NOT by me -- an LLM experiment

I was reading a thread about how writers and college writing instructors can detect text that comes from LLMs -- Large Language Models, i.e. AI. So for an experiment I have ChatGPT the following prompt: 

Write a New Year's Day blogpost in the style of the perverse lutheran.blogspot.com. Dismiss the idea of New Year resolutions and instead write about reliance on God's will. Use imagery from anti-Trump folks and the gospel of Matthew.

Here's what it came up with. What do you think? (I'll tell you what I think at the end.)

January 1 arrives like a reset button everyone insists on pressing too hard. Gym memberships bloom, planners open with a crackle of ambition, and the secular liturgy of “new year, new you” is chanted as if enough willpower might finally save us. It’s all very earnest. It’s also mostly bunk.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they aim too low. It’s that they aim in the wrong direction. They assume the universe is waiting for us to get organized, that history will finally straighten itself out if we stop eating bread or start waking up at 5:30 a.m. They baptize self-improvement and call it hope.

Meanwhile, outside the sanctuary of self-help, the streets are still full. Cardboard signs sag in the cold. Pink hats are stuffed back into closets but not forgotten. The chants echo anyway—against cruelty, against lies, against the cheap salvation of strongmen and red hats promising glory. Anti-Trump folks know something the resolution-makers forget: the world is not fixed by better habits alone. Something deeper is wrong, and something deeper is required.

Matthew’s Gospel does not begin with a to-do list. It begins with a genealogy—messy, compromised, full of people who did not keep their resolutions and were never asked to. It moves quickly to a baby born under empire, to refugees fleeing violence, to a voice crying in the wilderness, “Repent.” Not: optimize. Not: resolve. Repent. Turn. Be re-oriented.

Jesus in Matthew does not say, “Blessed are those who finally get their act together.” He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the mourners, the meek, the ones who know they are not in control. He tells us not to worry about tomorrow, not because tomorrow will be fine, but because worrying is a lousy god. “Your heavenly Father knows what you need.” That is not advice for productivity; it is a confession of dependence.

New Year’s resolutions are a small, private Tower of Babel—our annual attempt to climb our way into a better future by stacking days and habits just right. And like Babel, they assume God is impressed by height. Matthew’s Gospel suggests God is impressed by mercy. By bread broken and shared. By enemies loved. By lilies that do not hustle.

So on this New Year’s Day, skip the resolutions. They will forgive you; they always do. Instead, stand still long enough to hear the quieter word: “Follow me.” Not after you improve. Not once you’ve figured it out. Follow—into uncertainty, into protest and prayer, into a world still aching under bad rulers and worse idols.

The year will unfold whether we resolve or not. Empires will strut. Crowds will gather. Signs will be lifted. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Christ will be where Matthew always finds him: not crowning our plans, but interrupting them. Not endorsing our willpower, but undoing it with grace.

That, inconveniently and perversely enough, is good news.

What I think: 

It doesn't sound like me or my writing at The Perverse Lutheran. It lacks the wandering, wondering quality of me starting out and not knowing where I'm going to end up. It's a little too tight. 

Certainly pulls in biblical imagery and mixes it up with anti-Trump political images. Maybe too glibly. I do like the idea of New Year's resolutions being "a small, private Tower of Babel." I wonder if ChatGPT stole that from another blog or sermon published online. Actually I think a lot of what I thought at first was pretty good is a regurgitated mix from human writers. Might even be traceable through search engines. 

But -- I've heard many less coherent sermons. 

Celebrating

Last night while carrying out the garbage, I thought about celebrating a pagan Christmas. The walk from the backdoor to the garbage carts in the alley took me past the blue lights woven through the grapevine on my fence. Like most Christmas lights these days, they're LEDs and quite bright, a fiery gas-burner blue. 

And quite tasteful, if I do say so myself. 

Over on the next block, there's a celebration of electric Christmas lighting going on, spreading from house to house with trees wrapped in red and white and arches of light over the sidewalk. "Too much," some would say, shaking their heads, because what do we live for (to paraphrase Mr. Bennet), but to judge our neighbors? 

So go ahead and judge me: I did some serious binging of Hallmark-style Christmas movies earlier this month. Enough to get knit one complicated cabled and three colorwork hats knitted, Christmas gifts all. You need a movie you can watch with only half your mind so that you can keep one eye on the pattern chart. These generic Christmas romances (and there are dozens of them on Netflix) feature very circumscribed Christmas celebrations. "What's your favorite family tradition?" one lead actor will ask the other as they discover one another's better self. The answer invariably involves snow or hot cocoa, family, and a special Christmas tree ornament. But sadly, these things have been inexplicably lost although there's a hint that they might -- just might! -- return at the movie's end. 

