What does it mean to be spiritually fed in these times?

Three faith leaders return repeatedly to one core idea

“Sometimes the medicine is accepting community when isolation feels safer.” image credit: Shutterstock 

What does it mean to be spiritually fed in a moment where everything feels like it is asking something from you, your attention, your labor, your body, your grief, your hope and yet so little seems to restore you in return? This question is not abstract right now. It is material, it is embodied, and it is most certainly political. It’s about survival.

What emerges from all three interviews is an understanding that spirituality isn’t disembodied inspiration floating above material reality. It is deeply tied to how people survive systems designed to fragment them. That idea has deep roots across traditions.

Because what many people are experiencing is not simply fatigue. It’s what researchers and clinicians increasingly describe as burnout tied to chronic systemic stress, a condition the World Health Organization defines as a syndrome resulting from unmanaged chronic stress, one that leaves people depleted, detached and unable to function as they once did. When that stress is compounded by racism, transphobia, economic precarity, political violence, attacks on reproductive autonomy, housing insecurity and rising authoritarian rhetoric, the exhaustion becomes spiritual as much as psychological.

And yet, in the face of that exhaustion, the language of spirituality is everywhere. It fills timelines, pulpits, podcasts, captions. It promises peace, healing, grounding. But not all of it nourishes.

Some of it, as Andi Woodworth, pastor of Neighborhood Church in Atlanta, a progressive and affirming congregation, described, is a kind of “candy religion,” something that feels good for a moment but leaves you emptier afterward, a sweetness that masks reality rather than sustaining you through it. “There is a way in which a lot of spirituality is given to us … that is designed to make you feel good for a second,” she explains, “but it does not have any actual nourishment in it.”

That distinction matters, because the difference between spiritual nourishment and spiritual sedation is often the difference between liberation and stagnation.

The theologian Howard Thurman wrote, “I place a crown upon my head and all the days of my life I shall try to grow tall enough to wear it.” 

For Rev. Darci, who serves at Park Avenue Baptist Church, a progressive, activism-driven congregation grounded in liberation theology and Black feminist frameworks, that quote isn’t metaphorical decoration, it’s a standard. Spiritual nourishment, they say, must affirm people already possess dignity, carry worth, and belong to what they describe as “the entire kingdom of God” not someday, not after suffering, but now.

Interfaith minister Rev. Estee Dillard, an Atlanta-based faith leader, activist and Black feminist scholar, pushes the question even further. “Being spiritually fed,” she says, “is a critical question particularly for queer folks, for our trans family, for those of us who understand that it is Black women first that are going to lose their lives, that it is queer people first that are going to be impacted.”

For Dillard, spirituality cannot be separated from political and economic realities. She speaks directly about attacks on voting rights, healthcare systems, social welfare programs and what she describes as “a machine that does not value anyone but oligarchs.” In that context, spiritual nourishment becomes not comfort, but survival infrastructure.

“Nurture is not about comfort,” Dillard explains. “Nurture is about making sure that we are able to extract the wellness, the medicine, the food, the resources from what spirit makes available to us.”

Sometimes, she says, the medicine is bitter. Sometimes the medicine is rest. In a culture that glorifies exhaustion. Sometimes the medicine is crying when you want to appear strong. Sometimes the medicine is leaving environments that diminish you. Sometimes the medicine is accepting community when isolation feels safer.

All three faith leaders reject the idea that spirituality exists merely to pacify people through crisis.

Woodworth points to the danger of individualizing systemic harm, the idea that if someone just prayed harder, believed more, trusted deeper, their conditions would change. “Systemic problems are going to require systemic solutions,” she says, pushing back against the idea that faith can substitute for structural change.

Rev. Darci echoes this from another angle, recalling how institutions have historically suppressed liberating messages in favor of compliance, referencing moments when churches moved against liberation theologians who insisted that oppressed people weren’t simply vessels of suffering but agents of dignity. “If we are left burnt out with nothing left to give,” they say, “that can’t be nourishing.”

