Breadcrumbs Episode 10: Practicing Faith in the Body
Learning how a year with fewer spiritual practices was not a year with less faith.
This is the companion post to Episode 10 of Breadcrumbs, my behind-the-scenes series for paid subscribers.
The Chapter My Editor Called Boring
My first draft of Chapter 10 was built entirely around my own rule of life — a detailed account of my weekly and monthly spiritual practices, offered as an example. My editor's note was essentially: this is boring. (No shade, lol, doing edits was my favorite part of the process of writing this book).
She was right. It got rewritten. But the cut material gets a second life here, because that's what Breadcrumbs is for.
The List
I wrote a list down in 2024, after years of burnout taught me that putting myself last wasn't holiness, it was conditioning. (Jesus, Others, You spells JOY — remember?)
Daily neighborhood walks. Weekly lectionary podcast. Monthly spiritual direction. A new moon circle. Massage. Girls night every other week. Yin yoga Wednesdays. Centering prayer Thursdays. Therapy. Common prayer with my community. A monthly liturgical dinner in my home — which became the Crowded Table dinners I host on tour now. A book club. Weekly Zoom centering prayer. Sunday night gathering, which I often led.
It's a lot. But what I was actually doing was auditing: I tagged every practice by whether it fed my body, mind, spirit, or emotions, and whether it connected me to myself, others, or God. Because the way I was raised, nearly every practice was mind-based. Read the chapter, check the box. Done!
If you're new to this idea, I've written more about embracing embodied spirituality and practicing embodiment in Christianity.
What Changed
Our Sunday gathering of my faith community paused about a year ago. A few families moved for good reasons, the circle got too small, and it stopped working — especially for my kids. It was the right call and there was real grief in it.
Which means that for the first time in my life, I wasn't going to church on Sundays. While writing a book about how much my faith community means to me.
We're rebuilding now. A few Sundays ago I hosted a dinner for 17 of us, wrote a liturgy, did an art prompt around the table. It felt so good.
Seasons Are Not Moral
I wrote a chapter about spiritual practice and then spent the following year with fewer practices than I'd had in years. I don’t see thtt as failure. A year with fewer practices is not a year with less faith.
The argument was never do these fifteen things. It's that presence is available in the ordinary — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, walking-around life, placed before God as an offering.
So don't copy my schedule. Notice what your practices are actually feeding, see where the gaps are, and be led by what draws you instead of what you think you're supposed to do.
That's what embodied practice is for: Integration, not accumulation.
Faithfully Dissident Daughters is out now from Westminster John Knox Press. Order here.
The full Episode 10 of Breadcrumbs is available to paid subscribers below the paywall.