I would continue to share with you my thoughts about acquiring the mind of Christ by looking closely at how He prayed. He gave us the OUR FATHER as the preeminent prayer. When we pray it fervently in community we become the PEOPLE OF GOD – we understand that God is our Father and Creator and we begin to reject the idea that He is our Judge. Fathers don’t judge their children, they only attempt to show them how to live.

The petition that appears in the Our Father prayer after Thy will be done simply is on earth as it is in heaven. The will of God both on earth and in heaven is that His children might love one another and that they might hold sacred the creation that surrounds them. God’s will in heaven is that all created things and beings might recognize that He creates them out of love and only wants them to know that He loves them.

I would have you think about the prayers that we say on Theophany when we bless the waters, when we symbolically bless life – that energy that vivifies all of creation. The prayer indicates that all creation responds to God’s love and worships Him. In fact we pray: the sun praises You, our God, the moon worships You, the stars submit to You, the Light obeys you, the Tempests tremble, the springs worship You. All creation responds to God in praise and, of course, in worship.

The one purpose of creation is to worship and bring praise to its Creator, our God. All the angelic hosts bring praise to God in heaven. They Seraphim and the Cherubim stand before God’s Throne constantly singing: Holy, Holy, Holy are You our God.

So we pray that on earth we may do what is done in heaven, namely, offer praise to God. So in this prayer we ask OUR FATHER to grant us the insight and the courage to do what all creation is called to do, namely offer Him worship and praise.

One might immediately think, in hearing this, that God is very ego-centric or solipsistic. On the contrary, God calls us to understand who we are in His Kingdom. When we praise and worship God we come to discover that we are His children, created out of love, and hopefully when we understand how much we are loved, we will do everything in our power to return this love. We do this by trying to live like His children.