We are still bound by the laws of nature and if we don’t respect those laws then we are perverting nature itself, nature’s growth. That’s the terrible physical and moral and spiritual dilemma that we are facing today in our slow realization of what we are doing to Mother Earth and to ourselves. So all of this is a bit puzzling. We don’t know what is happening and what is our role in it except perhaps just to obey it, just to be natural; not to be supernatural, not to think that we can speed up the process or not to think that we can create life itself the same way as we now think that we have brilliant computers. We call them intelligent. We call them artificial intelligence and then we get frightened of them. But they’re not intelligent. They are artificial. They can help us a lot and they can corrupt us if we become dependent or addicted to them. In the same way we cannot create life, we can manipulate it. We can pervert it or we can nurture it. We are slowly, we hope, becoming conscious. We are becoming aware of this in this critical time for humanity and time is of the essence as Jesus says in this first Parable when he loses no time. When the crop is ready that’s when you cut it down. We cannot replay reality. We cannot record reality. We have to be in the present moment.
(Homily 16 June 2024 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
