Book Review: The body teaches the soul

Here’s a grim statistic: “[m]ore than one-third of New Zealand lawyers and law students are suffering psychological distress.” That’s a summary of a study into the mental health of the legal profession in New Zealand, which found this to be consistent with international research showing that lawyers experience psychological distress and depression at higher rates than other professions. 

Lawyers will have their own explanations for this; one clinical psychologist’s comment, that lawyers are trained “to spot weakness, to have negativity bias, to be driven towards perfectionism” rings true. At the same time, Justin Whitmel Earley argues that something more than unhealthy thought patterns is at play.

A lawyer who’d fallen into the habit of “relying on either a few pills or a few drinks to try to get some sleep,” Earley found himself insomniac, in a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night, with his body rebelling against him. “Here’s the strangest thing,” he says. “I was then and am still now a follower of Jesus.” So, he asked himself, how was it “that I can preach a gospel of peace in my head and yet find my body a wreck of anxiety?”

Earley was forced to re-evaluate, and the fruits of his reflections are found in his recent book, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten essential habits to form a healthy and holy life.

Earley’s argument is that what we do with our bodies matters; in fact, that rather than being a matter of thinking the right thoughts, life is an embodied endeavour. Thus he says, “You cannot think your way out of a problem you didn’t think your way into. You practiced your way here; you need to practice your way out.”

Aware there’s a risk of making the body into an idol, Earley counsels us not to focus on body image but on “body as image”. By this he means that we should consider our body to be a lens through which we reveal “the shape of our desires”—whether we crave human approval or instead understand our body as a gift which should be offered back to the One who gave it.

This orients his advice on eating and drinking, fasting and feasting. Fasting, for example, is not a spiritualised form of dieting. It is, or should be, a spiritual discipline that points us towards Jesus so that we can be conformed into His likeness.

Similarly, sleep is not an indulgence and nor is it a weakness to be resisted in the name of productivity. Instead, it is a “divine gift of rest” which images God Himself at the pinnacle of His creative endeavour. Accepting our need for sleep is a kind of nightly sabbath and, like the weekly sabbath, acknowledges our creaturely limitations and our dependence on God. Walter Brueggeman has even called this “sabbath as resistance”, an act of rebellion against dominant cultural narratives that tell us our achievements depend on our efforts and our significance depends on our striving.

Earley is aware of the obvious, that our bodies are as broken as the world of which they are a part. His wife, Lauren, suffers from chronic illness and pain, and he tackles the issue head-on. He doesn’t offer trite explanations or comforts, instead saying that “God does not give an explanation” for pain, sickness, and suffering, but instead “gives himself”. Thus it is faithful to hope for healing while honestly lamenting suffering, knowing that that God has already paid the price to put the world to rights in the fullness of time and that healing, when it happens, is God “do[ing] now what He has promised to do in the future.”

Earley is neither a theologian nor a health professional, but he draws skilfully on those who are to offer spiritual and physical disciplines. The chapters typically start with stories, traverse theological and practical insights, and end with easily digestible summaries. In addition to the chapters on eating, sleeping, and sickness, there are chapters on breathing, thinking, exercise, sex, technology, worship, and death. The good news, in life and in this book, is that the narrative ends in resurrection.

Earley has written for any Christian who wants to know how to pursue flourishing. The stats we started with suggest that lawyers, perhaps more than many, would benefit from his integrated vision of body and soul—the state that we call shalom.

Justin Whitmel Earley, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten essential habits to form a healthy and holy life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2025) can be purchased here.