out where the issue is pinching
and we'll be able to provide
relief.58
This is a spiritual motherhood which is
not bound to blood relations, but
extends to all persons. Stein suggests
the purpose of a woman's empathetic
vision is “to bring true humanity in
oneself and in others to
development”.59
Both Balthasar and Alice von Hildebrand maintain that women possess greater receptivity, not only
intellectually, but in their very bodily reality. Alice von Hildebrand writes:
Another great gift that God has granted the female nature is the gift of receptivity which
involves an alert, awakened, joyful readiness to be fecundated by another person or by a
beautiful object.…women feel at home in this receptivity and move in it with ease and grace.
This is already inscribed in their biological nature: a wife giving herself to her husband accepts
joyfully to be fecundated, to receive. The receptivity is a self-giving.60
Again she returns to the concept of kenosis. “Receptivity is a religious category par excellence. The
key to holiness is to let oneself be totally reformed by divine grace, to say to God, 'Do with me
whatever you will.'”61 Through a prayerful self-emptying a woman draws forth the truth found in
creation.
58
59
60
61
Ibid., 264.
Ibid.
Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman, 62-63.
Ibid., 65.
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