Tessa and Bro. David at his Crestone Retreat in 1985
When I first met Bro. David Steindl-Rast, he clicked his heels, bowed graciously, and kissed my hand, my fondest memory of this beloved man.
Like many others, I could write about Bro. David’s pioneering work in interspiritual dialogue, the way he’s helped introduce monastic practices into our everyday lives, and his inspiration for the global Network for Grateful Living. But I prefer to share more personal stories of our encounters over nearly fifty years of friendship.
Interspiritual Dialogues
I was the youngest member of the inaugural Buddhist-Christian Dialogue at Naropa Institute in 1981 and the only woman on the faculty. It was my first dialogue, and I was scared to death. Bro. David took me under his wing and mentored me through that event and several more for the next decade as we kept being invited to the same dialogues.
I loved the hilarious moment during one of the first years at Naropa when a participant was stunned by what I had to say about the Christian mystical tradition and thought I might be heretical. At the mock “heresy trial” I called for, Bro. David pronounced me “orthodox,” as did Thomas Keating. Another favorite moment occurred at a “Unity in Diversity” dialogue in Seattle when Bro. David and I teamed up for a final prayer service, wore our full monastic habits, and sang the traditional Latin “Salve Regina” together.
The first advice he gave me in those years of mentoring was, “No jargon.” He himself is masterful at this. As I’ve reviewed his books over the decades, this quality is key to them all. Though steeped in scholarship, Bro. David has always written and spoken from the heart as a simple human being, using the language of universal human experience.
Sunshinestone in Crestone
When my community was threatened by land development around our hermitage in Sedona, Arizona and needed a quieter wilderness location, Bro. David recommended us to Hanne and Maurice Strong who gave us land in Crestone, Colorado. I still have a copy of the telegram he sent to them: “Long and excellent record. Frugal, clearcut, resourceful community in genuine Catholic Christian tradition. I… wholeheartedly recommend them.”
The dedication of our new Nada Carmelite Hermitage took place in the summer of 1985, and we needed a good retreat before the festivities. Bro. David gave us that retreat as part of passing on his legacy. He shared many poems over those days. I remember “Divinely Superfluous Beauty” by Robinson Jeffers, but the poems he recited in German were best. I can still hear his incomparable accented voice reciting Ich bin ein Sonnenedelstein: “I am a precious sunshinestone.”
He was such a good sport when we welcomed him to Crestone. We loved the old Wild West and the “cowboy thing” and dressed up in hats and bandanas. We’d recently redesigned our monastic habit and tore the old ones into “dusters” and carried water pistols. When Bro. David arrived, our outlaw gang ambushed him, and he cheerfully played along.
Support and Sorrow
He renewed his own monastic vows with us at the end of that retreat when we renewed ours. And as I continued to struggle over this new foundation, he wrote to encourage me: “Hope you are feeling much, much better. The more you’re alive, the more difficult life gets.”
Over the next decades, he continued his support: “I still feel close to all your dear community and always will,” he wrote in 1999. Then, as we began to unravel in 2003 because of a sexual misconduct issue with our founder, and I wrote to tell him, his consoling response helped my perspective:
“It meant a lot to me that you told me the sad news before others. Thank you. As you know, i feel close to your community and care deeply. What happened is sad indeed, but what saddens me even more is the warped moral sensibility of our society: So much ado about failings which are due to human frailty – especially in sexual matters – and total apathy toward true crimes, say the ones our government is perpetrating at home and abroad. In these crimes we are all entangled, as the Germans under Hitler were entangled in his crimes. We urgently need a moral re-focusing.”
“Crazy Big City”
I traveled to New York regularly in those years and often stayed with Bro. David’s mother, Elizabeth Rast, on Lexington Avenue. It was always lovely to go home to a “mother” after a busy day in what she called “this crazy big city.” I treasure my encounters with Elizabeth, too, as I learned more about her son from her stories: horrific tales of World War II, the Nazi occupation of Austria, and the even worse “liberation” by the Soviet Army.
