Reading Francis

You can spend a whole day chewing on today’s Gospel passage, from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:24-34). Let me pull out one thread:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or drink,
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

“So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’
or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’
All these things the pagans seek.
Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.

“But seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be given you besides.
Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.
Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”

Today the element that jumps out is the part about worrying about your next meal and outfit. While I need to hear that often, as both a planner who trusts more in my 401K than in divine providence to provide my needs, and as someone who really likes food, what jumps out at me today is the connection to our cultural obsession with maximizing our health.

Derek Thompson has a great essay on this trend, which I’ll post in the comments. His thesis is that there is a connection between our era being both healthier and lonelier than prior times. As we rely on gamified tools like wearable sensors to show us how we can live ever healthier lives, from a bodily standpoint, we are pulled into ourselves and away from social engagements that might be good for our emotional health, but often at the cost of some less-than-optimally healthy behavior. (Sidenote: There is, oddly, a Christopher Walken beer commercial that illustrates this perfectly in which a youngish man declines an offer to go out with friends to a concert until Walken talks him out of it.)

You might say, rightly, that neither Derek Thompson not Christopher Walken are advocating that we seek first the Kingdom of God. Fair enough. But by arguing that maximizing sleep, diet and exercise isn’t the sole purpose of life, and suggesting that relationships with others might be at least as important, they invite the Big Question: what exactly is our purpose here?

While I haven’t done the deep dive on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas yet, let me pull from paragraph 50 for his answer to the Big Question:

“At the heart of the Christian understanding of the human person lies the great biblical affirmation that men and women are created in the image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26-27) of the Triune God. Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation.”

For Leo and for the Church, relationships are the point.