In calling God “Father,” Christ attests to the “Sovereign Good”: he refers on the one hand to the essentiality of the divine Goodness, and on the other hand to the reciprocity between the Creator and the creature “made in His image”; this means that Christ grants priority, not to the divine Power and to the aspect of Lordship, but to the divine Love and to the aspect of Paternity, precisely; as a result, man is presented, not as a simple slave, but as a child who, in relation to his Father, has rights granted to him by that Father, and which stem from his being a “valid interlocutor” and “image of God.” In Christ’s language, there is clearly a distinction to be made between “our Father” and “my Father”: the relation of filiation is principial and potential in the former case, and fully actual and effective in the second. The ordinary man is a “child of God” in the respect we have just indicated, that is, by the simple fact that he is man and hence “interlocutor”; but Christ is “child” or “son of God” in still another respect, which is superimposed onto the preceding; it is, geometrically speaking, what the vertical dimension is to the horizontal, or what the sphere is to the circle: he is “child” or “son” by his personality and not by the simple fact that he belongs to the human species, nor by virtue of an initiation or a spiritual orientation capable of actualizing a potentiality of theosis. For the Avatara is a cosmic phenomenon implying by definition every spiritual perfection possible – as well as every physical perfection – but which no realization on the part of an ordinary man could produce; the yogi, the sannyasi, the jnani, can realize Brahman, but he will never be Rama or Krishna . . . But let us return, after this digression, to the idea of the divine “Father.” This term, as we have said, has a meaning which differs according to whether it relates to man as such or to Christ alone; but it also has a meaning which differs according to whether it is conceived “vertically” or “horizontally”: that is to say, according to whether it relates, either to “Beyond-Being,” or to Being. In the first case, the “Father” is the pure Absolute and nothing can be associated with Him; the two other “Persons” already pertain to Relativity, of which they represent the summit; far from pertaining to the manifested world, they, together with the Absolute pure and simple, constitute what we may call the “Divine Order.” In the second case – which alone has been retained by dogmatic theology – the “Father” is situated at the same level of ontological reality as the other two hypostases; whence the Trinity “Power,” “Wisdom,” “Love,” if one may express it thus. True, this ontological and “horizontal” Trinity does not coincide with the “pure Absolute,” but it is absolute from the point of view of creatures; thus man, when he prays, should not concern himself with the “degrees of reality” comprised in the principial Order, on pain of speaking into the void. It may be objected that religion has no reason for including the idea of “Beyond-Being,” since its aim is the salvation of souls and not metaphysical knowledge, and indeed, as far as its saving function is concerned, religion can do without the idea in question; but in another respect, that of its claim to absoluteness, it must include it, on pain of misleading – or excluding – certain souls or certain intelligences. One is therefore right in thinking that the word “Father” expresses all that it is capable of expressing, at all levels of doctrine and degrees of understanding. [GTUFS: HaveCenter, “Our Father Who Art in Heaven”]
The question of knowing to which “divine level” man must address himself when praying never ought to arise, for to pray is to speak to God, independently of any metaphysical specification; the man who prays, even if he addresses a celestial personification, should not concern himself with the ontology of the celestial Interlocutor. On the one hand, “the kingdom of God is within you”; and on the other hand, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” But also, and above all: “Our Father who art in Heaven.” [GTUFS: RootsHC, Man in the Face of the Sovereign Good]