Hope Podcast: Featuring Hiatt O'Connor, MDiv '26

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from Hiatt O'Connor, a second-year MDiv student at HDS. He discusses his journey from a Christian upbringing to Zen Buddhist practices, reading the Tao Te Ching, and his relationship with Quakerism.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a podcast hosted by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they work to cultivate it daily. My name is Michael Fuhrman, one of the chaplain interns in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. 

Today, I sat down with second-year master of divinity candidate Hiatt O'Connor. Oh, we're real now. Oh, yeah, welcome to the real microphone world. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: I'm glad to be here. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah. Well, we're glad that you took the chance to sit down with us. We start these usually just by asking people a little bit about their spiritual biographies. It's so different here at Divinity School. Everyone comes from different backgrounds. So we'd love to hear about yours. 

Hiatt O'Connor: Yeah. What's the long and short of it that I could say? Well, when I was born I was baptized Catholic because my dad's side of the family is Irish Catholic, but we never practiced. So I don't know if I'd count that. But it's definitely in the blood and it's in the family too in the currents that we have. 

And my mom's side was vaguely Protestant, a little bit of Lutheran, a little bit of Baptist, a little bit of Methodist, all sort of sprinkled around. But nobody ever went to church. I went to church probably 10 times as a kid. None of them for Christmas or Easter. But just like, well, frankly, if someone died, or because my friends would go in elementary school and I would sleep over at their house on a Saturday. And then on a Sunday, it was like, hey, everybody get up. Time to go to church. 

But I never really liked it. The only reason I wanted to go is to be with my friends who were going. But that quickly fell away because I didn't like waking up early on Sundays, et cetera. So I was areligious, even though God is sort of in the vernacular of the family. But that was for a long time. And then in middle school, my home life got pretty sour. And then I got pretty sour towards any idea of God that was, like I said, in the vernacular. 

And I was also watching a lot of science channel because I was a very lonely kid, and I would hang out and watch a lot of Science channel, Animal Planet, Discovery. And where the explanations-- the religious explanations were there, the scientific explanations sort of took their place. So I became a naive, angry atheist as a teenager, as many do. And then I got to undergrad and that softened a little bit. 

So I basically became agnostic, but not in any way inclined towards a belief, just of recognizing, oh, OK, I can't possibly know what's what. And I helped in my spiritual life at my undergrad in the Humanist Society. I did a little work on their Buddhist community. And I also was with their nuns. But I was never like a part of any of them. I kind of helped found the humanist, but the more I learned about humanism, the less interested I was in it. 

And at the very same time, I was writing a lot of poems and reading a lot of poetry for the first time. And that, in retrospect, was like my first spiritual practice, but also my first, I guess, genuine touch with-- I don't want to call it religion because it's not religion. But genuine touch of whatever you might want to call it. And I followed that thread rather than the organized faith traditions or the faith traditions explicitly. 

And then I was also having a lot of transformative experiences. I don't want to call them mystical, because that's sort of too broad and not really saying anything. But these really profound experiences, just working on a horse farm, just being out in the world, the natural world, and then with animals, and with other people and in community service roles. 

But then COVID happened. So I couldn't follow that thread much anymore. And I was sent back home from my senior year, March of 2020. So I had the second half of my senior year to do, but I was at home. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I had these stirrings in me that I sort of had to parse out. So that's what I did. And I started reading all through a bunch of different wisdom traditions. I read through a lot of Christian texts. I read through some of the Jewish texts and some Midrash. 

The Abrahamic religions just never struck me. I had too much bias against them from when I was a kid. But I randomly found a copy of the Tao Te Ching one day and that-- well, I say one day, but it was over the span of a couple days that I read it out in the fields where I lived. And that just blew the top of my head off. 

Basically, all of the questions and all the apprehensions I had beforehand about spirituality or religious practice, or even like my place as a person in community and in the cosmos were not answered, but definitely positively gestured towards. It felt like when I was reading the Tao Te Ching, everything was really, really strange and new that I was reading and hearing from Lao Tzu, but deeply familiar. Like, oh, duh, of course it's like that. 

And I wanted to practice that. I wanted to put that into effect because I was tired of being confused and tired, of being frustrated and feeling a little lost. And I wanted to live my life more intentionally. I didn't really know how. So I said, OK, well, let me try to practice what Lao Tzu preaches. Couldn't because there was no active Taoist communities anywhere near me. I have to go pretty far. 

But with more studying and more reading, I came across Chan and Zen, and just fell full tilt into that while still writing poems and while still-- my main practice at that time was still poetry. And today, it still is, but it's sort of poetry and Zen practice are basically two moons of the same size that orbit each other and help each other out and help me out in that way.