These were balanced by charming accounts of Bro. David’s popularity as a dancer and how he was invited to lead the first dance at one Mardi Gras ball after another in Vienna the night before Ash Wednesday. Then the very next day when Lent began, Elizabeth laughed over how he embraced his penitential practices with equal enthusiasm.
I was so touched when she wrote, “It’s quite a gift to have a daughter, even though I have wonderful ‘boys.’” She also affirmed my contemplative vocation: “Please keep [us] in your prayers…. it is the biggest gift you could give us.”
As Elizabeth neared the end of her life, Bro. David told me to come soon to make my farewells. When I arrived in New York and called to arrange a visit, there was a long pause, and then he sadly said, “Tessa, Mother died last night.” I was heartbroken, especially since I had also missed my own mother’s death.
I learned so much from what Bro. David wrote me three months later about his own grief: “The process of grieving for Mother is turning into an experience of healing and sweetness. She’s more and more present to me in a new and better way.” I came to experience this as well.
Bro. David and Tessa at the Unity in Diversity Dialogue in Seattle, 1982
Friendship and the Burden of Correspondence
Friendship with Bro. David has been an ongoing lesson in the burden of correspondence. In July of 1986, he wrote, “Thank you for that lovely letter teeming with animals and brimming with enthusiasm. As you know, i moan and groan over every letter in the mailbox. But this kind is a reward for all the others, so feel free to keep writing. Talking with you would be even better.”
Over the years, as I took on more leadership responsibilities in my community, my correspondence became more irregular. As Bro. David’s influence grew around the globe, his correspondence became unmanageable.
In 1995, nearing seventy, he began to send his friends xeroxed letters, adding a personal note to mine in his own hand: “This is my attempt to rescue my sanity by a form letter. Everyone suggests it. No one likes to get it. It hardly ever fits the situation. Certainly not in your case.”
I appreciated the following year’s xerox to friends which taught me so much about friendship:
“Thank you for understanding that I cannot answer mail…. Please, do not think this means i am about to sever ties of friendship. On the contrary, i am exploring and tightening those bonds between us that really matter and last. The deeper i go into solitude, the closer do i come to those whom i love. Friendship does not depend on its outward expressions. Otherwise, friendship could not outlast this life. Yet, it does so, triumphantly. The deeper i go into silence, the more clearly do i hear the unique message that each friend is for me; the more clearly, too, can i respond to that message by a silence that sings.”
Memories in a Patchwork Quilt
He expanded these insights another year later by focusing on the relationship between friendship and remembering:
“In the silence of my hermit days, memories ripen like winter apples on a shelf…. T.S. Eliot tells us, ‘This is the use of memory: for liberation.’ Liberation, I take it, from the treadmill of time; from the compulsion to repeat again experiences that are not meant to be repeated but to mature in our memory. A few of my friends keep writing, ‘If only we could see you again.’ Is not the fruit of time we shared in the past sound and hardy enough to grow ever more brimming with flavor, now and beyond time?”
Then six years later, in 2002, he expressed his surprise over “something altogether new” to communicate with friends and share his life’s work: the first Grateful Living web site. I loved how he compared this to making a patchwork quilt:
“Have you heard the expression, ‘making a quilt from the patches life gave you’? Well, that’s what i’m doing these days. The drawers of my memory are overflowing with bright-colored scraps. The brightest among them show the faces of friends…. i am beginning to discern a new pattern, to see my life as a coherent story…. What makes a pattern out of my memories and holds together the scraps of my work is gratefulness.”
Finally, by his 80th birthday in July 2006, accompanied by a lovely photo of him crowned with ivy and blowing out the candles on his cake, he emailed us what I’d long anticipated and dreaded:
“I have to face the fact that i am no longer up to maintaining private correspondence, though i hope to send an occasional newsletter…. There remains a communion with you that goes beyond words. That you will understand me and from now on rely on messages from heart to heart, rather than by mail, is yet another gift to me, for which i am deeply grateful to you.”
