A Prayer for Limits
Loving the edges that give us grandeur and each other
I’ve found myself stretched and challenged by Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, which has helped to reset the public conversation about the perils of AI (perils that exist in the present, coarsening and riving us at every touchpoint). And beyond the horse-race punditry of so much of the media response, I’ve been grateful for nourishing commentary both appreciative and critical. Some thoughtful critics have pointed out how the encyclical blunts its effect in taking up some of the more shopworn tropes of tech criticism—in particular, the pale nostrum that tech is somehow “neutral.” For all the idolatrous evangelism of Silicon Valley, millions of users are turning to the bot not as oracle but as assistant—as a “tool,” anodyne and frictionless, with which to offload much of their mundane decision-making. Writing at the Hedgehog Review, Antón Barba-Kay incisively describes the serpentine infiltration of the technocratic paradigm with its framework of “habitual incentives that, once internalized, become practically imperative.”
In the same spirit, Mike Sacasas describes how the technocratic framework of utility, which poses problems of alignment and impact as mere matters of habit and skill, misses the extent to which technology is not a tool but an environment. Following Marshall McLuhan’s observation that tech works to “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance,” Sacasas suggests that we might best understand AI as “a denial of service attack on the human psyche.” I find this framing resonant—and to be sure, there’s much in the encyclical that unpicks this pattern as well.
I want to say that Magnifica Humanitas does its most important work not where it seeks to apprehend technology, but where it reminds us of all that we bring to our encounter with it—and all that we risk losing to it. Again and again the encyclical steps back from a speculative and theoretical encounter with technology and its perils to express, enumerate, and celebrate the richness of being human. This homiletic thread struck me especially while listening to Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell’s recent, glorious conversation with Jack Hanson on their podcast, Know Your Enemy. I was moved by their recital of paragraphs 119 and 120 of the encyclical, where Leo voices the beauty and grace of our limits—the very limits of knowledge and the body which technocracy seeks to abolish. I will quote from them here:
Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them….
It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God…. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.
I found myself wanting not merely to assent to these words, but to pray with them. It was a curious and inexorable feeling. I have not made a practice of composing and sharing prayers; but a spiritual confidante whose fellowship I trust has encouraged me to share this one. And so here is a prayer for our limits, offered not for intercession or supplication but in adoration:
It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits, which give force to our compassion and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need; which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail; which frame and enfold our measures of adoration. Confronted as we shall be by rejection, grieving as we must at the loss of all we hold dear, quaking as we do in the face of our failures, may we gather our wits, sense your nearness, and come to rest in the embrace of our entanglement.
We suffer from these limits and we learn from them. Without them, we would cease yearning even for love. To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded. What a gift it is to be drawn into your woundedness, into this adventure of failure and freedom, disappointment and dream. In you, we affirm the tragedy and splendor and glorious mystery of being your body together; with you, we choose the human.