Romans 8:28

Paul wrote this letter from Corinth, in chains or under house arrest, to a community he had never visited, the church at Rome. He was writing to people who were suffering: marginalized, persecuted, uncertain. He was not writing from comfort. And what he wrote was not a promise that things would be fine. He wrote something more precise and more radical: in all things, including these things, these exact circumstances, these losses that appear to be only loss, something is working toward good.

The Christian mystics heard this differently from the way it is often preached. Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, they did not read Romans 8:28 as a divine guarantee that everything resolves happily. They read it as a description of the structure of reality: that the ground of all being is not indifferent to what happens within it. That even what appears to be pure destruction is not outside the creative movement of the whole.

This is the curriculum principle in Christian dress. Not comfort, orientation. The same orientation that the Bhagavad Gita points to when it says the soul’s dharma is being worked out through this particular incarnation and these particular circumstances. The same orientation that Ram Dass received from Emmanuel. The same orientation that Job was given, not through explanation but through the revelation of scale.

Nothing can separate us from the love that is the ground of all things. This is not the ledger version. This is not reward for good behavior. This is the recognition that the ground itself is working, in all things, even these, toward the completion of something the individual soul cannot yet see in full.