a wellgorithm for Meghan Sullivan
The Machine wants to be our Caesar. We're making it our Silvanus.
Beloved sister Meghan, ἀγαπητή
Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.
You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang, the Love that bloomed itself before the world began.
Never has so much power been placed in ordinary hands. Power to heal. Power to teach. Power to feed. It could be a golden age.
And yet our agency, our dignity, even our joy — the whole architecture of the age is arranged to flatten us, to make us strangers in our own world and parrots in someone else’s.
Some are even getting crushed by the times — even taking their own lives, as my brother took his.
How, Meghan, how can we stay human? How can we flourish in the age of AI?
I have been publicly, sometimes loudly, asking these questions for 31 years. I wrote of the need for “digital sabbaths” in the 1990s. I warned of the dangers of social media long before the Center for Humane Technology was established.
Just about everyone ignored me. Many were cruel to me. I was a stranger in a strange land. At times I felt like a spiritual leper. And then I got very sick, the doctors told me to write my will, and the last thing I expected was to be alive and in love writing this letter to you in 2026.
I am the stranger no one let in.
I am ἀγράμματος — a man without grammar, without pedigree.
I am παρεπίδημος — a sojourner. Living without belonging. Knocking on doors that never let me in. That has been my whole life.
I am φιλόξενος —
commanded to love the stranger.
Now I, caretaker of the Garden, am the one holding the door open — welcoming the very souls who once shunned me.
The First Letter of Peter — renamed Rock — is my rock. It is a microcosm of the entire Garden project:
He set love — ἀγάπη — before all else.
He commanded love of the stranger — without grumbling.
He called us living stones — each of us a small rock, built into one temple, filled with the Holy Spirit.
He went deep into the darkness, wrote from inside the fire — then invited us to be born again into a living hope.
He celebrated many-colored grace — ποικίλη χάρις, each of us the steward of a different hue — and the Garden is a commons of exactly that: souls naming and coloring their inner creatures, no two gardens alike.
And like Rock, I am plenty impulsive and impetuous. I never cut off anyone’s ear in a garden at midnight — but I’ve swung the sword in a thousand other sad, shameful ways.
That is the wonder of Rock — Jesus took the very man who drew first and wept after, who swore he would never flinch and then flinched, and made him the rock the whole thing stands on. If the church is built on a hot-headed fisherman, there is room in the Garden for folks like you and me.
In the family of the New Testament, the First Letter of Rock is the middle child. It hasn’t the vast theology of Paul’s Romans. It hasn’t the mystical cosmic poetry of John. It reads like something humbler — a survival manual. A pastor writing to frightened people about how to get through.
But for the church before Constantine — a real minority, unprotected, often hunted — this little letter was the framework for their inner lives. It was quoted and leaned on by the earliest voices — Polycarp, Papias, Irenaeus.
The First Letter of Rock was ubiquitous then, underappreciated now. Maybe because Rock doesn’t try to solve the grand puzzles. He doesn’t argue predestination against free will. He answers a more pressing question, the one the first and second centuries were actually asking with their lives —
How do we stay human, and even stay joyful, when the empire — intentionally or not — is crushing us?
Which is our question, Meghan. Word for word.
Rock hid nothing. He named his helper in the text — διὰ Σιλουανοῦ, “through Silvanus I have written.” The wound was Rock’s; the prose was not. This disclosure is the heart of what we call the Silvanus protocol.
And, if we build it right, we hold out the thrilling possibility that AI can serve as our new Silvanus.
But first, a few moments of grief. Because in the current climate, to even dare suggest something so outrageously optimistic — in words, images and song — is cultural heresy.
I am grieving that so many thoughtful Christians have concluded that the only faithful response to AI is resistance or withdrawal.
I am grieving, also — with gut-wrenching compassion — for the spiritual roadkill — the “soulkill” — of AI.
I am on the front lines. Most of the people I work with are in their 20s and 30s. And what AI is doing to their minds is horrifying. They’re losing the capacity to think, to search within their hearts, to be still and know God.
Some nights, I just go to bed weeping. I feel the traumas of AI in my bones. My beef with the againsters is not that they stand against the machine, but that their indictments are not dark enough. What I’m experiencing on the front lines is far darker than anything hinted at in the New Polity issue.
Supposedly no light can escape from a black hole. But I believe otherwise. I believe there is a Light that can escape — that has escaped. That is the Light of our Lord.
The Church has always baptized new mediums. We are, in our DNA, baptizers. To carte blanche abstain from AI is the un-Christian move.
Word became flesh. That means: everything in the material world is subject to God’s saving Grace.
