Micheal O'Regan, whose unassuming warmth and quiet chuckle belied the toughness of his mind, united Christian traditions and the modern insights of psychology to seek a middle ground on which to build Eckhart House, the psychotherapy clinic he directed.
Eckhart House, named for a 14th-century Dominican, was founded as a research and healing community essentially rooted in Judeo-Christianity. It offered training for therapists and researchers and combined an extensive psychotherapy practice with research.
Giving the homily at Father O'Regan's funeral in St Mary's, the Dominican Priory in Tallaght, on September 12th, the Irish Dominican Provincial, Larry Collins, described him as one of the most innovative and influential Dominicans in modern Ireland. Father Collins was echoing words spoken the previous evening by Bernard Treacy, editor of Doctrine in Life, who had received the remains back to Tallaght. "I can think of no one else who so combined an unerring, focused analytical skill with a compassion that was broad and deep and real," Father Treacy said.
Micheal O'Regan returned to Dublin in the late 1970s as Socius to the then Provincial, Damian O'Byrne. Three years later, he founded Eckhart House, the Institute of Psychosynthesis and Transpersonal Theory, with backing both from his Dominican brothers and from Dominican convents. Eckhart House has continued to develop both as a healing centre and as a research centre for the study of psychosynthesis and faith within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Father O'Regan straddled the worlds of the Church and psychology, and struggled to maintain his position in what he described as the middle ground, even when it put him at odds with his Church or with fellow psychologists. He reached out to other religions, to those of Asia and other parts of Europe, to seek shared strengths.
In a paper on his experience of God, to be published next month, he wrote: "Even those who jettison all religious institutions and practice end up with their own personal rituals, beliefs and methods of exclusion and excommunication. A middle ground has to . . . be a community of inclusion rather than exclusion."
Through the last decade, Father O'Regan played another, tougher role in helping the Church to come to terms with sexual scandals which threatened to overwhelm it. Although he was at times close to exhaustion as a result, he helped to set in place guidelines to protect against abuse and counselled many of those involved. He visited Britain to discuss problems there, and ran seminars in Ireland for churches around the world suffering similar scandals.
Micheal O'Regan was born in Cork in 1938, the elder of two brothers. He began his Dominican life in Cork and read psychology and literature at UCC. He was then sent to Trinidad where he became a teacher. Trinidad changed him utterly. As he described it, he found himself face to face with the truth that people really were equal, but that Western tradition contained assumptions that bordered on racism.
When he left Trinidad, he moved first to London, where he studied at the Royal Free and the London hospitals, with the Dympna Centre, and with the newly founded Institute of Psychosynthesis, with which he continued to be associated until his death from stomach cancer on September 10th. The institute helped him to train his first group of therapists when Eckhart House opened.
For several years he commuted between the Dominican Priory at Haverstock Hill, in Hampstead, and Dublin; and even as Socius to Father O'Byrne, he continued to travel to London and to Holland, where he worked with European psychosynthesists. He travelled too to Latin America and India, since one of his tasks as Socius was to help the Irish Dominicans to solve the anomalies left by their shrinking missionary role.
As Eckhart House developed, it attracted people, lay and clerical, torn by the tensions of the modern world. His legacy is a flourishing centre which is unique in combining therapy, teaching and spiritual practice.
His strength was drawn not just from his religious belief, but from the warmth of his personal life. He gloried in his nieces and nephew, the children of his brother Liam, and in his circle of friends, both in his community and at Eckhart House. To them and to the children of his friends he was not Father O'Regan, but a stimulating, intellectually challenging and always generous godfather and friend. His delight in searching the toy-shops of Dublin and London for unusual presents was legendary.
In Eckhart House, as in the Dominican community, and at the hearths where his friends always kept a welcome for him, he will be felt as a light that has been extinguished far too soon.
A. McH.