Mark VI: Participating in Theological Praxis

"The hub is Love and the many spokes are the many ways human beings connect to Love. We are all bonded together and traveling the same road, leading to the same destination."

— Rev Charlottie Havlicak

My theology is rooted in Love as the unitive ground of our relationship with God, one another, and creation. I understand the spiritual journey not primarily as movement toward a distant God, but as an awakening to Divine Presence already within and around us.

The Christian contemplative and mystical traditions have profoundly shaped this understanding. Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and other contemplatives describe a spiritual life that moves beyond intellectual knowledge of God toward encounter, transformation, and ultimately union with the Divine. Their writings have taught me that Mystery is not always something to be explained. Sometimes it must be entered, experienced, and allowed to transform us.

This understanding has changed the way I think about Imago Dei.

To be created in the image of God means more to me than possessing particular human characteristics that resemble God's. It means that something of the Divine is reflected within us. The contemplative journey therefore includes learning to recognize and recover an awareness of that sacred presence within ourselves.

I believe this recognition is essential to spiritual wholeness.

Recognizing the Divine within ourselves is not the elevation of the ego into God. Rather, it is the discovery that our deepest identity exists in relationship with and participation in the Divine. The mystical path gradually loosens the illusion that we exist entirely apart from God, from one another, or from creation.

We bear the Divine image, and much of the spiritual journey is learning to remember what we bear.

This inward recognition necessarily changes the way we see others. If the Divine image exists within me, it also exists within the stranger, the suffering, the marginalized, the person whose beliefs differ from mine, and the person I struggle to understand. Mystical union cannot end in private spiritual experience. The recognition of our shared participation in Divine Love creates an ethical responsibility to honor the sacredness of one another.

My understanding of Imago Dei has also required me to examine the images through which I understand God.

I have become increasingly drawn to the Divine Feminine and particularly to Sophia, Divine Wisdom. Scripture gives us Wisdom who participates in creation, calls humanity toward understanding, prepares her table, offers life, and dwells among humanity. Scripture also contains images of God giving birth, nurturing, gathering, comforting, protecting, and seeking.

These images matter.

If humanity in its fullness bears the image of God, then the feminine must reveal something authentic about the Divine. Feminine imagery is therefore not simply decorative language added to an essentially masculine conception of God. It expands our theological imagination and helps recover dimensions of Divine Mystery that have too often been obscured.

Sophia has become especially meaningful within my contemplative theology because Wisdom is both something we seek and something that awakens within us.

Wisdom calls us toward deeper consciousness.

Wisdom teaches us to see.

Wisdom invites remembrance.

In this sense, I understand spiritual awakening partly as remembering the Divine image within ourselves—becoming conscious of a sacred reality that was present before we knew how to name it.

This is also why embodiment has become increasingly important to my theology.

I do not understand the spiritual life as an escape from material existence. The deeper I enter contemplative practice, the more sacred the embodied world becomes.

The body, creation, sexuality, grief, beauty, music, relationship, silence, birth, aging, and death are not obstacles separating us from the Divine. They can become places of encounter with the Divine.

God is both transcendent and intimately present.

The Sacred is beyond us.

The Sacred is among us.

And the Sacred is within us.

For me, Christ remains an essential revelation of this mystery: Divine and human held together, Love embodied and lived in relationship with the world. Sophia expands rather than diminishes that understanding by giving me another ancient language for Divine presence, wisdom, creativity, and indwelling.

I have become increasingly comfortable allowing these sacred names and images to exist together:

Christ.
Sophia.
Spirit.
Creator.
Mother.
Love.

None exhausts the Mystery.

Each opens another way of encountering it.

This is where theology becomes praxis for me. What I believe about the Divine necessarily shapes how I encounter another human being, how I understand the body, how I approach suffering, how I exercise power, how I seek justice, and how I create sacred community.

Theology cannot remain an intellectual description of God.

It must become a way of seeing.

A way of being.

A way of loving.

The United Church of Christ's understanding that faith must be made its own in every generation gives me permission—and responsibility—to continue asking how inherited theological language speaks within contemporary experience. Its commitment to continuing testament reminds me that revelation is not exhausted, that the Spirit continues to speak, and that our task is to remain attentive.

My theological praxis therefore begins with contemplation: becoming still enough to perceive what is already present.

It moves toward recognition: discovering the Imago Dei within ourselves and one another.

It deepens through Wisdom: allowing Sophia to awaken our capacity to see the Sacred within embodied life.

And it becomes action through Love.

For me, these are not separate theological ideas.

They describe one spiritual movement:

Contemplation awakens Wisdom.
Wisdom reveals the Divine image.
The Divine image reveals our belonging.
And our belonging calls us into Love.

That is the theology I seek not only to articulate, but to embody.