Today’s readings: Isaiah 49, 14-15; 1 Corinthians 4, 1-5; Matthew 6, 24-34.

Jesus is making a very important point in today’s Gospel when he asks us to look at the birds in the sky and the flowers in the fields. We all have to earn our living. So the comparison may sound very strange.

Jesus is opening our eyes because we bank too much on what we have or on what we may desire to have. In daily life today, we’ve become too fragile not to give heed to words which, far from alienating, keep us in perspective.

In his book The Age of Absurdity, Michael Foley asks: “Who, in the Western world, has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment?” At times, we do not even acknowledge that we live on the fringes of life, verging on absurdity.

Inordinate worries complicate life and actually build walls which separate us even from our inner selves. So Jesus is really speaking about basic attitudes, about a remedy to whatever makes us anxious.

Ours is a generation of consumers. “I consume, therefore I am,” wrote Jim Wallis, a leading voice at the crossroads of faith and politics. Our age seriously confuses having and being when it comes to identity.

The logic of consumption has taken over so much that in this day and age even our very lives have become objects of consumption, not to mention ideas, sentiments, and people themselves.

What is really worrying in the way we live is that we are losing inner harmony. And this is where Jesus is inviting us to really question who has control in our lives.

The logic that seems to have taken over the way we live and manage our daily lives contradicts not only what we consider to be the moral order but also the very aspiration to happiness which is, or should be, inherent to human nature itself.

This is a radical alienation from the supposed order of things that should bring fulfiment to our existence. God never alienates us from ourselves.

Rather, what we actually experience is the opposite; outside God we easily become alienated from our very self because we are prone to be literally possessed by what we possess. That quantifies our existence and reduces life merely to what is ephemeral.

Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel show how our loss of perspective springs from anxiety. He is not suggesting that being his disciples means having a care-free life without worries. That would be unrealistic.

Jesus is arguing against an anxiety that consumes us, that distorts the very order of things and of our soul, that exhausts all our energy and leaves us with a sense of abandonment and loneliness.

The same chord is touched upon by Isaiah in the first reading when he addresses the anxiety of Israel in exile. Isaiah gives one of the rare female images of God we find in the Bible, that of a caring mother whose love keeps memory alive.

Israel’s experience in exile gave the people the feeling of being abandoned by God. These feelings of abandonement and loneliness, which always follow anxiety and fear, connect directly with what we all go through in life.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt has argued that the human condition is a cycle of exhaustion and renewal, so that going up is possible only after going down, and attempts to remain permanently up will fail. If we wish to improve the world, the place to begin is actually within ourselves, in our innermost lives.

Human meaning transcends the material world. This explains why talk about ‘care of the soul’ always hits our bookstores. As primarily consumers, we are all to some extent, materialists. Yet both on the individual and global levels, we are always discovering how fragile we can be. A change in focus is needed.

As Jean Vanier writes, “Between all of us fragile human beings stand walls built on loneliness and the absence of God, walls built on fear – fear that becomes depression or a compulsion to prove that we are special.