Field Notes: Turn V

All Creation Groans

By: Alex Nutting October 15, 2026

The creatures were never told to optimize. They were told to soar, and to swim.

On the fifth day of creation, the waters teemed and the skies filled. Not with efficiency. With creatures. Life multiplying in every direction, filling the expanse that had been separated and named and ordered across the first four days. The creation did not optimize. It groaned and sang and flew and swam and filled the space with something that had not been there before.

The birds still sing. Not because they know the future. Because they are present to the yearning.

We do not like to groan. The world tells us to fix the ache, not feel it. To optimize our pain away. We schedule it, solve it, strategize around it. We design faster pathways, cleaner workflows, and smarter tools. We mute the ache with productivity apps, dashboards, and affirmations. Even in church we cover groaning with clarity, with programs, with performance, with sermons more templated than discerned and more automated than prayed.

But the ache remains.

Artificial intelligence did not invent this pattern. It simply accelerates it. Now we outsource not only our spreadsheets and sermons but our silence. Our waiting. Our discernment. The groan is no longer part of the process. It is treated as an error to patch, a flaw to streamline, an inefficiency to erase so that we can be whole again.

And we are starting to believe it.

Beneath it all is the quiet promise: if you just optimize enough, you will not have to ache anymore. Just work harder, just find a better way. Hustle.

This is a false gospel.

Because formation cannot be optimized. Presence cannot be outsourced. The groan was never a sign of failure. It was the sign that something sacred was still alive.

The Church’s vocation is not to eliminate the ache. It is to descend into it.

AI cannot groan. It cannot descend. It cannot suffer. And that matters not only technically but ontologically. Machines may simulate empathy but they cannot participate in it. Incarnation is precisely what artificial intelligence cannot offer. It cannot suffer-with. It cannot descend into grief or dwell in lament. It can only approximate output.

This is where posture matters. Not as formality. As formation.

When we say posture we do not mean politeness. We mean presence. Posture is how the soul listens. It is what we bring before the weight of truth. In an age of speed, posture slows. In a world of noise, posture listens. It is not performance. It is willingness.
To stay.
To groan.
To wait.
To begin again.

AI can produce content but it cannot hold a posture. Only the human soul can do that.

Groaning is not an error. It is the sound of souls still rooted in dust: the same dust from which God first breathed us alive. The Church must resist the temptation to become like the machine.
We are not called to escape the groan. We are called to enter it.
To descend with creation. To wait with the Spirit. To ache in hope.

A Deacon preaching on the harvest text from Matthew said something that has stayed with me.

Jesus does not begin with categories. He begins with compassion. Before there is a commission there is compassion. He looks at the crowd and sees people. Not a demographic. Not an audience. Not a target. People. Harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. And the response is not immediately a program or a strategy. It is first the seeing.

The workers are few and the harvest is plentiful not because the program is underfunded. Because seeing is harder than sorting. Formation is slower than output. Compassion costs more than a subscription.

The Church’s vocation is not to win the race. It is to stay in the ache long enough to tell the truth. And to teach others to do the same.

This is the witness AI cannot offer, but we can. Not because we are smarter. Because we were shaped for this. Formed in dust. Held by breath. Carried by the One who groaned first.

“Then, we should walk with special care and attention, observing how we are proceeding in the practice of virtue: whether we are getting better or worse in some area, especially in love for one another, in the desire to be considered least among the [community], and in the performance of ordinary tasks…Love is never idle.”
— Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle

This Field Note accompanies Breath, Key, and Rest 5 (i.e. Turn 5) of Liturgical Intelligence. Field Notes are best read alongside the piece they accompany.

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