There is a grief many faithful women carry, though they do not always have words for it. It lives in the tension between devotion and dismissal, between loving God deeply and feeling strangely estranged from their own bodies. Somewhere along the way, holiness became associated with endurance rather than intimacy, and the body was reduced to something to manage, tolerate, or overcome in the pursuit of spiritual maturity.
Yet, the story the saints tell is far more incarnational than we often remember.
In a recent conversation with Christina Valenzuela, founder of Pearl & Thistle, we explored what happens when women stop treating the body as a spiritual inconvenience and begin to see it as part of God’s chosen language. Not metaphorically, but quite literally.
The saints are often remembered in fragments. Their virtues are extracted, their suffering is summarized, and their bodies are quietly edited out of the story. What remains is inspiring, but incomplete. Every saint who fasted also felt hunger. Every saint who surrendered also carried fear in her chest. Every saint who trusted God did so while inhabiting a nervous system shaped by experience, limitation, and grace.
They did not transcend embodiment in order to become holy. They became holy by remaining faithful within it.
This matters because modern women have been trained, often unconsciously, to distrust their physical experience. Cycles are inconvenient. Fatigue is a flaw. Pain is something to silence quickly. Sensitivity is framed as weakness rather than information. Over time, the body becomes something a woman manages from a distance rather than a place she inhabits with reverence.
The saints remind us that God has never required disembodiment. He has always asked for presence.
When women begin to ask deeper questions about their bodies, they often do so hesitantly, as if curiosity itself might be suspect. Why does the body move in rhythms rather than straight lines. Why does fertility come and go. Why does emotional overwhelm often precede physical collapse. Why does prayer feel different depending on where a woman is in her cycle, her season, or her story.
These are not distractions from faith. They are theological questions, rooted in the reality that God chose to create women with cyclical, responsive, communicative bodies.
Body literacy, approached through a Catholic lens, is not about control or optimization. It is about attentiveness. It is the slow learning of a language that has been spoken since the beginning, one written into hormones, patterns, and responses long before charts or protocols existed. Christina’s work invites women to read this language with curiosity rather than suspicion, and with humility rather than fear.
In doing so, the body ceases to be something a woman must conquer in order to be faithful. It becomes a place where faith is practiced.
Beyond Fertility, Toward Integration
Much of the conversation around body literacy has been narrowly confined to fertility, as though a woman’s body only matters when pregnancy is possible or desired. Yet the body continues to speak long after fertility fades, and long before it begins. It speaks through anxiety and peace, through energy and depletion, through longing and resistance, through the subtle cues that shape how a woman relates to God, her family, and herself.
When women learn to listen to these signals, something shifts internally. What once felt like spiritual failure often reveals itself as exhaustion. What felt like lack of discipline becomes a need for safety. What felt like distance from God is sometimes the body asking to be included in the relationship rather than ignored.
The saints understood this intuitively. They did not confuse self-neglect with sanctity, nor did they mistake relentless striving for devotion. They trusted that God meets us in truth, not in denial.
If you have ever felt torn between loving God and feeling at home in your body, this conversation offers a different way forward. Not through force or fixing, but through listening, reverence, and a willingness to believe that your body, in all its complexity, was never a mistake.
You can learn more about Christina’s work and her approach to Catholic body literacy at https://pearlandthistle.com/, and explore how reclaiming the language of the body can open the door to a more integrated, peaceful, and deeply incarnational faith.
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