The Antidote to Your Perfectionism: Mary, Your Mother

For some of us, it is difficult to go to Mary, knowing full well that we can't live up to her. After all, she is perfect, she is sinless, she is the Immaculate Conception! She is everything we want to be as women, as followers of Jesus, as friends.

Obviously, we are not conceived without sin like Our Lady. "That's not going to happen," Beth Davis laughs in a recent Q&A session. "But do you know what can happen? I can be her little child. She can be my mother."

Making Mary Personal

Rather than gazing upon Our Lady from a distance, as a woman on her own level, what if we looked at her as a toddler looks at his mother?

Invite her into the inner chambers of your heart. Go to Mary as she is doing the dishes, putting her baby down for a nap, welcoming her husband at the door. Where are you in her home? What is it like when she stops her work to listen to you or to look at you?

On Q&A, Beth shared a meditation from her own imaginative prayer. On Holy Thursday, praying with the washing of the feet, she pictured the same scene in the home of the Holy Family. Jesus saw Mary wash Joseph's feet, Joseph wash Mary's feet, Mary wash His own feet when He came in from playing outside. "It was just this beautiful understanding that Jesus lived in the school of love," she explains.

Being in the School of Love

By going to Mary as our Mother, we too can learn in the school of love, just as Jesus did growing up in her home in Nazareth. "Mary will do or say something in my prayer, and I notice...it transforms me," Beth reflects. "I notice that I start talking, acting, doing what she did."

Beth pictured herself as a little girl, allowing her Mother to wash her own feet. Our Lady was so beautiful that Beth impulsively reached up to touch her, and Mary simply leaned in closer.

Lean in Towards Our Lady

In Beth's prayer, Our Lady did not lean away from her child's love. She did the opposite! Yet we, perhaps as a result of our perfectionism, can be tempted to lean away from her as our Mother.

"When I've been loved in my life, I've pulled back," Beth relates. "I feel embarassed and very vulnerable. And by Mary leaning in and letting me look at her face...I now know how to receive love."

Rather than feeling hesitant to lean in towards Our Lady in her fullness of grace or embarrassed to receive her ardent love, let us simply turn to her to teach us how.