existence and - as Marco Landi said - it is the only thing that remains. Let us never forget it!

Rosanna Tabasso
NP March 2024