Joan Chittister presents models for the sacrament of friendship among women. For example, she sees Anne, the mother of Mary, as representative of the kind of emptying out of self that one woman does for another. Here's a passage about this kind of nurturing.
"But nurturance is no small task and it must never be confused with control or superintendency or superiority. To nurture is not to dominate. It is to enable. It is to make the person I nurture free of me. 'If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship,' Charlotte Brontë wrote, 'we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.'
"To nurture a person is not to impose upon them a framework that, however healthy, is foreign to their soul. To nurture is to unleash the self for growth that is its own. Friendship nurtures when it provides a person the opportunity to experiment with the self and traces a watermark by which to measure the achievement."
