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I found this quote by Sister Natalia to be a very powerful and spot on understanding of religious life.

“We all have a natural call to marriage, but some of us have a calling to celibacy. That calling doesn’t come instead of a desire for marriage – it transcends it. My desire for a spouse helps me lean into Christ as my bridegroom.”

Today’s society is full of confusing and contradictory stances on sexuality that seem to be constantly and often radically changing directions every few years. One has to stop and ask themselves what is the truth of our sexuality if there is no agreement that lasts more than a few years? This isn’t just academic, it has far-reaching impacts on how we form families, pair bond, and how we define the happiness of the most meaningful long-term relationships of our lives.

That’s why I love Sister Natalia’s quote. She understand rightly that we all have a natural desire and calling to find a deep, fulfilling relationship in which we can express ourselves fully (including our sexual energy). That expression, however, is above all else relationship. Deep, fulfilling, open, vulnerable, wild, crazy, and sometimes frightening relationship that fully expresses our being in all dimensions.

As a person that explored religious life for 4 years at a monastery, I can firmly say that kind of fulfilling relationships is what all of us really seek. To reduce religious life, or ourselves, to our sexuality is to really miss the mark. As sister Natalia says, it is all about relationship – the relationship you have with God and bringing our COMPLETE selves to that relationship.

Have you found your complete fulfillment in your relationship with God above all others? Does it appear you have the gift of finding that expression of your love with God and being with him every day through what you are called to do and be for Him? Do you find that every day, you ‘lean into’ Christ as the most important person in your life more and more? Hopefully all Christians can say that, but for a person with a religious vocation, they find that ‘leaning in’ day by day with Christ to be the most important relationship. To the point that to do otherwise would be to deny who they are. And isn’t that the kind of self-fulfillment and self-expression we all seek?

• Sister Natalia’s article: https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/columbia/archives/042022.html

On Friday March 25th, Pope Francis consecrated Russia and the Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
While various forms of the consecration have been done, this time was different because the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Christians asked for the Pope to do the consecration and to specifically name Russia and the Ukraine.

So why is this important?

Obviously, the situation in the Ukraine is impacting and threatening the safety of the entire globe. The consecration of Russia was specifically asked for by Mary in her 1917 apparitions at Fatima. Many have been waiting for this very specific act since the end of WW 1, WW 2, and the Cold War. Various forms of the consecration have been done in the past, but Russia was never mentioned by name due to the fact it was a point of contention with the Russian Orthodox church.

Why a consecration?

Pope Francis asked for Catholics everywhere to pray a novena leading up to Friday’s consecration. The Ukrainian bishops even published the text for a novena that references many of the requests of Mary at Fatima – and the often forgotten oppression and horrors suffered by Ukrainians under Communism.

While many people discount such novenas as cynical ‘hopes and prayers’, even cynics will agree that the first step to change is to admit there is a problem. Catholics have always understood that change requires prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and forgiveness/love. Prayer must come with admission of our guilt, gratitude for what we have been given, and thanks for prayers answered. It must also be paired with acts of self denial that help us turn away from bad behavior (much like going to a gym to get in shape!), almsgiving designed to help change the situation, and acts of reconciliation/forgiveness. Most important to all of those is that we admit we do not have all the answers ourselves and ask for help – inviting God into the broken situation. As people with free will, recognizing we need help and asking for it is the very invitation God wants in order to help us. It is no different than when we ask others for help.

So with that, I encourage you to read the text of the consecration and hear all those elements of the Catholic understanding of how change is to happen.

The full text of the consecration is here on the vatican website, but here is a short piece:

Therefore, O Mother, hear our prayer.
Star of the Sea, do not let us be shipwrecked in the tempest of war.
Ark of the New Covenant, inspire projects and paths of reconciliation.
Queen of Heaven, restore God’s peace to the world.
Eliminate hatred and the thirst for revenge, and teach us forgiveness.
Free us from war, protect our world from the menace of nuclear weapons.
Queen of the Rosary, make us realize our need to pray and to love.
Queen of the Human Family, show people the path of fraternity.
Queen of Peace, obtain peace for our world.

Anne Hellen Petersen nailed it in this NPR interview (listen here). It captures what I’ve felt (and science is now confirming yet again) ever since startup culture pushed young people (including myself during the dot com days) to work so much that your social and work circles are nearly indistinguishable.

