Doris Westfall, T’05. knew she wanted to be a priest since she was a little girl. When a family friend helped her achieve her lifelong dream by generously offering to pay her living expenses in seminary, she seized the opportunity. Now she and her family are eager to pay forward that generosity.
Westfall generously supports current seminarians
When Doris Westfall, T’05, was a little girl, she knew that one day she would be a priest. At the time, women were not ordained in the Episcopal Church, the church in which she grew up in New Jersey. Yet she still had a conviction that she would one day be a priest. Oddly enough, she also had an inkling that she might prepare for the priesthood at Sewanee. “I remember as a very small child, a man came to visit my father—an old friend who had attended Sewanee. During the visit, my father turned to me and said, ‘Maybe one day, you will go to a college on the top of a mountain in Tennessee.’”
Years passed in which Westfall earned a degree in psychology from Valparaiso (1981) and a Master of Social Work from St. Louis University (1993). After seven years working as a clinical social worker, that long-heard call was reignited, and Westfall announced her plan to prepare for the priesthood and enter seminary at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, a seminary of the United Church of Christ.
While Eden was conveniently located, Westfall wanted a stronger Episcopal connection, and while she and her family were on a trip, they passed through Tennessee and stopped at Sewanee, where that long-ago friend had been a student. “When I came onto campus, I immediately felt at home,” Westfall recalls. Soon after that trip, she began making arrangements to enter Sewanee.
“One of the big obstacles for our family was cost,” Westfall says. “Sewanee was generous with financial aid, but the cost was still significant because for a number of reasons, our family needed to maintain two households.” Westfall and her husband, David, were spending long hours wondering how they would meet those costs when a family friend offered to cover Westfall’s living expenses. “We were so grateful for that generosity, which made a Sewanee education possible for me.”
Westfall studied hard but also made it a daily practice to spend telephone time with her family. In fact, her seminary education became a kind of family project, with everyone invested in her success. “One week I went home because one of my sons’ schools had parent-teacher conferences, and one of the teachers paid me the best compliment when she said, ‘If I didn’t know you were away, I wouldn’t know you were away.’”
When she announced her decision to attend seminary, Westfall’s father was skeptical. “He said to me, ‘so you’re going to throw away your social work degree?’” Yet Westfall has found that she has always used her background in social work in her daily life as a priest, particularly now, when she serves as interim canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri. “My work involves a lot of problem solving and helping people talk about the best direction to take, and my social work degree is really helpful,” she says.
One of Westfall’s duties is as a trustee of the University of the South, work that brings her great joy. And as a trustee, she and her husband made the decision to tithe her salary to Sewanee. “When my husband and I sat down with our financial advisor, he asked us what our goals were. David said that he would like for us to be in a position to do for someone else what had been done for me, when our friend paid my living expenses at seminary.”
