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Dorothea K for 8Likes says, A Christian friend told me that our identity stems from our father, not our mother, and this is why people with a difficult relationship with their father have problems with their identity. Could you comment on this? How is this connected with St. Paul speaking about the mother who was a slave and the mother who was free in regards to the children of Abraham? So kind of scared Jonathan won’t get the second part of my question. So to clarify, the father is obviously the same one, but the identity of the mother is what characterized the children. And so, yes, that’s a very astute thinking because you have to kind of understand the way that the Old Testament seems to see these things is that the family is an extension of the father. And so it’s a fractal system again, and it’s not a purely genetic thing. It’s actually just a notion of affiliation in the broader sense. The sons of Abraham are aspects of Abraham that then spread out into the world. As you can understand that Abraham contains enough in him to spawn a great nation. He has enough concentrated attention, you could say concentrated identity and concentrated dedication to God so that his seed can be plentiful and his identity can continue in that seed. And like I mean, it’s not just a question of having babies because an anonymous man could have a bunch of babies, but they would not share his identity. Like they would not participate in the continuation of his story, of his identity, of his memory. All of these things are important in understanding what it is I’m talking about. And so the best way to understand the second generation is to understand it as specification of the unity, the one identity. And that specification happens through, you could call it body, or it happens through particularization. And the particularization is what happens on the earth side. So you can imagine in the creation narrative, God says, let the earth create plants. And so God gives a one identity that contains all the secondary identities in them. And now the earth produces the particularization. So the earth spreads the seed and gives the seed multiple, multiple applications. And so that is the way to understand the relationship between the generation. That’s the idea that it’s like because of the two mothers, then Abraham’s children are very different from each other. And they even become hostile to each other because they are born of two different mothers. And so it’s as if their particularization represents something in Abraham, which is in conflict, you could say. And then that is what happens in the world. And so the way that they kind of understand the ancients understood it, that’s why you have this idea that when you die or when your life ends, you return to the bosom of Abraham because you’re gathered into the origin because you are still, you could say weirdly, in Abraham. Even in your life, you’re still in Abraham. Just like when we say you’re in Adam, it’s like we are in Adam. And the fact that we are in Adam means that we are continuations of Adam’s identity and separations and particularizations of Adam’s identity. And so that’s kind of the way to understand it. And like you hinted at, the mother is the tool of particularization. And so then you can understand, let’s say, the incarnation as this relationship of the seed from heaven that comes down, the logos from heaven that comes down, and then is made particular in the Virgin. And all this imagery about virginity and the Virgin and the idea of what Mary represents and what she is, And that is the fact that she is Mara, that she is the bitter waters, but she’s also the pure water. She’s a virgin. And so she contains all the imagery of the primordial waters of Genesis 1. And that’s why she’s able to contain the entirety of the logos, mysteriously, obviously. But then she also becomes, in some ways, the mother of all of us. That is, that we are also little Christ’s, right? We are little members of the body. We are particularizations of Christ’s identity. In some ways, Christ is even more encompassing in his capacity to hold the world in him or to be the source, the origin, the father, although we don’t usually call Christ father, but you understand what I mean. Like the head of the entire cosmos. That’s the way to understand that. And like your intuition about how the feminine is particularization. And this is, of course, really important to understand. It’s like, you know, often you’ll hear things like, or you hear in symbolic type thinkers, they’ll say something like, you know, the masculine is active, the feminine is passive, but it is more complicated than that. It’s actually a trade-off of perspectives, which is that the masculine is active in the sense that the masculine gives identity, but the masculine is more passive in the implementation of the identity. But the woman is passive in the sense that she receives the identity, but then is active in the sense that she’s the one who makes it happen. And that’s why when you think about the relationship between men and women, you’ll notice that women are often more active in the relationship because they are often the ones that make the relationship possible by their actions, by their caring, by their attention, by their capacity to pay attention to all the elements so that everything holds together, especially for the family. You can see that. It’s not 100% like that, but many times you’ll see that that’s the role that the mother ends up playing.