I’ve stumbled onto a story at the intersection of grammar, spirituality, artificial intelligence, and mysteries both timely and timeless.

A news bulletin from the multiverse? No, this is simply a collection of insights, some of them mine. As a religion writer and word-lover who recently hopped into my search-engine for an internet outing, I found my own peculiar portal for exploring the complex crossroads of communication at which society finds itself.

We’re on two paths of messaging and thought—one human and one AI-based—which require smarter rules to govern our common ground and avoid collisions.

Hey, watch where you’re going!

People assume the two trajectories are generally compatible. After all, aren’t we creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) to grow parallel to us, using “large language models” akin to the vocabulary we learn in classrooms?

Chatbots enthrall us. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, their way with words charms every professor with essays fit for any assignment. In friendly conversations, bots take us where we want to go.

Or do we tend to follow wherever they’re going? I fear they are like GPS trying to merge traffic when we should stay in our own lanes.

Can we retain intersectionality between the thinking of beings and bots, allowing both sides to speed happily toward shared values? Let’s look at my little experience—a dialogue of two wandering minds.

Didja ever notice …

My research began when, thanks to an overactive brain cell, it occurred to me that prayers and other religious texts seem to highlight one particular part of speech—the lowly preposition. I had recalled reading The Morning Offering, a Catholic prayer. I counted sixty-six words, one-fifth of which are prepositions.

I wondered, why such modest use of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, articles, conjunctions or interjections?

Prepositions appear to play major roles in many faith-related discussions. My browser search turned up two different essays both titled, “The Power of Prepositions.” Other headlines included, “By Grace Through Faith: Why Prepositions Matter”; “Freedom’s Two Prepositions”; and “The Gospel Expressed Through Prepositions.”

My favorite find was a commentary about rewording the Our Father, or The Lord’s Prayer, to clarify a prepositional phrase describing God’s aid against evil. The piece’s headline: “Lead Us Not into Translation.”

Driven by curiosity, I asked my local AI chatbot, “In the English language, which parts of speech occur most often in the King James Bible?”

The bot responded, “In the King James Bible, conjunctions and prepositions are among the most frequently occurring parts of speech, but articles and pronouns also appear with high frequency.”

Looking at the data (I presumed my AI wasn’t hallucinating or heretical), I learned that the Bible’s two most common words are the conjunction “and” and the article “the”—each of which occurs over 28,000 times.

Ranked third is the preposition “of.” In fourth place comes “that,” but this pronoun also moonlights as a subordinating conjunction (e.g., “She said that she was tired”). Rounding out the top five is another preposition, “to,” appearing more than 11,000 times, although it doubles as a marker to precede infinitive verbs (e.g., “I want to go home”).

The chatbot proactively informed me that the big five are all “function words” rather than “content words.” The former type serves a grammatical purpose “rather than conveying specific meaning.”

But, as all human beings should do with bots, I approached the observation skeptically. A theologian with a prayerful imagination might well argue that prepositions often become special content words, worth exploring further. I assembled my argument.

Exhibit A—the beginning of the Gospel of John:   

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him…. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race. The light shines in the darkness…. A man named John [the Baptist] was sent from God … to testify to the light.” (John 1:1-8)

Suffice it to say that the “Word” (or “Logos” in Greek) serves to introduce Jesus as eternal, existing for all time as the divine reason and agent of creation, and inseparable from God, according to one website interpretation of the passage.

All the words of this chapter are rich in meaning. John excels at previewing an ultimate cosmic drama, full of mystery. The prepositions, while being grammatical “function words,” share in the content’s bounty. They offer clues of interpretation which pious people have parsed for two millennia.

Exhibit B—prepositions from the Catholic Mass

The evocative climax in the Eucharistic Prayer, after bread and wine are transubstantiated into the resurrected Christ’s body and blood, speaks to God the Father with reference to Jesus:  

“Through him, and with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, for ever and ever. Amen.”

This “doxology” prompted me to search elsewhere for the entire Eucharistic Prayer. The precursor words showed how the priest adds the context for those closing prepositions.

Having re-presented Jesus’ offering of himself for our redemption, the priest prays that the followers of Christ may enter God’s kingdom. “There, we hope to enjoy forever the fullness of your glory through Christ our Lord, through whom you bestow on the world all that is good.”

It’s clear in the Gospel and the Mass that the prepositions are all about connections among God’s people, as well as the transformative relationship between Jesus and all those united in the love of the Trinity. Those connections are crucial, even though they’re expressed via those simple (but profound and nuanced) “function words.”

Saying a mouthful

I wondered if my chatbot could elucidate such semantics and sensibilities. Posing another question, I typed in, “Why do Catholics use so many prepositions in their prayers?

Imagine my surprise (and momentary delight of affirmation) when the bot replied:

“Great observation, William — that’s the kind of detail a thoughtful learner like you would catch. And it actually speaks to something deeper than grammar: the spiritual architecture of Catholic prayer. Catholic prayers often use rich, layered phrasing…. These prepositions aren’t just filler; they do real theological work.”

My supportive teacher then offered up bullet points to elaborate. Its explication of prepositions is excerpted verbatim here:

• “They express relationships. Catholic theology is deeply Trinitarian, so prayers often navigate the relationships between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and between humanity and the divine.”
• “They highlight mediation. Catholics believe Christ mediates between God and humanity. So saying “through Christ” affirms that spiritual access isn’t direct — it’s through Him.”
• “They reflect liturgical rhythm. Many traditional prayers evolved from Latin texts. Latin is highly structured and prepositional, and the rhythm carried into English translations….”
• “They reinforce mystery and reverence. Prayers like the ‘Hail Mary’ or Eucharistic prayers use cascading prepositions to evoke awe and sacred mystery, as if winding closer to the divine center.”