Dillard sharpens the critique even further by interrogating rhetoric itself.

“I think it’s important for us as Black and queer people to get away from rhetoric – to get away from what sounds good and to start looking at the outcomes of what people do,” she says. “If rhetoric sounds good and feels inspirational in the moment but has no outcome of making us better, gives us no practical information, gives us no direct access to the medicine that allows us to be made more well, then it is insufficient.”

Her critique lands at a moment when spiritual branding has become commodified online, where inspiration is often aestheticized rather than embodied. In many ways, what Dillard is describing echoes the warnings of philosophers like bell hooks, who argued repeatedly that love, healing and community aren’t abstractions but disciplined practices rooted in accountability and transformation.

It also resonates with the work of James Baldwin, who wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

That confrontation with reality is central to how these leaders define nourishment. And for Woodworth, nourishment begins with grounding in the natural world, touching the earth, standing in sunlight, noticing flowers, reconnecting to the reality of being alive outside the chaos of human systems.

“There is more to aliveness than the human context,” she says.

For Rev. Darci, nourishment comes through somatic practices, nervous system regulation, art-making, moonlight, land connection and community resilience work rooted in embodied healing practices. Following a breast cancer diagnosis that became part of their gender-affirming journey, they describe reconnecting to the earth not as escape, but as congruence.

“As I’ve been answering these questions,” they said during the interview, “I am literally sitting in the light of the moon on the grass in my backyard.”

Dillard similarly points people back toward ritual, body care, ancestral practices and emotional honesty. A practitioner of Afrocentric Christianity, West African Orisha traditions and ancestral spiritual practices, she describes spirituality as something deeply communal and practical.“We are not meant to grow alone,” she says.

Her recommendations are strikingly tangible. Journal. Go to the river. Cry. Take spiritual baths. Cleanse your home. Meditate. Eat foods that nourish your body. Go to dinner with someone. Touch grass. Sit with community. And so what emerges from all three interviews is an understanding that spirituality isn’t disembodied inspiration floating above material reality. It is deeply tied to how people survive systems designed to fragment them. That idea has deep roots across traditions.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh taught mindfulness isn’t withdrawal from suffering but presence within it. Audre Lorde famously wrote “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” The womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, whose work Rev. Darci references directly, has extensively documented how white supremacist theology shaped American Christianity in ways that justified domination rather than liberation.

Meanwhile, thinkers like Cornel West have argued justice itself is what love looks like in public. Across traditions, the message becomes remarkably consistent and real nourishment does not detach people from the world. It prepares them to survive it without losing themselves inside it. It is a preparation that often requires confronting difficult truths, not avoiding them. Dillard speaks openly about what she describes as “spiritual warfare,” not in the sensationalized sense often found in popular religion, but as the cumulative emotional, political, economic and psychological pressures designed to wear marginalized communities down.

“We are in wartime,” she says. “This is spiritual war. It is economic war.” And yet none of these leaders ultimately speak from despair. What they describe instead is a spirituality rooted in practice rather than performance, community rather than spectacle, embodiment rather than abstraction.

Woodworth talks about listening deeply to people unlike ourselves and finding hope through stories. Rev. Darci speaks about building congregations willing to deconstruct harmful theology while reconstructing practices that affirm Blackness, queerness, land and collective care. Dillard insists spiritual traditions must not merely sound beautiful, but actually produce wellness, clarity, healing and endurance.

All three return repeatedly to one core idea: Spiritual nourishment should leave people more alive. More grounded. More connected. More capable of loving, resisting, grieving, resting andrebuilding. Not because the world has become less dangerous, but because they have remembered they themselves are still worthy of care within it. And perhaps that is the clearest answer to the question. To be spiritually fed today isn’t to be endlessly inspired. It is to remain human in a world that increasingly rewards numbness. It is to build practices, relationships, rituals and communities capable of carrying people through exhaustion without demanding their disappearance in return. It is learning to breathe again. How to feel again. How to belong to yourself again. Even now.