If that is the one in Palos Hills I know it well.
No, not in the same sense.
I know that much of what the Latin Catholic church holds today originated in the east, many prayers and devotions erupted first in the eats and spread west. Even now there is often a reliance on eastern liturgy to try an understand what the early church believed.
We have to understand this with an Orthodox mindset. It is not wise to transfer eastern hymns of praise and laminate them to Latin preconceived notions. To understand what we mean when we pray the liturgy we need to understand Theosis as the means to salvation. That idea is sometimes lost to Latin Catholics who tend to think of salvation as somehow different. Nothing I can say here will do justice to your understanding, but please bear with me, I am not trying to insult here.
The best way I can conceive of it is to describe the Latin process of salvation as a static position once one has died. In other words Latin Catholics tend to think that once one has died, he or she gets a ticket to the theatre of heaven and takes an assigned seat, perhaps with Saint Mary of Nazareth up on stage in front of the curtain.
But we Orthodox know her to be a real person on the same journey as ourselves, and we are asking her to pray for us. She precedes us surely, and her prayers are very efficacious,
we are convinced. We have nothing but the highest praise for her. I think that in many ways
no one genuinely loves the Theotokos more than your typical Orthodox Christian. She is a heroine to us. We truly respect her and honor her. We see her as further along in this process than we.
Our understanding of salvation is that there is an unbridgeable gap between ourselves and the Divine. We may narrow this gap, but never close it. No one can see God, even in death (and thus there is no such thing as a beatific vision). Theosis is an unending process, an eternal quest, a never ending yearning for God and approaching of God. We desire to be God-like, divinized. So in life and in death we are all on this journey of joy that never ends. Saint Mary has all the same limitations as the rest of us in this respect, she is a creature of God in hot pursuit of the Divine.
So rather than see her up on stage, we see her as front row center, in the seats with us. She is praying with us as well as for us. We all pray for one another, and we ask for the prayers of the saints, most especially from the Holy Theotokos.
But we are all on the same narrow path (I am mixing my metaphors
). In that sense we all hope to eventually be right where the Theotokos is right now (and hopefully all of us eventually further along), and perhaps the Holy Theotokos’ prayers (and yours) today will help us achieve that.
For a background to readers, brother Mickey is referring to a debate I had in an Orthodox website.
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