Today in church we heard a passage from Romans that contains one of my favorite couple of verses in the entire Bible (I imagine I’m not alone in this):

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, 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)

I’ve come to think of the Incarnation itself in these terms: Jesus is God’s love, manifested and enacted, and sent into the darkest depths of human experience. In Jesus, God identifies with humanity in all its suffering and its sin. There simply is no “place”–physical, moral, or spiritual–where we can escape from God’s love. The Reformed theologian William Placher writes:

Reconciliation, then, is not about how Christ’s suffering appeases an angry Father. Our suffering has cut us off from God, and we can experience God’s love only as anger. God comes to be with us in the place of sin, as the way to bridge the abyss that lay between us, so that we can be in loving relation with God again. But coming into that place of sin is a painful business that costs a heavy price. It is a price that God, in love, is willing to pay. (Jesus the Savior, p. 141)

But if this passage from Paul is a great comfort, it’s also a challenge. Reading about Paul’s confidence in God’s love in the face of (as he writes earlier) “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” highlights how weak my faith in that love is, even though my distractions, sufferings, and temptations are much more mundane. And I can’t help but think that if I had a more robust faith I’d be able to act more bodly, doing risky things in the name of God’s love.

Part of the paradox of the Protestant notion of faith is that faith is supposed to be the ground for genuine good works–we are freed by God’s love to love our neighbors fearlessly–and yet we can’t will ourselves to have faith. Faith is a gift; though there is difference of opinion about the extent to which we can each prepare the soil to receive it.

So the question is, how can we come to trust viscerally in the love that Paul is describing, in a way that makes a real difference? Is this where spiritual practices play their role? Do we learn to love God, and to perceive the love from which nothing can separate us, by learning to pay attention to God? Is that what prayer is for?