53. How can we can break free from worldly perfectionism? What does God's definition of perfection mean? How does it apply to mothers and living daily holiness in our families?

For Day 2 of the Retreat for Mothers, we explore how forgiveness breaks perfectionism’s grip and how Mother Mary’s quiet strength reframes what it means to “stand” in seasons of weakness. Scripture, Benedictine balance, and a living in hope guides us toward peace, presence, and practical prayer.

• Mother Mary standing at the cross as a model of resilient presence
• Erika Kirk, public grief, public reaction, and choosing mercy over optics
• God’s perfection rooted in forgiveness, not flawlessness
• practical practices for prayer, balance, and daily holiness

To visit the Hozana App, https://www.hozana.org

Chapters

• 2:35 Mary’s Strength At The Cross
• 5:08 Grief, Public Critique, And Mercy
• 7:11 God’s Perfection vs Worldly Perfection
• 8:11 Day Two: Letting Go And Forgiving
• 8:55 Prayer, Balance, And Daily Holiness
• 11:27 Litany And Closing Prayer For Perseverance

Transcript

Sheila Nonato: 0:00

Sisters of Christ, welcome to the Veil and Armour Podcast. And I am welcoming you after a couple of weeks of hiatus, sickness in the house. I'm sure all mothers know this as. uh, school starts. And yes, we do get those cold bugs. And um, so unfortunately, I, um, got sick and, uh ,so did my family. Um, but yeah, thank you for coming back again and to join us for day two. Freedom from perfectionism. And, um, as I mentioned before, I brought back this retreat that I had recorded for the Hozana Prayer app, which is about uh close to two million users. Uh, prayer warriors, I call them. Um, and it's a free service. And so if you'd like to join the retreat online and it's an audio um retreat and also a visual retreat that you can read along with, you are welcome to do that, hozana.org, um, and I don't get any any, uh, payments or anything like that. It's totally a free, um, service because I believe we, um, we mothers should unite together in prayer, even if we are not united in person, um, especially if just circumstances we are not around uh family or friends. Um, but we do need to break that isolation. Um, and we we can come together as a community of prayer. And one way is through online. So I hope you, uh, will look into that if you are interested, hozana.org. And it's the Mother's Day retreat by Veil and Armour for Mother's Day, but I know it's it was specifically for Mother's Day, but not so much because shouldn't Mother's Day be every day, really, right? We should, um, celebrate the Unsung heroes, um, of, uh, our families, of our society, and that that's the mother. One, um, morning my son had asked me, Mom, how can you how can moms be moms if they're sick? And that is a good question. And I think we just you know, like fathers, how what do they do as well? Um, they just go to work and so do moms. Is that we um try to find that, um, inner strength within us to keep going? And uh and as you can tell, my voice, um, is the best in terms of uh its clarity because yeah, I've had a sore throat and almost lost my voice. But what does that mean, actually? Losing our voice and stealing silent, does that mean we are not strong? Um, we can use that to our advantage, whatever our situation will be. And one of the examples I'd like to point to is Mother Mary uh at the foot of the cross, and, uh, Miss Queenie, who I have interviewed with Mrs. Tammy Peterson, uh, she had talked with uh Tammy about this particular uh scene in The Passion of Our Lord and the Crucifixion, where Mother Mary stood. It says the Bible says Mother Mary stood at the foot of the cross. And that's actually a powerful statement. Although if you don't, um, it could easily be missed. But if you reflect upon it, after everything that her son had gone through, the horrific torture, the agonizing humiliation that her son had endured, Mother Mary, instead of running away, not wanting to see what was happening to her son, she decided she was going to stay with him until the end.

Sheila Nonato: 3:38

And she was silent, but having the having the strength to stand with her with her and at the foot of the cross, how much strength did that require? How much prayer, how much faith and trust in God did that require out of her? Um, that she was not, the Bible doesn't say she was on the floor crying. Um, she she probably was crying, um, given, you know, just a great amount of agony and torture her son went through that Jesus went through. But she stood, and I think that stands for something. Um, literally and metaphorically speaking, is that as women, as mothers, there are times when we we just yeah, we just want to fall down and um don't want to get back up again, you know, if something horrific or tragic happens, like Princess the assassination of Charlie Kirk and um and Mrs. Erica Kirk, who some people have been criticizing her way of grieving online. Um her her way of grieving is not sufficient to some people, but we think about it, our mothers, our military mothers, um, the military wives, military families, when our husbands are overseas or our loved ones are overseas, we have to, I mean, pardon the expression, "Soldier on," for our kids, because they're looking to us. And in that time, we um the face we show usually is one of strength because we don't want them to worry. Um, it doesn't mean that we don't worry. Doesn't mean we don't, you know, we might not show it outwardly, but it's there, the you know, the the concern. And so I mean I I I don't know what it is like to be a, um, military widow or a widow of of any kind. And, um, and I my heart just goes out to those women who have had to carry that cross, including Erica Kirk. And we just we just send her prayers, no matter um, you know, what your political affiliation is. I think I hope we can agree that um violence of any kind, especially the murder of somebody, um, should be unacceptable, and that we offer compassion to the family who who lost that loved one. Um and so I just, yeah, just how do we sort of tie this all in? Is that Miss Erica Kirk was talking about in her speech, the most powerful part I found, and many people have found, is she said she forgave her husband's killer. And if you think about it, how much strength do you have to have in order to say that? Because we usually have to, you want to hold on. And in God's, um, definition of perfection, forgiveness, forgiveness also plays a very important part in that. And uh it also shows us that there's sort of a disconnect between worldly perfection, what we think is perfection, as in, you know, the Instagram perfect pictures and all that. But God has a different, um, interpretation or definition of perfection, and this actually fits into the topic of love. What is perfect love? So let's um, let's dive into the second day, the second day of the retreat, and thank you for joining us. God bless, and Happy Thanksgiving before I forget to our Canadian listeners and uh subscribers. And we wish you and your family a blessed, happy, holy, and wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends and relatives. God bless. Hello and welcome to the Veil andn Armour Podcast. This is your host, Sheila Nonato. I'm a stay-at-home mom and a freelance Catholic journalist. Seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the inspiration of Our Lady, I strive to tell stories that inspire, illuminate, and enrich the lives of Catholic women to help them in living out our vocation of raising the next generation of leaders and saints.

