November 30, 2025
I think one can say that the Woman, Mary as Queen and heart of the Church, will be the final “place,” a living stone, in which God will dwell with “men” and God will move forth from her to the world just as God came forth from Jerusalem and Zion.
The analog here is the mother. The child dwells in her body during gestation and then in her soul for the duration of their lives. So God resides in Mary and all her daughters. In the Old Testament God comes “from” a few places–such as Sinai, Paran, Teman (Deut 33, Hab. 3,). These mountains are masculine, and God comes in power and glory to reveal Himself as their God, to plant seeds in the human race for their contrition, conversion, and reconciliation into holiness. But Jerusalem and Zion are different. These are feminine. These are His daughters, His beloved. He dwells with them, and subsequently comes from them as from a mother who bears her child, but now she is to bear God for the world. They subsequently become her children if they receive him–Ethiopia, Edom, Cush and others (Psalm 87).
This all points to the woman who becomes a dwelling womb for God himself. But this still begs the question, why? My theorem begins with the fact that woman bears a child and thus becomes a mother, as a “child bearer.” (לֵדָה, Heberw–there are other terms as well, or tokos, Greek). This bodily structure sets up a motor sensory arena to be a kind of bearer, thus the home of the spirit of a child, and really anyone who enters for orbits and becomes a treasure for her.
Female conditioned understanding, judgment, decision, faith and love
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Female psyche
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Female body
Metaphysically I think this is best formulated as being an originating mediator of fertility.
The Old Testament one can see that the Fall leaves a woman “desiring her man and he will lord over her” (Genesis 3:16).1 The fallen man is nominative and fallen women will be attracted to such beasts.
One gets a sense that the entire feminine from earth to woman is fallen and that men will only gain fruits with difficulty and that this trial of the human race is central to the path and plan of salvation. Through Abraham, God brings them to a place “flowing with milk and honey”–a place of rich fertility. Such places make the woman fertile, more alive, a place where the men want to be, a home, and in such a place, femininity is elevated into beauty and magnificence. The women use their intelligence, reason, and freedom to bring about this elevation, and thus the entire place is subsumed into their souls and from their souls manifested to others. Then men relate to the entire place as “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.”
The men who dominate corrupt their women with their venom and perversion–as did Lamech to his two wives (Gn 4:23-24). Canaanite women were “bitter” as Isaac and Rebekah noted about Esau’s wives (Gn 26:34-35). Only with Abraham and others who follow him, does one find a man who does not dominate or lorded over his wife. The same for Isaac and Jacob.2
In corruptive states, women do not become nor want to become mothers. They become barren fields, abortive of life and all creation. A woman who does not thirst for children has despaired of her happiness and her authentic self-transcending life. For a time she may be deceived that she wants a life not as a woman or wife or mother, but as an important person being lorded over by a man, or a business owner, or even the tyrant of the nation, or perhaps trying to be one of these tyrants and rulers. But this will not last for her. Her deception leaves her transcendentally empty.
One can, I think, read the beginning of this feminine barrenness into the prehuman world of the earth, under the dominion of the demons, ruled by Satan. God carved out a masculine walled garden (garden meant a walled area, not as we mean today) in which the feminine earth could become moist with mist, and a man could be formed out of her and given the breath of life. Then from him, a new level of the feminine could emerge, be created, from his own body, his rib, one with that same breath of life–and the man would recognize her as the place where he becomes complete–“bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.”
So God’s salvation reclaims the woman and then blesses her, the earth, with a man, and from him comes a new woman made in their image. This has its height in Mary who becomes the womb and home of God himself. Later, she is assumed into heaven and becomes the queen of heaven and earth, the heart of the new Zion and the new Jerusalem, that will come down from heaven at the end of time, after the final judgment, to become the fullness of God dwelling among men. This is why Mary is the highest of all creatures!
- A number of patristics (St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Irenaeus, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose) will argue that this is a post-fallen “ruling” or domination over women, one that involves a disordered rule over the woman. Some will also argue this is a distorted form of a natural ordering of men to woman as well, namely of his role to protect, guide, be head, sacrifice himself for her good.
- Notice for example how much Abraham defers to Sarah, such as with Hagar (Gn 16:2, 6), or how Rebecca is given the freedom to leave and join Isaac (Gn 24:57-58), or the degree to which Jacob defers and gives freedom to Leah and Rachael (Gn 31:1-21).