Guarding Our Attention in the Age of AI

We closed our recent centering prayer by sharing our intentions and gratitude. Amid the quiet of the room, someone mentioned that the Vatican was wrapping up its summit on Artificial Intelligence.

It was a fascinating piece of news, but as we transitioned back into the noise of the world, it got me thinking about the nature of human focus.

In the spiritual life, we are constantly taught to guard our attention. Yet, it often feels like the human ego demands an enemy to fixate upon. Right now, the global conversation around AI is filled with a loud, ambient dread: warnings about how it will consume our energy grids, how it might wreak havoc, and how it will displace us.

Fear is a powerful distraction. Yes, technology can be weaponized. But as a person of faith, I have to ask the harder, internal question: if these machines threaten to do harm, is it the fault of the wires and code, or is it because our spiritual and social institutions have failed to form the moral character required to steward them? The machine only mirrors the soul of its maker.

While we obsess over the physical energy consumption of data centers, we are quietly ignoring a much more devastating spiritual crisis. We are burning through our sacred, human energy with hatred, fear, and division.

I am reminded of Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited, and his naming of the forces that stalk the vulnerable: fear, deception, and hatred. These hounds do not live in silicon chips; they live in the unhealed corners of the human heart. They are the ancient forces actually wreaking havoc on our world right now.

Global poverty remains an open wound. The old powers still crush the spirit of the poor, and our faith communities are losing the transformational influence they once carried. With so much immediate, tangible suffering calling for our compassion and prayers, it feels like a spiritual failure to sit in sacred spaces and let our energy be hijacked by panic over algorithms.

Yes, AI will cause job displacement, just as the printing press, the steam engine, and the computer did before it. But the story of humanity is a story of resilience and divine adaptation. We are co-creators, blessed with the capacity to integrate new tools into our lives.

Instead of making AI the ultimate enemy, our spiritual calling is to make room for growth.

Can we have the spiritual maturity to use these tools to better serve the human race? Can we harness this technology to finally solve the systemic issues — like resource distribution and poverty — that our collective greed has allowed to persist?

Let's stop throwing the tool away out of fear of what we might do with it. If we are to fear anything, let us fear our own lack of moral imagination and our tendency to hide from real human suffering behind the latest technological panic. It is time to quiet the anxiety, face the world as it is, and refocus.