At First Sight
“Jesus looked at him and loved him.” This brief statement appears in Mark 10:21 as we encounter Jesus on his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. It is here that we are introduced to the rich young man, and we discover a few things about him. First, he desired eternal life. Second, he wanted to understand which of the Mosaic covenant laws would help him attain this divine gift. Even though he was a principled and moral man, we learn that he was unwilling to surrender his wealth for the sake of Christ, and he goes away sorrowful.
We witness this exchange unfold. Boldly seeking reassurance that he has done enough to become righteous, the young man asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He is hardly prepared to learn that his good deeds and efforts alone are not sufficient. But the one who stands before him is, and this is the message Jesus seeks to convey. Give up your possessions, surrender your heart to me, and find what you are looking for.
In this short passage, with just one glance and one utterance, Jesus offers a penetrating truth about what is required of us to dwell with God and to experience uninterrupted fellowship. But even before Jesus names idolatry and greed as the barrier in the young man’s life, he does something more significant. He looks at him. And he loves him.
Could it be that simple? Is there a direct relationship between seeing and loving? I believe there is. Our affections often begin with setting our eyes upon something that captures our attention and draws us in. Yet, how we see one another—with a penetrating, honest, and healing love—ultimately has little to do with our physical sight and much more to do with our capacity to offer a patient and deliberate presence.
In this article, I argue that to become people who love as God loves we must first become people who can slow down long enough to truly see. I begin by contemplating how our ways of seeing may be formed and deformed as AI accelerates our daily living. I conclude by considering the role of the Church in cultivating unhurried rhythms that invite us into deeper connection with God and each other.
Disordered Love, Distorted Sight
“How do you feel about starting treatment for glaucoma?” I wasn’t expecting that question. For several weeks before my most recent eye exam, I started preparing myself mentally for conversations about cataracts and macular degeneration. My doctor has been monitoring those issues for the past couple of years, but the mention of glaucoma was new.
I’ve only seen the world through myopia and astigmatism. But as I age, my eyes begin to show signs of distress with the development of cataracts and floaters and patterns of eye disease. I worry about my vision long term and what it will mean for my quality of life. Will I lose sight partially or completely? Will I be able to maintain my independence? What will I miss seeing the most? I don’t have answers to or control over these concerns. As I continue to pray for healing, I maintain a mix of fears and hope. I am grateful for what I have today and am more aware than ever of the gift of sight.
My focus on physical sight these days has also spurred questions about the spiritual dimensions of what it means to see clearly. I am particularly interested in what it means to see in truth and love as generative AI is increasingly determining what comes into view and reshaping our perception toward immediacy over the kind of deliberate attentiveness that is essential to human relationships. I enter this conversation knowing that AI can also help us perceive things we might ordinarily miss.
I am AI cautious, but not resistant. My husband works for a healthcare company that uses AI to analyze data on patient cancer specimens and deliver the most optimal therapies and treatment options. It is an amazing company that is creating breakthroughs and saving lives. As an interested observer peering into my husband’s world, I see how the treatment of cancer is being revolutionized by new technologies. The positive applications of AI are undeniable. Yet, I can recognize something as good and still question if it is ultimately good.
That which is ultimately good originates in the very nature of God, his character, and his person. We experience flourishing in knowing and being known by God, loving and being loved by God, and knowing and loving one another. These are embodied experiences that are lived out in patient faithfulness as we abide in Christ. In her book The Sacred Slow: A Holy Departure from Fast Faith, Alicia Britt Chole asks readers to resist our cultural tendency to seek efficiency in everything, including our faith.[1] She reframes slowness not as inefficiency but as a sacred discipline that creates space for God’s presence and gradual unfolding revelation.
Among the greatest potential dangers of AI is the disordered love we have for its efficiency and productivity. This is not unlike previous technological advances. Yet, there is something strangely different in generative AI’s capacity to automate and create almost instantaneously. Never-ending efficiencies are not inherently antagonistic to the Christian faith, but they might shape us in ways that are unfavorable to the slow practices of attending, abiding, seeing, and loving.
Attending and Seeing
The Gospels are replete with moments where Jesus allows his earthly ministry to be inconveniently interrupted. While preaching to the crowds in Galilee, Jesus responds to the pleas of Jairus and stops what he is doing to follow this father in distress (Luke 8:40–42). While on his way to heal Jairus’s dying daughter, Jesus pauses to identify the suffering woman who touched his garment (Mark 5:21–34). We see this same response toward Bartimaeus. As Jesus is preaching to the crowds, he responds to the cries of the blind beggar (Luke 18:35–43). Jesus sees him not as a distraction but as someone worthy of his full attention.
