Matt O'Connor

Matt O'Connor

My name is Matt O'Connor, I am a spiritual director, with a focus on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I am a graduate of the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Claremont, California, and an associate of the Loyola Institute for Spirituality in Orange, California.

    © Matt O'Connor 2020-2021

    Returned to Ourself

    Reflections on the journey towards wholeness; On the peace that finds us when, relieved from trying to become somehow "better", we live true to ourselves; And on the freedom found when our "belovedness" moves from a pious concept to the living breathing person we can be in the world.

    Mutuality

    Having a Laugh with God

    Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century Dominican friar, theologian and mystic, got himself in hot water with the Church when he wrote: "When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit."

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    Courage

    Living Confidently

    When I think of confident people, they are invariably cool, unflappable, even insouciant, but they carry themselves with an authority that those of us around them find compelling. Picture Martin Luther King Jr. as he led a walk with five thousand demonstrators; or fourteen year old Greta Thurnberg, addressing a conference of UN aristocrats, many of whom older than her grandparents, saying "How dare you!" to their pathetic response to climate change. Ms. Thurnberg and Dr. King leave no doubt about what it is that matters to them. What had been instilled within both became the defining nature of their engagement with the world. Each of us can live authentically too, when there is no distance between what resides within and our persona in the world. Besides being the author of the one and only life we have, we get to live out what matters most to us.

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    Introduction

    Returned And Restored

    To be "returned to ourself" is simply to be brought back into the truth of who each of us is. All the philosophies, theologies, or ideologies, for all their value, cannot compare with the richness and life that already exists within us. Notice the "returning" is done to us, not by us. This is important, for it is through our relationship with others and with God that we are brought back. Brought back, kind of to where we started, but to a self that emerges as infinitely "more" by way of the exchange with that "other."

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    Reconciliation

    Do Something

    Author Robin DiAngelo in her best selling book, White Fragility, describes white people’s complicity in the societal structures of racism as an inescapable consequence of our being silent. This silence provides us the cover to deny we have any responsibility to make right an unjust system that in its undeniable effects favors ‘us’ and punishes ‘them.’ Ms. DiAngelo explains this denial does not necessarily make a person ‘bad,’ that that is actually irrelevant, but, that denial sanctions those racist structures. To deny this reality is to sustain it, and that is not what we want to do.

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