Interviewer: Everybody is always about a corporate culture. And so many organizations and companies are like “We’re all big one happy family”

Peterson: NO! That’s toxic!! When you think of your corporation as a family, it’s a toxic family. And so, one of the things I think a thing that a lot of people, particularly millennials, have gotten used too is using their workspace as their primary source friendship or companionship. And that’s the result of working all the time and having your identity be solely defined by your job.
And so, as we start to dis-articulate ourselves from that understanding (via working from home), to try to figure out who we are apart from work, part of that means I don’t need to be best friends with everyone I work with. And if you have a more flexible life that isn’t in the office all the time, you can cultivate and sustain friendships that are not associated with the workplace. And that is so important.

We’re increasingly seeing Youtube, Twitch, and other stars speaking out against another aspect of Hustle culture: working 24-7 so that there isn’t a healthy separation between your social and work relationships. Rod Thill (TikTok’er with over a million followers) came to a similar conclusion :

After working at several startups with what he called toxic work environments, Rod Thill decided he just wanted a 9-to-5 job. So, he found one at a company, working in sales. It was a place with boundaries, where he could actually log off.

“As millennials, we were fantasizing about the startup culture — pool tables, exposed brick, coffee bar, open bar,” Thill says. “I’ve worked at all these types of places, but then I realized I would rather work in a cubicle with the 401(k) and a 9 to 5, summer Fridays —  leave, go home and just enjoy my life.” 

This is something that we seem to have had to re-learn. It’s not the first time we’ve had to re-learn work lessons that were first figured out 70 years ago.

She also goes on to make some other good points:

1. Working from home has largely proven that productivity goes UP when not focused at the office. Offices have heavy overheads of commuting, synchronizing work times, distractions, etc.
2. The push to bring people back to the office is largely because leaders haven’t stopped to re-examine what we are going back for. Is there really a reason – or can we re-think how we do things? It’s a moment we can re-think the real reason we do what we’re doing. For example: what does customer service looks like without an office building and maybe we can even do it better?

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series (and the successor to GPT-2) created by OpenAI. GPT-3’s full version has a capacity of 175 billion machine learning parameters. People have created unbelievably accurate question-based search engines, ghost write articles, chatbots that can fool almost anyone, code generation based on text descriptions, compose guitar tabs, re-write articles in a different style, write creative fiction, and many, many more. Here’s some other examples. Or how about an entire Reddit forum that is nothing but bots talking to each other. Yes, everything on that forum is a bot. It should give you pause when responding to social media articles in the future…

How good is it?

The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human, which has both benefits and risks. An initial experiment of 80 US subjects were asked to judge if short ~200 word articles were written by humans or GPT-3. The participants judged incorrectly 48% of the time, doing only slightly better than random guessing. Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original paper introducing GPT-3 in May 28, 2020. In their paper, they warned of GPT-3’s potential dangers and called for research to mitigate risk.

Here’s a great example of what it can generate automatically – with no human intervention (click the link for the full article):

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

What are those risks?

Well, when you can create bots that can write articles or engage in conversations that are basically indistinguishable from humans, anyone using it can automate misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting, and manipulating online forums with countless bots that control narratives and overwhelm the humans trying to fight them. Machines never tire.

In an unprecedented step, Microsoft announced on September 22, 2020 that it had licensed “exclusive” use of GPT-3; others can still use the public API to receive output, but only Microsoft has access to GPT-3’s underlying model. The API to use GPT-3 is still available, but at a per-use cost. Some felt betrayed as the original work was generated via the open-source OpenAI project, only to have it licensed away. Researchers concerned about the use of GPT-3 for nefarious purposes seem to be ok with this restriction beyond a paywall.

Others have tried to re-created GPT-3 – such as GPT Neo, GPT-J, and many others. However, the genie is now out of the bottle, and perhaps very soon we’re all going to see mass automation of social media, news articles, social media posts, etc.

The question is, can we survive it? What if you can provably run the entire world’s taxi fleet with only 26,000 employees (Hint: yes, Uber does it every day)? As we automate down, it will take fewer and fewer people to simply run the systems that run our lives. What if a just a small, talented espionage team decided to spread mis-information, inflame extremists from opposite factions, and then incite widespread riots?

We’ve already seen the clear rise of cyber-based manipulation of media and social media to influence elections, COVID, public policy, etc. Cyber shutdowns of critical infrastructure and even governmental overthrows are already well underway as our last 2 US elections have shown. There’s plenty of evidence social media bots are being used by foreign and domestic groups to target public perception and inflame extremists groups.

Combine that with the provably unhealthy effects of social media use, and perhaps we must come to the same conclusion the AI in War Games did…