Mary's feminine "here I am" reveals the universal feminine "here I am" (II)

The woman, every woman, is like the representative or the ambassador of universal femininity: she is its privileged "spokesperson", and when that is the case, the vocation of every woman is perfectly fulfilled in Mary's "here I am" pronounced in the name and place of all fundamental femininity.

It must remind us - all of us - of our vocation, which is inherently religious: "Here I am!" As Paul Evdokimov so rightly says: "In the religious sphere, it is the woman who is the stronger sex."

Therefore, for a woman - provided she is called to it - the religious consecration of her whole person is a privileged enhancement of her deepest being, of what she is, of what she represents in the whole of the Church and the world.

Thus, holiness, which is the ultimate goal of the Church, is fundamentally feminine... because holiness has to do specifically with a wife and espousals.

It is all contained in the intimate, total, definitive "here I am" said to God.

God is not known - in the biblical sense of the word - in a conceptual, intellectual way, but in a nuptial way, as the Eastern tradition tells us, that is to say, through our whole being surrendered to the thrice Holy One as we respond "here I am"(2).

Father Yves Fauquet, O.F.M. Cap., is one of the commentators and annotators of Canon Osty's Bible. He is also the author of "Voici et me voici "dans la Bible ("Behold and here I am" in the Bible) published by Editions Anne Sigier, Paris 2003.

(2)The author goes on to explain that the ordination of women would cause an obliteration, a forgetting of the vocation of Creation, of humanity and of the Church; something that John Paul II had mentioned about in his Encyclical Mulieris dignitatem.