Perhaps my reading of this is skewed by my western faith upbringing, but this sounds an awful lot like "works..." How is it that our actions and our turning to the Divinity "cures" our wickedness, when it is by grace that we are saved through faith?
As I wrote earlier, the Fathers taught that it was not what we did in our lives, the evil acts or the good deeds which will be weighed out in the balance at the Final Judgment, but rather how much like God we have become. If I were to pray unceasingly, attend the Divine Liturgy everyday, give alms to the poor, lock myself up in a hermitage and eat dirt and bugs for the rest of my life, nevertheless I would never attain salvation unless by the grace of God I died to the self and became "divinized" (not, most definitely, deified!). As St. Symeon the New Theologian wrote in his Discourses:
"In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ's love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father."
God's uncreated energies of Love, what the West calls grace, fall on all of us equally. Because we are created with Free Will and are prone to sin (actually it may be better to say "prone to miss the mark" since that is what the Greek word "amartia" actually means), our only hope of theosis is God's grace which impels us to focus on God and not the self, because in the end, our theosis, salvation if you will, depends entirely on our acceptance of God's Love. St. Peter the Damascene wrote:
"We all receive God's blessings equally. But some of us, receiving God's fire, that is, His word, become soft like beeswax, while the others like clay become hard as stone. And if we do not want Him, He does not force any of us, but like the sun He sends His rays and illuminates the whole world, and he who wants to see Him, sees Him, whereas the one who does not want to see Him, is not forced by Him. And no one is responsible for this privation of light except the one who does not want to have it.
God created the sun and the eye. Man is free to receive the sun's light or not. The same is true here. God sends the light of knowledge like rays to all, but He also gave us faith like an eye. The one who wants to receive knowledge through faith, keeps it by his works, and so God gives him more willingness, knowledge, and power." (Philokalia, vol. 3)
It is not theosis, per se, which we attain by works. Theosis, becoming like God, is only by grace, but as the Father +Peter says, we keep it, to the extent we have have it, by works. In this sense, the Eastern Fathers stand opposed to any concept of an instant salvation or any sort of anti-lapsarian mindset nor at the same time do they ascribe to any notion of theosis through works. Does this help? I've been told this evening that I can seem rather obscure! :) There are probably others who could explain it better than I, but +Symeon the New Theologian and +Peter the Damascene say it pretty well, I think.
pharmamom, I've been struggling to understand this for a little while now. The very first answer is: yes, (y)our reading is not just influenced, but comes from a thoroughly different perspective or approach because of (y)our western faith upbringing. We have to take just about everything we know, throw it away, and start over in order to understand. We have to dump the legalism, the Western angle, and approach through mysticism, the Eastern angle.
I am going to explain this very badly (to begin with I am an engineer, not a theologian), based on what I read in Kolokotronis' posting, but I'm going to try to paint the difference anyway.
In both the East and West, men are apart from God and strive to approach Him. But in the West (here's where I begin to struggle) "grace" seems sometimes to be a package received at some point -- such as the instant of being "born again," for some Protestants. In the East, grace is being continually showered, but to receive it you must live in it, continually. Westerners pray for grace to be accepted by God, Easterners live in grace to draw closer to Him.