And from there, I started to re-interrogate and revisit my Christian background, my vaguely Christian background. So I had to coax out what that had instilled in me and used Zen practice and my own poetry practice as a background and as a mirror, I mean, to do that with. And that-- I don't know how to say it. It was very helpful insofar as that-- I could approach it more openly and with less animosity, but still critically. And then could see positive light. 

I could coax out what, in my quote-unquote "Christian upbringing," it was in the water. I could coax out what from there I resented and what from there I thought was really beneficial and wholesome. And I could do so in alternative ways and through different angles. I could look at it slant-wise, and read sort of quote-unquote "nontraditional" authors. I wouldn't say Thomas Merton is at this point nontraditional, but he might be on the periphery. 

He was very much helpful, so were his books on Zen and the Birds of Appetite and his Asia journals. Just to see how my current and form currently forming spiritual practices and Buddhist readings can work together with my Christian background and the water that I came from in more-- and the water that I came from in beneficial ways so they don't have to defeat one another. They can just be there with each other, for better or worse. 

And I neglected to mention, but I wanted to practice with Buddhist communities more. But there were none in rural Maryland, and there really still aren't. I mean, I'd have to drive like an hour to sit in someone's basement. So that was good, I liked doing that, but I wanted basically a more serious and more refined experience. I wanted to deepen my practice. And you can't really do that in that way. And you can't really do it sitting alone. That only takes you so far. 

So I went to places like Zen Mountain Monastery in Tremper, New York, and did a couple of sesshins. I would say that they are my lineage at this point. But I also wouldn't claim them or let myself be claimed by them in that way. I still have a suspicion and an ambivalence about rooting myself in one single tradition. 

And I'm also neglecting to mention the fact that I sat with a Quaker meeting for two years in rural Maryland, Pipe Creek Friends Meeting. Love those guys. Shout out to Pipe Creek Friends Meeting in Union Bridge, Maryland. Quakerism itself was very inspirational to me and very uplifting insofar as it balanced that sort of outward service that was deeply transformative for me, along with the contemplative was equally as transformative. It's the cataphatic and the apophatic together. It's not called that in Quakerism explicitly, but that's what it is. 

Yeah. So then I was sort of duly belonging and having to do a lot of soft translation between Quakerism and my Zen Buddhism. I still do have to because I'm one of the guiding members of the HGSE friends here and in the Buddhist community here. And I'm teaching Dharma at the Groton School with Dr. Sanford. So I'm having to do a lot of soft translation. I've had to do a lot of soft translation sort of constantly through my life. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: A lot of what's informing your decision to be here, I think, very obviously is the aspect of pluralism, the aspect of belonging, multiplicitly to-- 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Multiplicitously? 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Multiplicitously to varied spiritual traditions. And so I think from that standpoint, it makes sense why HDS. But I guess the follow-up question to that would be in addition to why Harvard Divinity School, why grad school at all, maybe. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. I'll go with why graduate school first, because then that would contextualize this. So the pandemic restrictions loosened up and I started to work again, first doing pizza delivery because that's who was hiring at first. And then I wanted to work with youth again. I neglected to mention this, but the horse farm that I volunteered at and worked at during undergrad, Brook Hill Farm in South Virginia, was an equine therapy and rehabilitation program. 

So they did a lot of work with adults with mental and physical disabilities, along with at-risk youth. So youth who have unstable homes, unstable food resources, unstable financial resources, whose families and parents sort of wrought with addiction. And that's where I came from. That's why when I mentioned my home life being sour, that's what it was. So I wanted to continue serving my community that I was from now, since I was back in Maryland. And I wanted to serve and help and lend a hand, because to me that was meaningful and it's what I was good at. 

So I started to work-- I volunteered at first at the Boys & Girls Club of Westminster. And then they hired me on as a mentor. And then from there, I became a site director at North Carroll Middle School. So I was applying my spiritual practices and the Bodhisattva vows, which I had taken at Zen Mountain Monastery, which I neglected to mention because I forget when I ramble. 

So I could actualize my own spiritual practices in the world through service. And it was really fulfilling. And I loved the work, but I was sensing in myself that I needed more refinement and more explicit and intentional work. Just for my own satisfaction, but also for my own practice and for my own benefit and the wider benefit of the communities I wanted to serve. 

So I was talking to a former mentor about that. His name is JR. He's from the University of Lynchburg. He's a chaplain in their spiritual life. Community and he recommended that I check out masters of divinity programs. And I said, what is that? What is that? That sounds ridiculous. I don't want to study divinity. What? 

JR has always-- whenever he's given me advice that sounds strange and I follow through on it, it always worked out in my favor. He has a way of reading forward for me that I can't do for myself. So I checked it out. And it turned out to sound like a fantastic fit to balance service with learning, with study, and with formation. 

