Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

“Pray to the Holy Spirit, Daniel,” were the sage words were offered to me by a dear friend and mentor, the late Bishop Henry Hill. Interestingly enough, offering prayer to the Holy Spirit might not seem like the most natural thing to those of us raised in the Western Tradition, and particularly, within Anglicanism. Many of us were raised to think of prayer as to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Many of our collect prayers in the Anglican tradition honour this prepositional partitioning. Yet sometimes I wonder if this encourages an unintentional partitioning of the Godhead, and indeed, an unintentional ascription of the importance of one person of the divine Trinity over another. I have often sensed a kind of iconoclasm in certain trajectories of the Western Tradition, namely, a fear of articulating the notion of Christ as God in our prayer. He may be “Lord,” or “Son,” but our prayer often lacks the boldness of that of our Orthodox brothers and sisters who unabashedl...