I learned while growing up that this sort of sentimental Christmas was, if not hollow, less important than the "real meaning of Christmas" which happened at church with Baby Jesus and traditional religious carols (definitely no chestnuts roasting on open fires). This was a lesson reinforced by participation in traditional Christmas Eve services with my Lutheran elementary school classmate. It continues, since in adult life, including this year, I've ended up as one of the teachers guiding students through this ritual. At some point this evening, during such a service, I'll stop and pray that the ritual -- the music and poetry, scripture and songs -- stays with these kids and somehow shines on into their adult lives. 

But gosh, I could go for a bonfire this Christmas. Or some dancing around the Christmas tree, fueled by spiced grog and good whiskey. Less metaphor, more serious yelling against the darkness. Fire up the Christmas lights, all the colors you've got. Turn on the blowers that populate front lawns with Santas riding on elephants and snowmen ten feet high bobbing in the winter wind. Feast on honey-sweetened Lebkuchen and cinnamon-roasted pecans. Revel in the now, enjoy the secular.

Poets and others fond of paradox make much of God becoming human, of Jesus being born to die and embracing human suffering. A lot of me is wrapped up in that truth -- just read my November post. But there's a lot to be said for letting in the primitive celebration of Christmas -- stuff Christianity borrowed and good taste struggles to tame. Not just a single star, but vast starry heavens. Not just a flickering light in the manger but electrical energy powering lights all around the neighborhood. The seasonal return of longer days and shorter nights. Dinners and desserts and Santa suits and cornball music. 

Pagan is a stretch for this perverse Lutheran. But less theologizing, more staying in the moment -- I'm going to try that on this year and join in as heaven and nature sing all kinds of songs.

Merry Christmas

Candlelit vigil

Last week I attended a vigil at my church. It was a time to sit quietly in a darkened, mostly empty sanctuary, to pray, to contemplate, to sit with a recent and very sad death. 

I went up to the front to light a candle. I stood it up in the dish of sand, with other candles that had been lit and placed there by people who had come to the vigil earlier in the evening. Then I went and sat next to a friend, in silence.

I thought about lots of things, one of them being candles. As I had walked to the front of church, past the tall Christ candle, lit at baptisms and funerals, words from the Easter Vigil service had suddenly popped into my mind, almost as if they'd been spoken aloud: "The light of Christ rising again." 

Huh. I lit my candle from others in the bowl and carefully placed it in the sand, arching my wrist, careful not to scorch the sleeve of my winter jacket.

These skinny white candles were the same kind we use at Easter Vigil, to pass the light of Christ from person to person through the congregation. And those words? It seemed to me like there should be more, like I'd forgotten the next part. Rising again for what? But apparently that's all there is to it. "The light of Christ rising again."

Practical churchwoman that I am -- or is because I'm impractical, I'm curious -- I thought about when else we use these white tapers. Actually, it was just a few weeks ago. Candles had been lit on All Saints Sunday, commemorating those who had died in the previous year. So here they were again, flickering, shining in memory of another saint, a new addition to the roster. 

My mind moved on to this family's loss, the hugeness of it. The deeply broken hearts, personal faith that I know all too well is upended by grief and loss and disaster. Inevitably, because it's a lifelong habit to ask, I thought about where was God in all this, and how I cannot answer that question.

I came back to the candles and when we use them and remembered suddenly that we would be lighting them on Christmas Eve. Yes, at my Lutheran church, we sing "Silent Night" by candlelight at the end of the late service. It's what we come for. It's sentimental. We even sing the first stanza in German, because ... well, for me, because my grandmother taught it to me. It's quite beautiful, as "the dawn of redeeming grace" breaks upon us in "Jesus, Lord, at your birth."

Christmas is a very different thing, I thought. No ideas about death running through Christmas, not like Easter or All Saints. Except, like all of us, Jesus was born to die. Mary brought forth her firstborn son safely, something that could not be assumed would happen (can't be assumed even now). She held him in her arms, watched him grow, and thirty years later, buried him. Yes, Jesus had a remarkable career of teaching, working miracles,  making disciples and upsetting authority. But I thought to myself in that darkened church, surely he had times when stuff happened, friends died, injustice was done and he, disturbed, angry, confused, asked where was God in all this? He was fully human. What do we think he thought about as he gazed into campfires late at night by the Sea of Galilee? Maybe the same kind of stuff that we toss and turn with late at night, staring at the heavens through the bedroom ceiling. 

Candles are for keeping vigil. The electric ones on my windowsills during Advent and Christmas say -- I don't know exactly. Keep hope alive? Watch for the morning? Or just, people live here, and through the darkness, the light of Christ keeps vigil with them.