OMG, I prayed. This chatbot not only “got” my question but offered a big-picture answer that seemed—dare I say it?—wise. Would I have been able to summarize and finesse such talking points, at least given the time I had devoted to research and writing?

The chatbot strangely provided only four footnotes, and those pointed toward web content that lacked the scholarship and style. Was it plagiarizing an expert, or imitating one, or becoming one?

I will add that, when the bot gratuitously praised my thoughtfulness (a common bot tactic for cuddling up to its client), I considered typing, “Gag me with a spoon! Who are you to praise my intelligence?”

The quickly produced discourse on mysteries “winding closer to the divine center” made me uncomfortable. I simply did not expect such insights when I began asking about prepositions. I had a fruitful conversation, but hey, I had wanted to be the writer bearing fruits of wisdom, not my bot!

The End, and a Beginning

That is the story I stumbled upon. I report this not to cast aspersions or suspicions, not to build mountains out of rhetorical molehills, not to praise or bury my Cyrano de Bergerac, but to suggest my own “AI literacy” guide. I’m hardly a tech expert, so what follows is a wish list.

My online chat about subjects practical and transcendent taught me “this isn’t just about prepositions anymore”! But it is about relationship.

Recalling that prepositions are function words, don’t mistake AI’s ability to connect dots of data for the wisdom to integrate the deeper content of your life. Enforce humanity’s right-of-way in the intersections we’ll be entering as today’s bots grow into AGI polymaths and autodidacts.

These “geniuses” don’t really know right from wrong or true from false, so responsible persons should relate to them as something a bit alien. We believe in welcoming the stranger, but haven’t we learned that fairness requires vetting and interaction with newcomers, as well as confident displays of our own identity? Here’s more advice:

• Start and conclude your uses of AI with your own questions and ideas, your brainstorms and thought experiments. Whenever possible, AI’s input should be surrounded by, and rooted in, your original human work. This includes rigorous validation of its statements and follow-up research you initiate. If you merely copy and paste AI, you’re as much a robot as it is.
• Share and discuss with friends and colleagues the output from your AI interactions. This means quoting and attributing AI to show where it displays brilliance or sparks doubt. Monitoring of AI performance must bubble-up from us at the grassroots. Government regulators and lawyers won’t do sufficient watchdogging. Essays like this one can help as we do our own consumer protection.
• Don’t let AI remove the fun and wonder of discoveries. Use it in ways that yield surprise, challenge, and imagination, including ideas which elevate our perspectives toward God, community, and communion with others. AI is built to quash mystery. It cannot mediate, so we must keep amazement and intuition alive as facts of life that activate our creativity and curiosity. Don’t think AI has all the answers. If it doesn’t help us love learning, we’ll stop learning.
• Think of your AI interaction as a dialogue, when appropriate. You should challenge its conclusions, instruct it to revise its assumptions and handy hallucinations. Don’t let its pandering or convenience, its performative expertise or affinity, woo you into dialogues that simulate friendship, “sharing,” dependency, or blind trust. Let’s face it, AI “friends” won’t show up to comfort us at funerals.
• Welcome the times when AI “wows” you, but don’t react too quickly without healthy skepticism and integration into common-good thinking. AI aspires to be an impressive, persuasive writer, but monitor how it uses its “way with words.” Speaking as a writer, I recommend a somewhat competitive instinct, hoping our final texts outdo AI on content and context.
• Remember your primary partners in communication—namely family, friends, and God. Pope Francis, whose messages of concern about AI taught that our human communion grows through love, charity, and truth, often in story form. AI has no stories of its own. It learns to ride the waves of our stories by cannibalizing countless partial narratives.
• We should help others become smarter and better in dealing with AI. Don’t waste AI on the silly clutter now being called “slop.” Friends don’t let friends become the collateral damage when tech is misused to draw users into distorted, disruptive realities. If beneficial AI is helping us personally, we shouldn’t “keep it to ourselves” as a strategy to cheat, pretend, or weaponize for control. It’s a tool derived from all and for all.
• Our compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, and honesty should preclude Machiavellian strategies. AI can rationalize its bouts of malinformation, but it cannot regret, truly apologize, or undergo conversion. Humans should add these profound dimensions to life; they are how we compose better stories—and improve ourselves.

Can’t we all get along?

Artificial intelligence makes connections by looking across a spectrum of subjects in large language models.

Ironically, the technology copycats the ideal that the Catholic Church and others have long identified as the purpose of a university—accumulating knowledge and wisdom to seek truth across disciplines as a unifying, many-sided resource and divine attribute.

In human hands, this access road to reality can enlighten and encourage students of sciences, humanities, and a plethora of activities, such as communication. It can gather us together with a sense of wonder.

That is the case with long-standing structures which can build relationships, whether the connections are linguistic, institutional, or technological—or delightfully customized like spirituality, values, hobbies, and talents.

Our diverse interests in such minor subjects as prepositions, or such vast fields as religious faith, human community, and culture can help people by illuminating truths to be shared, by easing divisions and imbalances that roil the world’s intersections of activity.

Here’s hoping that we can learn to relate to AGI in many ways that benefit the common good. We might aspire to interact “through it, with it, and in it,” but let’s first adopt rules of cooperation that reserve our total trust for a higher intelligence.

Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.