Pauli Murray.
In 1961 Pauli Murray found joy being in New Haven, to have endless days for study and discernment and to have that culminate, five years later, in her becoming the first African-American student to earn a doctorate from the Yale Law School.
It was the opposite of joyful -– and she never forgot it -– when a landlord on Howe Street refused to rent to her because of her race.
That incident was recalled Thursday night at Albertus Magnus College in a panel discussion sponsored by the school’s newly formed Meister Eckhart Center for spirituality and social justice.
Yale Divinity School Associate Professor Donyelle McCray and Albertus Assistant Professor of English and Humanities Eric Schoeck led the “New Haven Mystics” discussion with students and the public gathered both via Zoom and in person at the Behan Community Room near the campus’s Winchester Avenue western side.
No mystics were immediately sighted; rather, they were invoked.
Passionate words ensued about Murray, civil rights and feminist activist, lawyer, and finally, in another ground-breaking achievement in the last phase of her life, first African-American female Episcopal priest.
The other mystic invoked was charismatic Catholic priest and Yale Divinity School professor Henri Nouwen, the most popular spiritual author in the country in the 1970s and 1980s.
“He was called a ‘wounded prophet,’” Schoeck said of Nouwen, a Dutch-born priest whose candor about his own personal pain and struggle to experience God was the public side of what was then the new field of pastoral counseling and psychology.
He wrote dozens of books over his career about subjects like how silence and prayer must be vehicles for service, and how a contemplation of Rembrandt’s painting on the Biblical return of the prodigal son points to the necessity to embrace broken-ness.
Nouwen’s call was for people to step toward their pain, not away, “to befriend our brokenness in order to heal it.”
That emotional/spiritual — as opposed to intellectual — struggle with fundamental human challenges qualifies Nouwen as a mystic, by the professor’s light.
Professor McCray, who is writing a biography of Pauli Murray (after whom a recently built Yale college is named), said she was drawn by Murray’s “deep fidelity to ancestors, to live in the consciousness of those gone before; also by a certain life-giving playfulness in her work; and ultimately an optimism and belief in the ability to overcome differences.”
Fighting Jim Crow laws 20 years before the heyday of the civil rights movement, Murray wrote a textbook on laws and race that Thurgood Marshall termed a “bible” for activists.
After Murray was ordained a priest in 1977, her sermons challenged gender assumptions. “In one sermon she said Jesus could return as a woman, and that women could have been at the Last Supper,” McCray reported. And Murray had not meant the women attendees were there serving the food.
She said Murray’s favorite New Testament texts included one from the Gospel of John: “In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, man or woman, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Murray saw that as the basis of gender fluidity and fuller personhood, McCray observed, a spirituality based on being a child of God, an inner serenity, a freeing from all feelings of inferiority.
“It was diving into the unknown, a new paradigm,” McCray said.
Neither speaker could be pinned down on their definition of a mystic, nor on how to spot one these days on the streets of New Haven.
“For Pauli Murray,” said McCray, “being special was so much not the aim. Earning a title of mystic or saint, these weren’t motivating factors. These were lives lived absorbed in the love and wonder of God.”
Eckhart Center Director Edward Dunar concurred that “mystics often aren’t showy and they often act out their convictions in quiet ways.”
Pressed by a mystic-hunting reporter, he offered this definition: “A mystic is called to an encounter with God or an ultimate healing that transforms our hearts and minds and inspires us to take action in pursuit of justice and peace.”
For information about future programs on similar spiritual themes, which are always open to the public, click here.