Jesus normalized disruption and used it to demonstrate the power of an attentive grace that might be the very key to understanding how to see as God sees. Efficiency does not yield to interruption. Love does.
If being human is about our createdness in the image of God that we might resemble him relationally, how are we to be formed? What are the potential risks of an AI-patterned formation? What are we to understand about the goodness of human finitude and the limits of our efficiency and productivity? To what extent might our relationship with AI interrupt this understanding? Are there benefits to a slow faith that restrains our pursuits? If so, what spiritual rhythms must we establish as we continue to steward AI?
I am persuaded by Paul Kingsnorth’s not-so-subtle critique of AI in his latest book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth’s criticism, like mine, is not about technology itself but the ideology that underpins its spread. So, what is this ideology? It is what Kingsnorth refers to as the Machine—the human tendencies toward “power, control, and ambition.”[2] It is this same ideology that thrust us out of the garden and into a state of “dis-integration.”[3] Yet, there is hope according to Kingsnorth. Just as readily as we unmade the world, we can remake it, but it will require new ways of seeing:
We need a counter-revolution: A restoration. We need to overthrow the emissary and put the real master back in place. If we are attending to the world wrongly—if our way of seeing is up the spout—well, then we are going to have to start seeing differently. But first we have to try and unmoor ourselves from this one. Where would we start? . . . . we should start by changing our quality of attention.[4]
What makes us human is that we are created in the likeness of God. We are literally God’s representation redeemed through the atonement of Jesus Christ and restored to his image. As we are reconciled to God, we gain the capacity to love as God loves, but it begins by seeing rightly. So, how do we change our quality of attention that we might not continue to drift farther from home?
Renewal
I believe the Church must still play a vital role in Christian formation through practices that are both timely and timeless. James K.A. Smith might agree. In his important work You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, Smith sets out a framework that I find helpful for considering how we might be “rehabituated” toward ways of seeing and loving that can withstand a culture that increasingly demands immediacy.[5] According to Smith, the very pattern of Christian worship—gathering, listening, communing, and sending—is formative in ways that remind us of our createdness and place in God’s story. It is in this rootedness, in our understanding of our true identity, that we become a people who are not easily formed by AI.
The gathering, or call to worship, redirects our focus to the author and creator of our faith. It is an act of sacred devotion that requires us to be attendant in ways that are countercultural. As we prepare for the preaching of the Word, we are invited to a practice of listening that requires both receiving and responding. To listen well we must put away the distractions and urgencies in our lives. When we gather at the Lord’s Table, we are drawn into a posture of communing. It is a shared and embodied act of remembrance that demands our full presence. As we receive this gift from Christ to his Church, we are compelled to go out and share the love extended to us. The sending is not a passive re-entry into the world but a reenactment of Jesus’s ministry on earth, with all its inconvenient disruptions. These four practices—gathering, listening, communing, and sending—hold the potential to slow us down and form us into individuals who can be present enough to remain with God and each other.
Perhaps, then, the answer to recovering a Mark 10:21 way of seeing that is inseparable from loving is right in front of us. According to Smith, it is in our sanctuaries, in our liturgical practices, and not so new at all but simply needing renewal. What might that renewal look like? For Smith, “Worship that restores our loves will be worship that restores our imagination.” What Smith is inviting us to is the kind of worship that “sanctifies our perception” and “implants the biblical story so deeply into our preconscious” that we cannot see otherwise.[6]
I can imagine the worship Smith describes because I encounter it on the college campus where I work. I experience it in the intentional conversations about Christian formation that take place in classrooms and meeting spaces. I notice it in my walks across campus in the posture of the people gathered to pray. I see it in the faculty and student mentorships that flow from the academic halls to the mission field. I observed it recently in the face of the 11-year-old boy whose loneliness was met with grace as a fellow summer camper remembered his name and invited him to a game of chess.
The kind of worship that forms us into people who are not easily formed by AI happens in the relational and communal, in the up-close-and-personal, and in the telling and retelling, living and reliving of our shared biblical narrative. It is worship that shapes our vision and slows us down to see and love. And it gives me hope.
References
[1] Alicia Britt Chole, The Sacred Slow: A Holy Departure from Fast Faith (W Publishing Group, 2017).
[2] Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025), 37.
[3] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 4.
[4] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 270–71.
[5] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press, 2016), 94.
[6] Smith, You Are What You Love, 94.