Gnaw on My Flesh: The Presence We Cannot Outsource

My flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.

This last week, I was in Los Angeles with Brian Green,
a professor of AI ethics at Santa Clara University.
We gave a presentation to the priests
of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
We gave ten sessions over four days
and we had about sixty of those priests gathered.
Then yesterday, we had a huge crowd gathered here
in Santa Clara, at Our Lady of Peace Parish.
We had over four hundred people from throughout the diocese.
It was a national panel talking about AI ethics.

These were a powerful couple of days
discussing the Pope’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas,
and the impact on Silicon Valley,
the impact on our world in this age of artificial intelligence.
But what struck me most about it was something different.

I think the presentations were good.
Do not get me wrong.
I think we did a good job.
But there was something else more powerful that took place.
For example, in Los Angeles,
what struck me more than the presentations were the conversations
we had at breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day.

Over fifty different priests
representing fifty different communities.
But with one common struggle.
Everyone was distracted by busyness and out of time.
Everyone was so busy
that they were struggling to keep up,
to keep focusing on the real message of life.

Ironically, this is the very thing
that Pope Leo has done in his encyclical.
He has reframed the whole conversation
of artificial intelligence
around human flourishing and human dignity.

What does it mean for us as human beings to flourish?
What does it mean to have dignity as a human person?
And what is the common good for all people?
He goes through a whole hundred and thirty-five years
of the Church’s social teaching
to refocus our energies on that message.
And then he takes on artificial intelligence.

But what was interesting was that this distraction,
or as we hear in today’s readings,
is that Moses warns the Israelites to not forget the Lord.
We are forgetful, as Moses tells the people.
And he warns them not to forget the Lord
in their abundance.

Remember, the context of this first reading is
that Moses is not going to enter
into the promised land himself.
He has been journeying with them for forty years,
and been up and down in life.
He is at the edge of the Jordan River
and he is giving them his final wishes
as they enter into the promise.
He says, whatever you do, do not forget the Lord.
In this land of milk and honey of abundance,
do not forget who took care of you in the desert.
It was the Lord.
Do not forget who has always been at your back.
It is the Lord.

The he asks them,
here in the next section,
you have a choice of life and death.
I ask you to choose life.
Blessing or curse,
I ask you to choose blessing.
You follow everyone else,
or you follow the Lord.
And he says, for my part, I testify.
I choose the Lord.
I ask you to choose the Lord.
That is the very feast day we celebrate today.

This is the Body and Blood of Christ.
And what is interesting is that around meals
is where we had the most profound conversations.
When we sit with each other
at breakfast and lunch and dinner.
Even yesterday, with all these hundreds of people,
it was the gathering around the meal
where we interacted
and were present to one another.

Artificial intelligence cannot do that.
It is not embodied.
It cannot promise to bring us together in that way.
We need to be mindful
that that is our call as human beings:
to be ever present to one another.
It is so easy, so easy,
to forget the power of that presence.

Today’s feast day,
the most holy Body and Blood of Christ,
is about sharing in the Body of Christ.
Remember in today’s gospel,
the context is pretty important.
Jesus has just fed five thousand people
and he is now trying to explain to them
that after feeding them,
they are all sort of on a high.
Then he says, I am the bread of life.
You need to eat my body.
You need to eat my flesh.

Now, they were a little bit unsure.
Eat tis flesh? What do you mean by that?
And he doubles down.
The real translation would be,
you need to “gnaw on my flesh.”
You need to chew me.
He is not shying away
from his embodiment as a human.
He is doubling down.
He says, I am one of you.
You have to gnaw on me.
You have to be me in the world.
He says, if you do that,
then you will have eternal life.
This is what it means to be the Body of Christ:
to be present to one another,
to gnaw and to chew on the very presence of each other.

So what does all this mean as a challenge for us?
The challenge for us here in Silicon Valley is very similar.
We too get forgetful.
We too are enormously distracted.
And by the way, with lots of good things.
Not all good things,
but a lot of really good things, and a good life.
We are living a life of milk and honey.
And the challenge of that is
we have sometimes forgotten the Lord.

Now look, in one sense,
I am preaching to the choir.
You are here in church with me, right?
So you get it. I get that.
But often we even forget, even as we are coming.
If everybody got that in our parish,
this church would be full
at every single Mass, every single weekend.
And we would need four or five more Masses.
But we are not because we are forgetting.
We are forgetting who our true source of life is.

We come from God
and we will return to God.
As the Pope says in this encyclical,
we have a finite time.
And that is not a flaw.
That is a feature of being human.
And we need to embrace that.
Our human reality is
that we have to be present to one another.
And God does that by becoming present to us
in this very Eucharist.

That is what we celebrate on this feast day
in the most precious Body and Blood of Christ.
But we celebrate this every Sunday.
And we celebrate it because we are reminded
to be present to one another.

Here is the reality.
When a child falls
and needs somebody to pick them up,
artificial intelligence cannot help with that.
When you pick up that child and hold it,
and assure it that they are safe and loved,
that is what that child needs.

Or when an elderly parent is feeling alone,
feeling no longer useful in the world,
we come alongside them and say,
it is not usefulness that we want.
We want your presence.
Your love matters to us.
And we hug them and we care for them.
And we assure them that they are loved, even in their frailty,
maybe even more in their frailty and brokenness.

We have to do that for one another,
in our family and friends.
But my friends, it is so easy to forget.
Like the Israelites in the desert we get distracted.
And I know that it is very real.
It is as much for me as it is for you.
You have heard me talk about
how important sleep, exercise, and nutrition are.
That is great.
But that is not all there is in our life.
We have relationships.
And I, for my own part,
have not done terribly well with that recently.

With all this work on artificial intelligence
and my dedication to it,
my family have hardly seen me.
I need to refocus on that.
You, my parishioners, have hardly seen me.
And I get that.
We need to be present to one another.
And that is not an admonition to you.
That is a challenge to all of us.
We need to know the power of presence.
Of sitting across at a kitchen table
and not just chewing on the food together,
but chewing on each other’s presence together.

Acknowledging the gift of love
shared at the table in the house.
And we are reminded to do it as a community.
To gnaw on this bread
and to remind ourselves of the love
that we share as a community.
To be a witness in our world,
which so often forgets.

So my friends,
when we come together
and we come forward to receive the Body of Christ,
and we say Amen,
let us be assured of what we are saying Amen to.
We are promising to become what we receive:
the Body of Christ, broken for others.
We promise to become
the Blood of Christ, poured out for others.
That is what this little child
is going to be baptized into in a minute.
And that is what we promise
to witness in our lives.

So that is what I ask of you
when you come forward:
to realize that the Lord says to all of us,
I am the true food.
My blood is the true drink.
That is the challenge of today’s gospel.
To be what we receive.

My flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.