Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 
Isaiah 55:1-3 | Romans 8:35, 37-39 | Matthew 14:13-21

On Romans 8:35-39

Normal human experience seems to be one of separation. I am not you, and you are not me. Often, we are opposed – two people can disagree and can do so violently. We do not appear to be connected because each of us is living in our lives in an apparent state of disconnection. Further enhancing this separation, we live in separate interior worlds – what preoccupies you? It may be keeping you from enjoying life as it unfolds. Of course, our nation’s politics show us daily, sometimes hourly, how we are disconnected, separate, and divided. All these felt experiences of separation reinforce the grand illusion that God is not with us, within us, or one with us.

St. Paul flatly contradicts the illusion of separation in his mystical hymn to divine love at the end of Romans chapter 8: “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?...I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We are never separate from the love of God revealed to us in Christ Crucified and poured out upon us, into our hearts, by the Holy Spirit.

St. Paul sings of the indistinction of divine love, which means God’s love is utterly and incomprehensibly one with us in all our experiences, in our very being. We are one with God beyond all things, even beyond our egos and the sense of being a separate self. Various Christian mystics give voice to this unity we enjoy with divine love:

Meister Eckhart preaches, “Between the human and God, however, there is not only no distinction, there is no multiplicity either. There is nothing but one…God and I become and are one ‘is.’” He also announces, “God’s is-ness is my is-ness or God’s self-identity is my self-identity.”

Beatrice of Nazareth intones, “The soul is drawn through eternal Love alone, and into the eternity of Love, and into the incomprehensibility and vastness and inaccessible sublimity and the deep abyss of the Divinity, which is wholly perfect in all things and remains incomprehensible above all things, which is immutable, perfect Being.”

John Tauler testifies, “the purified and clarified spirit sinks completely into the divine darkness, into a still silence and an inconceivable unity. In this absorption all like and unlike is lost. In this abyss the spirit loses itself and knows neither God nor itself, neither like nor unlike. It knows nothing, for it is engulfed in the oneness of God and has lost all differences.”

St. Catherine of Genoa proclaims, “My deepest me is God…My me is God, nor do I recognize any other me except my God Himself…My being is God, not by some simple participation but by a true transformation of my being.”

Nothing can change or disrupt our oneness with God. Nothing we do can erase this oneness with divine love. God delights to be with us, within us, and one with us, often despite us! And since nothing can ever separate us from God, we have only to turn within ourselves and drop our illusions to enjoy this love. We have only to let go of our resistance to divine love. Practically, this means prayer in which we rest from thinking to rest in God’s love. It means choosing to turn to God when we get caught up in selfishness, which only strengthens the sense of separation.

Divine love is present through the letter to the Romans as in chapter 2:4: “God’s priceless kindness, forbearance, and patience…the kindness of God.” The priceless kindness of God evokes our repentance, our turning away from the misery of sin to be in the orbit of the Love of the Absolute. Once we start to orbit God’s love, happiness and peace erupt from within. We begin to walk in the presence of God as much as Jesus did while he walked this earth. We enjoy unity beyond ego, separation, and sin. This is what we were made for. This is our fulfillment and eternal joy, for we know, deep in our essence, the beauty of oneness: the divine mystery as incomprehensibly one with all things.