So I applied to a bunch of schools, not thinking I would get into any. I applied Naropa, Chicago, Earlham, which is a Quaker school in Indiana, Harvard, and again-- oh, Union Theological Seminary in New York City with their engaged Buddhist program. Not thinking I'd get in anywhere. And if I did get in somewhere, definitely wouldn't be here. 

And sure enough, just like reading the Tao Te Ching all those years before, it sort of blew the top of my head off again of oh my god, the possibilities then just became immense. Yeah. So it was incredibly gratifying and something to be grateful for to then have the opportunity to then come and study here, and well, to come and study in any of those places. 

Knowing the home life that I come from before and all the confusions that I had had and all the frustrations, and then all of a sudden I have this opportunity to just run amok in this beautiful place with fantastic professors and people and community service opportunities and fielded opportunities and so on. 

But I chose Harvard Divinity School, specifically over a place like Chicago or Naropa, because it I think balances really, really, really well and it's sort of mutual emphasis on community formation, community service, and your own individual formation, and academics and intense studies. 

And I think my gut sense on that was correct, because now when I'm here and I'm doing my academics, I can do them in a way that still incorporates my poetry and still incorporates my spiritual practices and my own inmost experiences, in ways that professors don't ignore or shut out or say that I couldn't bring them into the fold. It seems that they respect and encourage the fact that those experiences are what motivate and are what inform you, along with your own academic interests. 

But anyway, I also chose to come here because of the field Ed opportunities, which were strongly emphasized. And now I'm working with Dr. Monica Sanford at the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, with their Buddhist Sangha. So I'm serving high schoolers from 8 to 12th grade. I'm serving the youth community, which is who I want to work with and who I've always worked with in an explicitly Buddhist capacity, which is what I wanted to do and it's part of the reason I wanted to come to Div School. 

And in the process, learning a lot more about the Dharma and how to present it skillfully and how to lead practices skillfully. And how to incorporate that project and that effort into my own practices and my own life. And that's obviously a very, very shortened version of that. 

But I came across that on a whim. I asked Dr. Sanford, who I had a class with before, hey, do of any opportunities? And she said, well, I think this would be perfect for you. And I said, well, I think you're right. I think it would be. And so far, it is. So all the-- yeah, I'll stop there because I'm going to keep rambling. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I mean, it sounds like I think a word used around here a lot is integration, taking these threads or these things that in our world somehow are connected and then actually getting to put them into practice in the real world. And causing that integration, I think, is a Testament to both the school, but also to your own resourcefulness and willingness to try and explore too. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. See, this is why you're the host, because you can say it so much better. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Well, I appreciate that. And the container of this podcast, kind of as I call it, is hope. And that word means so many different things to each individual person. And we're curious with this context of you as a spiritual person, with you as a graduate student, I'm sort of curious about what hope means to you. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: If somebody asked me if I was a hopeful person, I don't think I would answer yes. On a surface level, maybe not. And on a broad level, maybe not. Like, if you ask me how the world's going, I'd wince, you know? But on an everyday level, yeah, maybe I would say I'm an optimistic person. I don't know. In the context of practices and rituals that make me more optimistic or hopeful, or at least sort of refill that sense or that possibility in me, I'd say really broadly speaking, it's practices of attention. 

So that's what poetry is and that's what zazen is. But I mean even more broadly than that. Attention as in awareness or receptivity might be a better word or they're all sort of synonymous. So that's what guides me, those practices, and orient me and reorient me and what supports me. I don't know. For me, the main practices, like I said, are zazen and poetry, but also, I just like to walk around. I just like to amble and freely and loosely look around and let my mind go where it goes and let my thoughts go where they go in a way that's unrestricted and nonjudgmental 

Yeah. But those are the sorts of attention that I like to practice and like to cultivate. And the types of receptivity is probably a better word there. Even though they're three different textures, like poetry, ambling around, and zazen are three different textures of cultivated receptivity. I don't know what a good thing is to call them. 

So they're practices in that way, but not so much in the sense of workouts or exercises. It's practices-- I don't know, it's not practices. I don't think it's the best word for all the time. I think for me, attention, and receptivity are more hygienic in the sense that they rinse me off whenever I returned to them. They rinse me of my tensions. They rinse me of spite, of judgment, or of irritability, of reactivity, or bitterness. 

They clean me off. They rinse me of all that. And in doing so, they sort of clear away the space for hope and optimism to show up, or at least to come out of the ground, so to speak, because it's those, things like judgment and bitterness and irritability and so on, closedness, narrowness, that make optimism sort of atrophy, especially in my life. I don't want to speak too generally here. 

So when I am rinsed, whether that be through reading poems and writing them, or walking around for a couple of hours or doing a 35-minute sit, it leaves this sort of positive absence in the wake of all that other negative dust that was there. And that does make me more receptive, but it also makes me more accepting. Loving-kindness becomes the default rather than something I have to knuckle for. 

