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On this episode of Discover Lafayette, we welcome Sarah Mary Toce Donlon, a speaker and consultant whose work bridges faith, wellness, leadership, human dignity, and the deeper questions that shape how we live.

Sarah Mary is a Lafayette native from a third-generation Lebanese family, rooted in the Mahtook family. She describes growing up surrounded by cousins, food, and family, swimming at her grandmother’s pool, and a deep sense of belonging. “I always just wanted to leave the world better than I found it,” she shares. “My family was so great and always supported my dreams and my big goals. I would say that they always dreamed bigger for me than I did for myself.”

Sarah Mary first studied Disaster Science and Management at LSU, a path she jokingly calls “basically a superhero degree.” Theology had always interested her, but she saw disaster response as a way to live out her faith in practical service: “I could do the work of Christianity in helping people in their most vulnerable times, caring for the hurt, the sick, and those in need.” As a young intern at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness during the BP oil spill, she witnessed the gravity of public service in real time. “The FBI is on the phone and the helicopters are coming in. It was something to see. I could be a part of a crew that had a hand in helping people recover.”

Her path later turned toward advocacy, communications, and the dignity of women and children. Through spiritual direction, she began asking deeper questions about faith and theology. Her spiritual director eventually asked whether she had considered pursuing a degree in the subject. Sarah Mary remembered that as a child, she had written about that very dream in a journal. “I applied, I interviewed, I got in, I got a full scholarship,” she recalls of pursuing studies at Boston College. “It was unbelievable how it lined up. So I knew the path was made clear and I knew I was supposed to be there.”

At Boston College, Sarah Mary earned her Master of Divinity, a three-year program with a pastoral component. But she is quick to say that theological study did not give her neat answers. “I always say that I was seeking answers, but I didn’t get answers because I find in, at least the Christian tradition, when you get answers, you get more questions. The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know.” What she received instead was a deeper understanding: “My whole worldview was reshaped. As a person, the way I engage with people and with life and with thoughts was made so much deeper and more impactful.”

Part of her faith formation took her to Rwanda, where she completed her practicum teaching English and religion. Rwanda was then implementing English as a primary language, and Sarah Mary often used French to teach English to her students. She describes living on a school compound where “cows were roaming the grounds,” beginning mornings with dances with the children, and sharing meals with teachers. “It was such a spectacular experience,” she says. “It’s a beautiful country, more beautiful than people realize.”

A central theme of Sarah Mary’s work is that faith does not require a rejection of reason. She says, “The awakened brain is wired for spirituality. Faith elevates reason, and science can prove it.” In our conversation, she explains that this idea has shaped a retreat she calls Sacred Sight, influenced in part by Dr. Lisa Miller’s work in The Awakened Brain. Sarah Mary describes the human mind as needing both sides of the “picnic table”: logic, science, and facts on one side, and spirituality, philosophy, intuition, and the arts on the other. “In our world, we tend to think the only true way to know anything is through logic and science and facts, period,” she says. “So what Dr. Miller argues is that you’re only using half of your brain when you think that way.”

Sarah Mary’s Catholic faith informs how she understands the relationship between reason and transcendence. “Faith never contradicts reason. It just elevates it,” she explains. “Reason has a ceiling. You can reason things all the way as high as reason will let you. But then it has a ceiling. And that’s where faith comes in to elevate that ceiling.” This spiritual lens allows her to speak about suffering, meaning, and human purpose without reducing life to easy explanations. “Our suffering isn’t meaningless,” she says. “It has a larger meaning in the wider world.”

That belief also shapes her view of the human person. “As Catholics, we say we’re built in the image of God,” Sarah Mary says. “We have God’s fingerprints on our soul.” But she does not present faith as anti-intellectual or dismissive of science. Instead, she calls people to “expand the logic” and “dive into the faith.” For Sarah Mary, faith is not an escape from reality; it is a deeper engagement with it. “God’s footprints are all over the created order,” she says. “If you go into nature and you look with sacred sight, using that fully awakened brain, you can see reflections of God.”

Sarah Mary is especially compelling when she speaks about human dignity. Her theological education, she says, broke her out of “very black and white rigid notions of truth and not truth, right and wrong, and clear and not clear.” She learned to become more comfortable in “the gray,” where opposing truths can coexist in tension. She uses the example of Jesus being fully human and fully divine: “You have to hold two opposing ideas in tension, and they actually create the whole truth.” That same understanding applies to daily human relationships, leadership, communication, and conflict.

For Sarah Mary, dignity becomes practical when we ask who we have quietly decided is “other.” Reflecting on a psalm that says God prepares a banquet before one’s enemies, she observes: “What God doesn’t say is that your enemies are not invited to that banquet.” She challenges listeners to consider not only who they identify as enemies, but who they value less than themselves. “Where can we challenge ourselves to grow an understanding of that person and inevitably grow in empathy and understand that they are dignified, just like you and I, no matter their circumstance, no matter what they look like?”

That insight leads to one of the most grounded moments in the interview: how we see people experiencing homelessness. “Nobody grows up saying, I can’t wait to have to beg for food,” Sarah Mary says. “That wasn’t their dream.” She offers a simple but powerful phrase: “curiosity before judgment.” Rather than assuming we know someone’s story, she asks us to become curious first. “What if we just got curious about people’s lives before we made some all-knowing judgment when we don’t even know who they are?”

Through Sarah Mary, LLC, she now offers retreats, speaking engagements, leadership formation, corporate workshops, and spiritual conversations. Her work has included a teachers’ retreat at Cathedral Carmel, a diaconate retreat for the current deacons at the Diocese of Lafayette, a five-part Easter mission at St. Pius X Church, and corporate retreats focused on leadership and morale. She does not believe in offering canned answers. “I never like to treat symptoms,” she says. “I like to treat root causes and help people think more deeply so that they can understand. Because when we understand, then we own knowledge and knowledge can transform us.”

In corporate spaces, Sarah Mary often focuses on human flourishing, empathy, and communication. When morale is low or an organization is struggling through change, she helps people step back and see the larger picture. “Sometimes people just need to be heard and told that they’re understood,” she says. Her approach is rooted in servant leadership and the belief that people thrive when their dignity is recognized.

Sarah Mary also brings wellness into her work, not as a trendy add-on, but as part of the whole human person. Having worked as a trainer and in the health industry, she sees physical wellness as another form of healing. She has taught clients about movement, nutrition, and “adding more color in their life,” especially through fruits, vegetables, and micronutrition. In her view, faith and wellness are not separate: “God made it,” she says of the natural world. “It’s his pharmacy.”

The interview closes with practical wisdom about stillness, balance, and self-awareness. Sarah Mary says balance is often misunderstood. “I don’t think it’s giving everything equal amounts of yourself,” she explains. “Balance is knowing what your values are and making sure those are aligned with your daily priorities.” She encourages people to identify their values and then examine whether their actual days reflect those values. “We can go through a day and do 500 things and be incredibly efficient and accomplished, and then go to bed feeling like we did nothing because nothing that we did aligned with who we were and who we’re called to be.”

This conversation with Sarah Mary Toce Donlon is ultimately about depth: deeper faith, deeper listening, deeper leadership, deeper dignity, and deeper awareness of the human being. She invites us to move beyond quick fixes, rigid categories, and surface-level solutions, and instead to ask better questions, hold mystery with humility, and see ourselves and others as created in love.

For more information, visit https://www.sarahmary.org/