Co-Hosts: 7:56

Please join us every week on the Veil and Armour Podcast, where stories come alive through a journalist's land and mother's heart.

Sheila Nonato: 8:03

Welcome to day two: Freedom from perfectionism, learning to let go and forgive. "Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect." "Then Peter came up and said to him, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.' And Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Opening prayer, Heavenly Father, you asked us to be perfect like you. You also asked us to learn forgiveness for each other. And among Jesus' last words as he was dying on the cross were words of compassion, imploring you to forgive us for what our sins have done to your only begotten Son. May we learn to forgive and love like you do. May we learn to also forgive ourselves when we feel like we don't measure up the world that demands so much of women and how we should look and how we should act, that we are tempted to draw comparisons with others instead of focusing on how God created each and every one of us unique and also in his image and likeness.

Sheila Nonato: 9:29

May we exchange those earthly standards for the biblical standards of the Proverbs 31 woman, a woman of dignity, patience, generosity, courage, wisdom, faith, and love. These virtues reflect the feminine genius of Mother Mary and the feminine genius of women. May we learn to embrace our femininity, our womanhood, and our motherhood in each unique vocation to which we are called. Perflection. In the Bible, the number seven signifies perfection. When Jesus asks us to forgive seventy times seven, he is teaching us that this perfection mirrors biblical perfection. God's perfect love to be perfect like God the Father and God the Son is to love like they do, an unconditional, all-encompassing, compassionate, and merciful love that embraces the prodigal children of whom we all are. How can we emulate God's perfect love in our daily motherhood through God's grace and by making prayer as the centre of our day? In her book, "The Heart of Perfection, How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's," Catholic author, homeschooling mom of four, and former presidential speech writer, Colleen Carroll Campbell, writes about Saint Benedict and his rule of Biblical balance. In a Valent Armor podcast interview, Colleen also spoke of how the saintly sixth-century monk taught us about aura et labora, the importance of prayer and work. Colleen applied the concept of biblical balance to motherhood and wrote in her book about how Saint Benedict saw those daily duties as the stuff of our sanctification. For Saint Benedict, holiness consists in fidelity to God's will and the competing demands on our time and the mundane tasks of everyday life. Let us take to prayer a well-known phrase in social media, especially when we feel like we don't measure up. May we stop seeking validation from a world that crucified the perfect man. We can persevere through our daily challenges with God and the anchor of prayer guiding us in our actions throughout the day. Litany. Good Saint Anne, please pray for us. Our Lady of Czestochowa, please pray for us. Our Lady of Kibeho, please pray for us. Our Lady of Lourdes, please pray for us. Closing prayer. The late Saint John Paul II acknowledged how Vietnam's Our Lady of La Vang was a sign of hope for Christians in the country, although the apparitions have not yet received official church approval. Saint John Paul II wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Vietnam on the 200th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of La Vang. He wrote, "In going to the shrine of Our Lady of La Vang, so dear to the hearts of the Vietnamese faithful that pilgrims entrust to her their joys and their sorrows, their hopes and their sufferings. In this way they turn to God and make themselves intercessors for their families and for their entire people, asking the Lord to instill sentiments of peace, brotherhood, and solidarity in the hearts of all men and women, so that all Vietnamese will be every day more closely united in order to build a world in which it is pleasant to live, based on the essential spiritual and moral values, and where each person can be recognized in his dignity as a child of God and turn freely and with filial love to his Father in heaven, who is rich in mercy."

Sheila Nonato: 13:44

For our Closing Prayer, we remember all Christians around the world who were persecuted for their faith. May Our Lady of La Vang intercede for the people of Vietnam and the region of Asia to protect Christians in the practice of their Christian faith. May we learn from the example of the martyrs whose hearts burned with love for God and united their sufferings with the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail our lives, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn thy most gracious advocate, thine eyes to mercy towards us, that after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O Clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Co-Hosts: 15:07

Please subscribe to our podcast and YouTube channel and please spread the word. Let's Be Brave. Let's Be Bold and Be Blessed together.