Introducing The Faith & Life Lecture Series.

On March 20, I’ll take my turn speaking in the “Faith and Life Lecture Series.”  I’ll be fourth in the lineup behind former MLB Hall of Famer, Darryl Strawberry (“Faith & Transformation:  A Personal Story of Restoration”, Feb 6, 2025).  After me, 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 topic?  “Faith & Resilience:  Finding Hope in Challenging Times.”  As the time for this series draws nearer, I’ll share a link with you so that you can join these amazing speakers and me live in Minneapolis, or online.  The Senior Pastor of a vibrant Twin Cities Lutheran Church , Tim Westermeyer,  founded this lecture curriculum way back in 2003.  Let me use his words to tell you the mission of this series.

“The Faith and Life Lecture Series” exists to create welcoming and accessible forums for members of the Twin Cities community to hear nationally known speakers reflect on how Christian faith is related to different dimensions of everyday life.  The talks are always free public events.”

If you stumble upon St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church’s Facebook page, you will find that Tim is both profoundly pastoral, as well as deeply thoughtful.  This week, I thought I’d share with you just a small section of an interview that we finished up together last week.  You will find that Tim’s questions are provided below in bold type.    

Tim Westermeyer Interviews Tom Wagner (Aug 31, 2024)

We’ve heard a lot about the loneliness epidemic in our culture. What has caused that, do you think, and how can the community of the church help to address it? 

Such an important question!  So many layers to it!Ask anybody in a helping profession about the “recent loneliness epidemic” in our culture.  You’re likely to get a wry smile and a response like, “This is nothing new!”  Anyone in a helping profession has been noticing this for so long!  Artists have been singing, painting, and writing novels about it for many, many decades.  From where I sit, I think that the Pandemic of 2020 just exposed a long-standing problem, even as it heightened it.  What may be new right now is the helpful message, “You’re not alone in your loneliness!”

Lately, I’ve been seeing the issues of loneliness and isolation through the eyes of Wendell Berry’s novels and essays.  In a word, he sees consumerism as the community shredding machine at the heart of American loneliness.  A financial system that is dependent upon constant short-term growth, as well as unsustainable levels of debt for almost everyone, quietly, but inexorably, takes time, resources, and focus away from the bonds that have always sustained humanity.  Beauty is lost to glamor.  Discipline is for chumps.  Ownership rather than relationship is the coin of this realm.  I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll surely repeat it.  “The global village” predicted at the advent of electronic media, has not only failed to come to pass, it has actually fragmented people into ideological gated communities, made more space for false information, kept our children indoors and away from each other.  From what I see from my counselor’s chair, is that media in all its forms, is making us more angry, scared, and isolated from one another.       

What can the church do about it?  In the Fifth Century, Augustine of Hippo, said, “Oh Lord, our hearts were made for you, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  Among all the organizations in our culture, our spiritual communities are best suited to understand and speak to the loneliness that lies at the heart of the human condition.  Our culture desperately needs our spiritual communities to reteach us the ancient arts of the practice of the Presence of God.  This is what my resilience research has led me to.  An abiding source of community and resilience pulses at the heart of each person.  Recovering how to connect with that Transcendent core of the self is essential work for our time.  This work cannot be done in isolation.  This work has to be done together in communities with experienced, mentors who are capable of a deep form of accompaniment on this journey.  Nobody can come to this alone. 

On your website, you have this beautiful statement: “We live in a God drenched world. Scratch just below the surface of things, and you will notice, right there under your fingertips…divinity.  For those who are looking for it, all of reality holds the potential for revelation.” If, as you say, the world is so drenched in divinity—which I happen to agree with—why is it so easy for us to miss it? Maybe more importantly, how would you encourage people to see it more fully?

It probably goes without saying, but one obvious answer to this question has to do with what brought me to resilience research to start with:  the ubiquitous experience of suffering.  I agree with the aphorism that the least wrong thing you can say about God is that “God is love.”  In the midst of Grade A, Blue Ribbon, Gold Medal suffering, it’s hard to see or experience that Loving Presence.  It seems to me that in those moments, that Loving Presence has to be mediated through the Beloved Community that Christianity describes as “The Body of Christ.” 

I can remember attending a talk by the Twentieth Century mystic, Anthony DeMello.  In answer to the question, “Why is God so hard to find?” he passed along this story.  “There once was a fish that was quite a seeker!  She kept looking and looking for the ocean, but all she ever found was water!”  DeMello, like the spiritual masters in every tradition, describes God’s Spirit as nearer to us than our own breath.  One of the Hebrew words for God’s Spirit, Ruach” can be translated, “breath inside of breath.”  God’s presence is easy to miss because it’s so close you can’t see it.

In my own resilience research, I’ve found that the intentional practice of noticing Beauty is an incredibly accessible way of developing the eyesight to see this Presence at the core of everything.  The way that the discipline of “beauty checks” works, is that once you locate something beautiful (whether it is physically beautiful like a landscape, or morally beautiful like kindness or generosity) the next step is to momentarily “stop” what you’re doing, “drop” down into your body so that you can “savor” it.  This methodology of “Stop…Drop…and Savor” is very close to what gratitude practitioners like Brother David Steindl-Rast, Lucy Hone, and Marty Seligman are getting at in their respective research.  For me, the term, “gratitude,” suggests an intellectual exercise.  I prefer the term, “savoring,” as a much more holistic term that includes the somatic inner experience in the practice.

A Note to SMC Readers:  This was just a small section cut out of last week’s interview.  I look forward to sharing the rest of it with you in either this forum, or sharing with you on the link to Tim’s quarterly publication where it will appear in some future issue.  In the meantime, have a great Sunday, and a great week!