The blessings that are our limitations

Any of us who has ever suffered a grievous loss, a terrible illness, a physical or mental handicap that consumes us, knows the pain of such loss. Why did my brother have to die? Why do I have this disease or this limitation?

Yet at the same time, many of us know that losing someone we loved has helped us become more compassionate when others experience loss. Losing our mom enables us to draw closer to someone else experiencing that same loss. Suffering from an illness can actually make us more generous to others. Struggling with these tremors of mortality can draw us closer to God, even as we ask why.

Why must there be suffering and loss is a very human question. But we live in an age when our pride and our technological accomplishments can lead us to think the avoidance of such suffering and loss is within our grasp.

It is thoroughly modern to wish that science would simply find a cure, a solution to that which burdens us. Some of the richest people on the planet, reportedly, are even seeking a technological or medicinal means to immortality, as if their money and their hubris will allow them to cheat death's finality.

For all of us moderns, Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical has some surprising advice: "Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them."

This is because it is our own finitude, our frailty, that helps us discover compassion and generosity, and ultimately draws us closer to God.

The subtitle of "Magnifica Humanitas" -- "On safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence" -- tells the reader the primary focus of Pope Leo's first encyclical letter. It is a look at the potential and the threats of AI. Yet half way through the document is a moving reflection on the blessings that are our limitations.

"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," he writes.

Our limitations lead us to others, including God. 

"When we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure," it is at those moments when "we discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord."

The pope assures us that although seeking to alleviate suffering through medicine or technology is not in itself wrong, we can be misled into seeing our finitude not as a blessing but as a curse. And he warns us that "to eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well." The lessons we learn from suffering, from loss and from disappointments are essential to what it means to be human.

"Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others," Leo writes. And this is the means by which we "recognize the inviolable dignity of every person."

How we respond, of course, is the moral challenge we face. Do we see this God-given dignity in others or do we run from that awareness?

All of which brings us back to artificial intelligence and how we choose to use it. Does it help us to flourish, to be fully human, capable of relationship and love? Or, while enriching the few, does it isolate us, impairing our ability to see Christ in each other?

In short, will it help us to recognize the grandeur of every human person, or make us strangers to ourselves?