This perspective is especially important to me now as I’ve turned eighty and find myself in the same predicament, wanting to write my own friends as he did to us, “By reducing correspondence, i hope to find more time for writing. When i get a new book written, your patience will have contributed to it.” As he’d written me as far back as October 1983, “There’s a kind of being in touch at the Center, permanently, and I’m grateful to feel that we’ve been gifted with that.”
Haiku in a Tent
Over the last years, then, the number of notes and letters in that beautiful handwriting in my beloved Bro. David file has dwindled, but matured in memory, “brimming with flavor.” I’ve spread everything out before me now and am struck by the valentine on pink paper, the dried leaf he taped to the top of a page, greetings on the feast of St. Teresa, my patron saint, the postcard he and Elizabeth wrote me together from the Camoldolese Hermitage in Big Sur, ending with, “Mother thinks Fr. Dave would enjoy the Lebanese cooking we have here. Hope you’d like the rest here, too.”
I find the haiku Bro. David wrote for me at one of the early Naropa dialogues. As we kept one ear on what the Zen roshi was saying under the tent at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, he slipped a little piece of paper to me across the table like a naughty schoolboy, and I read in capital letters,
EVEN THE TENTFLAP
STOPPED FLAPPING: ONLY SILENCE
AND THE SMELL OF SAGE.
For Mother Tessa
Feast of the Transfiguration, 1982
I see how often he celebrated my love for the unicorn, a favorite Christ symbol. While giving that retreat to us in 1985, he wrote a poem about a cat named Homer with this dedication: “For Mother Tessa, who, besides Unicorns, loves cats.” He sent a telegram when he got back to Big Sur to congratulate us on the opening of the new Colorado hermitage and said, “May all the unicorns dance and sing for joy!” Almost a decade later, he sent me a little drawing he’d done of a unicorn to illustrate one of our favorite community songs. In the letter with it, he wrote, “Someday, God willing, we’ll dance a little dance again.”
And oh, all those soulful loving greetings to “my dear Sister, always remembered,” “faithful Sister,” “long neglected Mother Tessa,” “Mother Nada,” “Splendid Torchbearer, my heart is with you in that garden of which you dreamed.” And in a letter introducing me to Robert Mueller at the United Nations, “I’ve encouraged [Mother Tessa] to let you know when she gets to New York…. She’s one of the lights of monastic life today, and young at that. We need a new generation to carry on the work.”
That was 1985, and now I’m the older generation.
The Final Kiss
The last time I saw Bro. David, I joined him and Roshi Joan Halifax to facilitate a retreat in Petaluma, California for ANGeL, the Network for Grateful Living. That’s when I learned about the turtle he loved as a child and named Divina.
I told everyone the story about our meeting at Naropa, the clicking heels and the kiss on the hand. I said I really appreciated the warm hugs over the years as we became friends, but I missed that chivalrous gesture. At the end of the retreat, after I recited a poem I wrote poking fun at Divina, Bro. David stood up, bowed towards me, clicked those heels, and kissed my hand once more. He laughed and said, “Now I don’t want to hear any more about it!”
And I won’t say any more except this: on Bro. David’s 100th birthday, July 12, 2026, and every birthday as long as I live after him, I’ll remember and honor my beloved friend, the gentleman-monk, the chivalrous, child-like giant of a man, full of wonder and love for so many people and for the whole planet.
In honor of Bro. David’s one hundred years of grateful living, editor Klaudia Menzi-Steinberger compiled In Widening Circles, a book of stories, reflections, and testimonies of love from some of Bro. David’s many companions, including the Dalai Lama, Roshi Joan Halifax, David Whyte, and me! The essay here is an expanded version of my chapter in the book. In Widening Circles is available from Paulist Press.
Bro. David and Klaudia Menzi-Steinberger
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