New Center Leads Into The Mystic

Unable to find a convenient or affordable cave? Are the crazy schedules, noise, and constant challenges of New Haven life playing havoc with your quest for solitude and purpose?

Don’t fear. Albertus Magnus College’s new Meister Eckhart Center just may have a solution for you: Learn how to be an ​“urban mystic.”

You might start by having pizza with one.

That goal — and word of upcoming public programs to help guide you — emerged at an opening celebration of the college’s new center, which is named for Eckhart von Hocheim, popularly known as Meister Eckhart, 13th century medieval Dominican philosopher and theologian.

Eckhart was a radical thinker in his time who fought off charges of heresy. The heart of his philosophy is how to find balance in life: that is, how meditation, contemplation, and prayer can be integrated with effective justice-seeking action out in the world.

He explored how the former prepares the soil for the latter, said Edward Dunar, the director of the Meister Eckhart Center for Catholic and Dominican Life. Dunar was the host of Tuesday night’s opening reception.

The gathering drew several dozen students, teachers, alums, and other spiritually-inclined friends at the school’s emblematic white building visible from Prospect Street, Rosary Hall, which houses the three-room suite of the new center.

The new initiative at the Catholic college was funded by a $1 million dollar gift from the Dominican Sisters of Peace. That’s the same order that established the college in 1925, said Sister Anne Kilbride, the assistant to the president of the college for Catholic mission.

The sisters had come to New Haven in 1902 and established St. Mary’s High School on Orange Street, now the location of New Haven Academy high school. Parents at the time asked the sisters to establish the college because there were so few such opportunities for women, Kilbride added.

The new Eckhart center has been one year in the making, with lots of focus groups and contemplation. It’s intended to be a place, in the spirit of Meister Eckhart, that advances key Dominican values with a focus on how prayer and contemplative preparation lead to social action that is, ideally, more ​“well-studied” and less ​“knee-jerk” reactive, she said.

I asked Professor Dunar how a future social action-focused program emanating from the new center might have characteristics different from one, for example, emerging from a secular group or a community management team.

He gave the example of the public art murals proliferating in recent years around New Haven.

“Community muralism, of which there’s a lot in New Haven,” he said, ​“has been an occasion for people to think about the community and its values. I [also] see this as [an opportunity for] contemplative practice that involves [discussion of] the real and the ultimate.”

He said he foresees the center hosting a panel on the art in question, why it emerged, and with what effects. There might be ways to integrate the activity into the college’s art therapy curriculum, he added, along with opportunities for students to adopt murals, to maintain and document the process and the effects of the finished product.

The center’s programs are one of several new bridges the college is building with New Haven, said Dunar, in the coming years.

They will include, next year, a range of activities on helping to make the Albertus campus, along with New Haven, greener, and will be based on Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, on the connections between spirituality and ecological concerns.

“The hope is to invite everyone to be an urban mystic,” he said.

Upcoming programs include:
• Gun Violence in the Community: Impacts and Responses, with former New Haven Police Chief Ontoniel Reyes, Oct. 18 at 5 p.m.
• How To be an Urban Mystic: Introducing the Meister Eckhar Center, Oct. 20, 5 p.m.
• Apizza with the Mystics (this one is for Albertus students only, alas!), Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
• Introducing Meister Eckhart, with a trustee of the Eckhart Society, Feb. 9, at 5 p.m.

For more information, the contact is Prof. Edward Dunar .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).