Last year, shortly after my father died, I opened up his copy of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila that he had given to me years ago. I chuckled as I looked at the blue pen underlining various passages in the text. Unlike my father, I dislike writing in books in pen or using highlighters. I use pencil because I find it less distracting. There on the pages of the first few chapters were the unmistakable blue lines of his fountain pen. They bled through the page to the other side in some places, which is exactly why I don’t like to use pen in books.
With him gone, the pen-soaked pages are treasures. As I turned the page, I stopped as I gazed at my father’s handwriting in a margin. Tears came to my eyes as I could see before me the evidence of his life through his own hand. It took me losing my dad to really start to understand the importance of our handwriting and how it is a tool that connects us to the material world and to past and future generations.
God made us body and soul. We are not pure spirit like the angels. We are not pure body like the animals. We are a harmony of the two. A harmony that was deeply wounded by the Fall, but it is meant to be a harmony. In a digital age, we are experiencing a divorce from this reality. Everything is supposed to be stored in the cloud. Our photos, memories, and our lives are reduced to 0s and 1s in some ethereal digital reality. We have in many ways blindly walked into this mentality because we’ve allowed certain philosophies and beliefs to encroach upon the truth that we are body and soul. We have allowed too much of ourselves to be digitized. Where will the memories be for our children and loved ones when we are gone? Will they only be digital and have no material quality? Will they simply be cold pixels on a screen that they can’t touch?
This growing sense that handwriting is an important part of retaining our humanity in a digital age was driven home for me this past weekend while I chatted with a high school teacher at a potluck. She told me that her high school students have abhorrent penmanship. They were never taught handwriting in school, so by the time they get to her, they have barely handwritten anything. In order to drive a wedge between her students and cheating through using AI systems, she has started requiring handwritten papers. The challenge is on both sides. Her students struggle to handwrite the assignments while she needs a cipher to decode their poor penmanship. Her intuition is correct, however. Something is being lost by future generations who never handwrite anything.
One of the things I remember most fondly about my late father was his handwriting. He was known to handwrite hundreds of pages of legal briefs when he was practicing law. He wrote with expressive long cursive loops across yellow legal pads with his fountain pen or a felt-tip pen. He inherited his handwriting from his mother who wrote in the same manner. It was a joke within the family that we all had to work hard to decipher their cursive. My dad’s paralegal was the only living person who could fully break the code of his cursive penmanship. I have a couple notes from him that he wrote to me when I was in boot camp for the Navy. They are prized possessions on this side of eternity. They matter more to me than all of the emails and essays he wrote online. His handwriting connects me to him in a deeper way than anything on the screen can accomplish.
We are losing profoundly important aspects of our lives through the ceding of more and more ground to the technocrats. We are losing a deeper connection with previous generations and future generations. I was greatly moved when I saw my paternal grandfather’s handwritten draft card for World War II recently. This is not mere sentimentality. It is the blending of the material and the immaterial that we are called to as rational embodied spirits. Our handwriting, eye contact, touch, and the physical evidence of our presence matters. Catholics are a people of holy relics, whether body parts or items owned by the saints. We understand that the physical world is intimately connected to the supernatural world. A digital Tower of Babel will always be false precisely because it rejects the material aspect of our humanity and supplants the supernatural through a false, disembodied utopia.
Don’t wait until your father, mother, brother, sister, grandparent, friend, or other loved one dies. Start creating physical mementos to leave behind. One of the things I have started doing again to push against AI is to handwrite notes to friends and family. It is a small way for me to take time to let people know I am thankful for them and that I love them. It takes effort that an email or social media post does not, but it will last long after the pixels have changed shape to form the next email and my words are quickly forgotten.
As someone who has lost a parent, I can attest to the fact that I don’t search out my dad’s emails. I did initially, but I don’t regularly. I look for his physical photo on the table next to my prayer chair. Every time I walk out the door, I glance at the icon of Our Lady of Tenderness and the Christ Child that was on his bed when he died. I look at his handwriting when I really miss him. To fully live the human experience, I look to physical signs of his presence while he was here on earth, and I turn to him in prayer, asking for his intercession and praying for his soul.
We are still intimately connected as members of the Mystical Body, even though I can no longer see him. Whether he is with the Church Suffering or the Church Triumphant, we are united in one Mystical Body.
As Catholics we are called to prudently discern the signs of the times and whether or not a technology fully conforms to our God-given humanity. We should not be so quick to jettison ways of doing things practiced by generations before us for millennia. Handwriting is also a tool, like using a computer. It is the use of paper and pen, but one is more naturally connected to the body-spirit dimension of our humanity, while the other lessens it ever so slightly over time. In the long run, those ever-so-slight changes have resulted in Gen Alpha being unable to handwrite anything. The generation after them may not experience the gift of opening a letter or book filled with the handwriting of a loved one who died. What a profound tragedy. May this realization propel us to live in a more human manner as both body and soul.
Photo by Ire Photocreative on Unsplash