And then with that, I'm also more gentle inwardly and outwardly towards myself and towards other people, towards grass, towards trees, also towards the city, because I'm not a city boy. I was raised on a farm. I've lived on a farm. I've never lived in a city before I moved to Boston. And it can be very difficult and it can give me a lot of reason to not want to go outside and not want to look around. 

But something about those three practices and these practices makes it easier to look around, and also easier to appreciate and have gratitude for, I don't know, the loud-ass trash trucks that wake me up twice a week outside of my apartment. Thank you for picking up all of my trash, trash truck and trash people. 

If I practice enough attention, I don't wake up and go, oh, my god, there it is, again beeping. I mean, this past night, it was 2:30 in the morning that they showed up. I don't know what they were doing there at 2:30 in the morning. But thank you for being there and helping out. 

Anyway, through practices of attention, my posture becomes more optimistic, my whole orientation as a person. Not so much broadly, but more towards the ordinary and the everyday and the mundane, like I said, with the trash trucks. I can see better. I can hear better. I can feel better. I can speak better. And I can think-- and by better, I think I just mean more clearly, less obstruction. The waters are less stagnant. They just they flow better. You can drink from them. They taste better. 

But also in my everyday relations and just with other people-- what is that George Fox quote? I can more easily answer to that of God in everybody. Even though I don't believe in God in that way, or maybe not the way that George Fox did, but that phrase sounds right to me. I'm more able to answer to them and to respond to them and to their dignity, and to what in them is deserving of love, which is all of it. And I can do that, again, without knuckling for it. It's just sort of defaulted. 

I mean, to make it more spiritual, Simone Weil said in her book, Gravity and Grace, that unmixed attention is the same thing as prayer. What else? That it presupposes faith and love. But again, I'm not Christian. So faith in what? For me, I think it's Faith in the same positive capacities in every individual that I just mentioned for myself. Faith that those are there. And not that just that they're there, but they're not that hard to touch and they're not that far afield. They're not that deep, deeply hidden. 

And they're not so atrophied as you might think, or as I might think when I start to be overwhelmed by those feelings. Attention doesn't require, or maybe it does, but it also cultivates faith in those things being there, in those traits being there. And love that they are there and love that you can do it and love that other people can. And just love more broadly, loving-kindness Maitrī. 

So yeah, the hope and optimism that I feel is not broad. If you ask me, again, hey, how do you think the state of the world is going? Is it going to be swell in 40 years? I think yeah. No comment. Yeah, the darkness around us is deep, as William Stafford wrote in one of his poems that I love. So the hope and the optimism that I cultivate, again, it's like that posture, that orientation, and that just makes the small things more obvious. And then big things are made up of many, many, many small things. 

And it takes daily renewal. It takes daily practice. And sometimes I don't sit because I'm tired and I have essays to write the night before, and I'm sleepy. But I will read some poems in the morning before I go to class, or I'll read them during class. Sorry to my professors. Or after class, I'll just walk around. It sounds so simple, but it's so helpful. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I think that it's been really amazing to hear all these different insights and angles you take to that sense of attention being hope, that I think totally models the relationship you have with those different spiritual traditions as well too. There's not one avenue into this. 

And what I love about the word "posture" that you use is that, like you say, it does take practice. I think in some ways, it takes another model to show you what proper posture could begin to look like, which I think is really important too. And so you've totally talked about some practices and things that help you cultivate hope. Is there anything, in particular-- I hear you have a poem-- you'd like to share? 

HIATT O'CONNOR: And before I do that, what you just said about you need models. The poem that I'm about to read, the poet William Stafford is one of them, but so are so many people in my family that have passed and are still here. And so many of the people I'm around today at HDS and the professors, and especially the student community. But then all the books, all the authors like Thomas Merton, all the Buddhist authors, people I've never met who I was reading when I was lonely and alone are demonstrated pretty fantastically. The postures, how to take them and then how to upkeep them, keep them up. 

But yeah. Can I read that poem now? 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Please. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: OK. This says everything I was trying to say much better and in much few lines, with much less stumbling. And that's why William Stafford is known to be who he is. It's called A Ritual to Read to Each Other. 

If you don't know the kind of person I am, and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break, sending with shouts, the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dam. 

And as elephants parade holding each other's tails, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but to not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, something shadowy, of remote important region in all who talk that says, though we could fool each other, we should consider-- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

Because it is important that awake people be awake, or else a breaking line might discourage us back to sleep; the signals we give-- yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear-- the darkness around us is deep. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Hiatt. And I hope that it maintains its sense as a testament to staying awake and using that sense of attention that I think in some ways, you've challenged us to consider and to focus on as well too. So thank you so much for sitting down with us today and teaching us. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Thanks for listening to my rambling. I appreciate it. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Anytime. Ta ta ra taa. Cut. Thank you. 

[BIRDS CHIRPING]