Mark Your Calendar for March 27! “Faith & Life Lecture Series”

Back in September, I shared with my Sunday Morning Cafe readers that I’d be traveling to Minneapolis on March 27th to participate as a speaker for the “Faith and Life Lecture Series.” Back in February, MLB Hall of Famer, Darryl Strawberry shared his powerful witness in a talk entitled, “Faith & Transformation.” Just about a month after my talk, the next speaker in the series will be author, and NY Times journalist, David Brooks (“Faith & Connection:  How to Know a Person” (April 24, 2025).  My talk?  “Faith & Resilience: Finding Hope in Challenging Times.” Join me online on Thursday, March 27th, 2025, from 7-8 PM CST. Add the event to your calendar and save this link to connect to the livestream.

This series was founded by Tim Westermeyer, the Senior Pastor of a vibrant Twin Cities Lutheran Church, and a media presence in his own right.  Back in August Tim and I conducted an in-depth interview as a way of introducing me to his audience. In September, I shared an edited portion of that interview as a way to announce my upcoming presentation. This week, as Sunday Morning Cafe is getting ready to expand into other forms, including a soon-to-drop podcast, I figured the time was right to share another portion of that interview.  Tim’s thoughtful questions did a good job of making me articulate the fundamental goals of the SMC project. Thanks for being part of that project with me. I hope to be making some announcements pretty soon about the podcast, and upcoming SMC events. Pretty exciting!

The Edited Interview  

Tim:  “Who are you, and what do you do?”

Tom:  Nothing like a good open-ended question!  Let’s start with the resume stuff.  Then we can move onto the “Who is this?” end of things.  My wife, Lisa, and I just celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary.  Our three grown children have fledged our empty nest:  Annalise, 28, a baby lawyer, John Harry, 25, a baby engineer, Lizzie, 20, the baby of the family is a junior in college.  For over thirty years, I’ve maintained a counseling practice specializing in marriage and family therapy.  My doctoral research centered on resilient, happy marriages in difficult circumstances.  Specifically, I interviewed self-described resilient/happy couples caught up in the grind of medical residency.  It just so happened, that during that time of life, my medical school student wife, and mother of two children, was beginning her intern year as a pediatric resident.  Let’s just say that I had a personal stake in learning all I could about what leads to success in medical marriages!

Over the years, my research interests have broadened to include resilience in all its forms.  I found that, like my practice of strength-based psychotherapy, the resilience researcher asks the subject who has endured hard things, “How’d you do that?”  The researcher, like a good counselor, is sifting through a subject’s story locating those factors and decisions that led to surviving and thriving against all odds.  My love for writing, facilitating, and speaking to groups, has led to a satisfying adjunct career in retreat, and workshop facilitation, as well as a once-a-week article in my blog, “Sunday Morning Cafe.”  I’ll describe that more at length in a bit. 

As for the “who” of me…at a particularly dark time, my sideways adolescence got interrupted by, what William James would have called, a “religious experience” (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902).  From that time till now, the pursuit of intimacy with God, and service to it, has been the animating force of my life.  From the age of 17, I’ve pursued an evolving personal practice of contemplative spirituality.  Whenever people are confused by the term, “contemplative,” I like to say “it’s where Christian prayer and practice looks a whole like Buddhist mindfulness practice.  The difference for me is that the stated purpose of contemplative practice is intimacy with God.  That focus on the relationship with Holy Presence, informs my practice of psychotherapy, and research in some obvious, and some not-so-obvious ways.  Over the years, I’ve found that both the informal/inexplicit, as well as the formal/explicit spiritualities of my clients and research subjects can provide a tremendous source of resilience, and well-being.  The skill of listening deeply to my clients has been sharpened by my practice of listening deeply in contemplative prayer. 

Tim:  Is there a story behind the name of your blog, “Sunday Morning Cafe?”

Tom:  I think that last paragraph began to hint at this answer.  I’ve found that in my own faith tradition of Catholicism, perhaps the best kept secret is the richness of the contemplative tradition that goes all the way back to the first centuries of the early desert mothers and fathers of the Christianity.  The contemplative tradition within Christianity contains a smorgasbord of spiritualities that is as broad and deep as every personality type.  In my experience, most seminarians are never trained in these approaches, consequently, when they become pastors, neither are their congregants.  For the last fifteen years, my weekly article has attempted to exist at the crossroads where psychological insight meets solid contemplative practice.  It’s my hope that my work can speak to the heart of anyone interested in questions of meaning and mindfulness, whatever religious tradition, or no religious tradition at all.  I hope that the stories I tell each week connect with the Transcendent core of my readers.