Nothing Can Separate Us from the Love of God

Imagine this scenario: there is a great storm and wind is blowing at hurricane strength. You discover water falling from the room onto your bed because a tile has just blown off your roof. Now you know you have to go get a bucket and move your bed to prevent further damage by this flowing water. You are afraid you might lose the whole roof. A tree outside falls and lands inches from your house and you hope just to weather the storm. At that point, someone comes to you who also lives in the house and tells you that God loves you. At that point would you care?

Obviously, you are intensely distracted but that is part of the message. There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God. God’s love is constant and it is unconditional. That is according to Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi. Further, that message is the most important message you can receive and so many do not know it.

Pope Benedict XVI taught:

The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38- 39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man “redeemed”, whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has “redeemed” us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote “first cause” of the world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of him everyone can say: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).—Pope Benedict XVI Spe Salvi #26

There is no other message in this world as important as the fact that God loves you. That love is a powerful force and it is a constant. What changes is our understanding of it. Our whole world is built on an understanding of conditional love. If you fit a certain mold, then you are loveable and if you don’t you are not loveable.

That teaching is destructive because it creates a whole group of unloveable people and those who feel unloved or unloveable become more unloveable. They become hardened against the world and turn angry and bitter. The person who can stand in the love of God who the power to do God’s work and to transform the hardest of evil humans because love is that powerful a force. This is why a focus on doing the right thing without a grounding in God's love is so dangerous. It teaches good behavior without love and that leads to legalism, the belief of the pharisees.

St. Paul today writing to the Romans makes this statement to a world that could not understand it without Christ. Do you think the Romans understand the concept of unconditional love, especially from their gods. Probably not. So, St. Paul is making a statement that is revolutionary for its time and for ours. There is nothing that will separate you from the love of God. You can separate yourself from loving God but even then He will not stop loving you.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that our mission is to please God and we please God by loving human beings. However, it is not totally on us. It is a team effort, we see that clearly in the scriptures, especially in the Acts of the Apostles. We learn to love when we encounter the most difficult and demanding. Those are the people that drive us to prayer because they can be difficult and demanding.

Remember also that we fall between two extremes all the time. When we choose to love, then we act accordingly and there is no law against what we do. When we reject love then we are subject to the human and divine laws and they force obedience at the expense of retribution. The Catechism also teaches that through prayer we co-operate with God’s grace for the human race. So we must be people of prayer, real prayer so that we may act in union with God’s will.

Those who do not understand this respond to God conditionally. They speak of those who are not deserving of God’s love. I read a comment this week from someone who complained about the Vatican II Church teaching that all humans beings have dignity. Wow, complaining about this teaching and calling them a good Catholic. Wow! He needs some serious catechism. However, where does the Church get that teaching—right here in this passage among others.

People whom we can believe as humans do not deserve God’s love, we discover that yes God even loves them because God is love, which St. Paul also teaches. So we must act accordingly.

This week there was a disturbing photo distributed on the internet of a celebrity exorcist holding a deadly firearm in front of the sanctuary of a Catholic Church and a tabernacle. Obviously, it was concerning but some people took that as permission to act accordingly. That attitude comes from a false understanding that God’s love is conditional on people’s behavior and, therefore, so should we display conditional love.

However, we have a mandate by our baptism to love all and we can only do that if we are serious about prayer in our lives. This is why I get irritated when people speak of morality. Morality is important but you can live a moral life and not a loving one. Many people do. God calls us to understand his love for all so that we too can act lovingly and when we do that, we act in true morality which is actually a higher standard than traditional morality. That is because we act on God’s love.

So, St. Paul tells us that God’s love is constant and nothing can separate us from it. We have a mission to be people of prayer so that we can experience that love, experience it, share it and live it in Christ.

Then we learn that no matter how strong that hurricane is, its power is still less than understanding that God’s love is constant and unconditional in our lives.

Fr. Robert J Carr is the chaplain for two hospitals in Brockton, MA

His Patreon Page is patreon.com/catholicaudiomedia

He podcasts at Catholic Audio Media Podcast |

He is the author of several books including: Christ in Your Humanity