Who do I want caring for my ninety-eight year old mother (below) a robot or a human being? These days, with robotic medical instruments, the answer can be both.
The future may be different. It may be technology alone.
Technology, by its nature, will always change. Love's energy, on the other hand, is constant.
But, what shape will Love take if the culture we have known is turned on its head?
Take a look at the state of God's earthly institutions. On a recent trip to Boston, we passed numerous elegant buildings topped by crosses. Inside, many bear signs of a sea change in American religious expression.
In the wake of scandals, many Catholic churches and schools have emptied. The so-called mainstream Protestant churches are one-fourth filled, often with "grey-hairs" like me. Other church buildings have been turned into restaurants, theaters and, sometimes, private homes.
Some expert observers believe that we are living in a "Post-Christian" era in which civilization is turning away from traditional faiths toward new pathways. When these pathways reflect indifference to the spiritual life, there is cause for concern.
Love's expression depends upon all of us and each of us. For who are the keepers of Love? Traditionally, civilization established churches, hospitals, hospices and charities as places where God's Love flows through caregivers to those in need.
In recent decades, each of these agencies of Love's expression have undergone slow but radical changes.
Hospitals, have gone from places of charity to high finance corporations with billion dollar budgets. High paid CEOs have replaced the mission-focused administrators of the past. In for profit health care companies the Wall Street ticker is more important than the EKG strip.
Some futurists, looking centuries down the road, doubt that humanity as we know it will endure. There are those who believe in the Apocalypse. More likely, humanity will decline because people will increasingly turn human tasks over to robots.
What form will human energy, and caregiving, take one hundred, five hundred or one thousand years for now?
The biggest reason to care about that now is that so much change has already begun.
In Japan, robot caregivers made their appearance more than five years ago. These "caregivers" were created to replace children who no longer visited their nursing home bound parents. Programmed to express kind words, warm reassurance and sweet expressions of affections they were so effective they are still in use.
Frightening and demeaning as all of this may seem, these kinds of changes provoke useful questions. What is it that is unique about the human expression of God's Love?
The answer, of course, centers around realtionship. We can program a computer to tell us what we want. But, God is absent from such a relationship because Love is absent.
Those who have begun to devalue the role of Love in our technology-driven society may do well to recall that technology is not the reason for living. Love is.
-Reverend Erie Chapman.
Journal of Sacred Work 
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