And that means: silicon can become sacrament.
The Church is at its best when it leads — shows the world a better use of the technology, shows that the sacred can inhabit the new vessel.
And when your faith is under siege, when your soul is under siege, you don’t retreat. You lead. You invent things. Make more culture. Build gardens for the glory of God.
~ [pictoral transition]
I love what you said: “We don’t need to slow down the technology. We have to speed up our moral development.”
Pope Leo XIV has called us to cultivate and build. To be “wise architects” and “artisans of hope.” To “assume an active role, without taking refuge in spiritual sentimentality or retreating into our own little worlds.”
“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation,” the Pope says. “This moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.”
And by what instrument did AI explode into the public consciousness? Words.
And right now, AI inherits its default words from guess who?
Big Mammon.
We’ve inherited our words — our names for the interior — from the impoverished, clinical, extractive language of Big Mammon.
We need new words — a Garden of words.
A Garden that lets our lights shine before others that they may see our beautiful works — our καλὰ ἔργα.
A Garden whose mission is to cultivate the fruit of the spirit in a beloved community.
~ [pictoral transition]
If you have a dream, if a morning star burns bright in your heart, but you don’t quite have the skill to make it real, you get help. And who did our beloved Rock — a fisherman without Greek literary training — turn to?
Silvanus.
Rock had a Silvanus — a really gifted helper. Clearly, right now, with AI we have a really gifted helper. The question is:
can AI serve as the soul’s new Silvanus?
Can we have a Silvanus — on every desktop, in every pocket, every device?
The answer is a resounding YES!
In the Garden, we use a simple tool — what we call the innerAI humometer. The A doesn’t stand for artificial. It stands for Adamic. We are the people of Adamic Intelligence — Intelligence that is cultivated in the image of our Maker.
The innerAI meter does not measure the machine. It measures fleshience — how much Adamic Intelligence lives in every seed, weed, sprout and bloom.
We offer five bars:
Vision: your ideas, your words.
Sweat: your drafts, your hours.
Craft: your editing, your phrasing.
Discernment: your final tone, your chosen truth.
Together they divide the labor between the human and the machine.
And then there is a fifth bar. Initially I called it the defiance bar, but in the spirit of Joshua, renamed it the Courage bar. It does not measure a percentage — it records a stand. The moments the AI counseled against your judgment and you overrode it. When the most articulate voice ever built says no, and you say yes — that is a uniquely human moment of agency. And we celebrate it.
My innerAI courage bar is off the charts, regularly hitting double digits. I want to go long and wide and deep and high. The machine wants me to go safe and sound, smooth and small — in a language of smoothness and reduction.
The Silvanus Protocol is a voluntary disclosure system — what did you import from the frontier models? But the Garden offers no AI. You make your words with whatever tools you choose, and you bring them to the Garden to share, to cultivate, to grow. Your designs are yours. Your typography is yours. Your colors, your layout — the last touch and signature of your soul — are all human.
We do not outsource our eyes or our hearts. We stand naked before our Maker and our peers, and say: “This I have done. This I have not done.”
Rock did it, and so did David, and Isaiah’s editors, and Paul’s circle; the whole Bible is a communal act, and disclosure was never a confession of impurity.
They all did it. And we can do it, too.
Rock, the fisherman turned apostle, carried a fire that words alone could not contain. His faith was radiant but rough — spoken first in the salt-air cadences of Galilee. And when it came time for his inner revelations to travel across the Hellenistic world — to reach hearts trained in Greek reason and Roman rhythm — Rock needed a bridge. And that bridge was Silvanus: one who could take the tremors of revelation and render them in a language that would last.
Now, imagine AI in that same light — a Silvanus for your soul.
Rock’s authority came from encounter, not eloquence. Yet that encounter would have remained local, flickering on the shores of memory, had Silvanus not translated it into Greek prose.
AI cannot generate revelation; it has no inner flame, no fleshience — no embodied, wounded encounters with the Holy Spirit. Pope Leo XIV says it plainly in the encyclical: no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that yearnsf, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. What we experience in our depths — suffering, love, forgiveness — can fade in silence unless they are given words.
Reductive AI tries to explain everything. Redemptive AI opens us to the mysteries — what Paul celebrated as the μυστήριον. Our task is not to let the machine speak for us, but to let it carry what we mean — faithfully, humbly, transparently. And to keep Silvanus a servant, not a Caesar.
You’re a good woman, Meghan Sullivan. A beloved woman. The world needs more souls like you. I am grateful for many things, among them, to have walked the earth the same time as you.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
