The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on January 10, 2024 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Orthodox Christian theologies are careful to retain the distinction between the Creator and Creation. Simply put, we humans are not God. Theologically stated, this careful distinction is pan-en-theistic, rather than pantheistic: all of creation has its existence within God, but is not equivalent to God. The Holy One is always more than the sum total of creation.
When the orthodox caution is taken to an extreme, the result is a practical and conceptual sense of God as separate, somehow “out there” and far away. Conversely, when the panentheistic position gets too loose, it can become blurred, and the loss of distinction results in a practical sense that there is no God, that somehow God is just “elevated-us.”
In regards to active prayer life, neither extreme is satisfactory. It would be rather difficult to maintain a discipline of prayer in relation to a God who is neither accessible nor existent! In prayer then, spiritual teachers lean into a middle-way, a third option. Prayer is participatory. The fancy theology word in Greek is theosis: to become like God. Again, orthodoxy retains the “like” in the equation—we do not presume to be God in a metaphysical sense. Yet in prayer, we do aspire to act like and imitate God, to participate in Divine Life by relationship and transformative activity.
In particular, the lens of contemplation—to see Reality as it really is—helps us to discern the fullness of Divine Life, and therefore to choose daily actions and attitudes that most enable us to participate in the Life of the Holy One, through the natural course of our supernatural lives!
