Background on Brother David Steindl-Rast
Brother David at Mount Saviour Monastery, ca. 1956.
As a scholar, writer, and social activist, Brother David Steindl-Rast has shared messages of peace, interfaith dialogue, social justice, and environmental stewardship worldwide for more than 50 years in spoken and written word that is both thoughtful and occasionally infused with beauty, wonderment, and wit. His TEDtalk Want to Be Happy? Be Grateful has garnered over 5 million views and thousands of people a day tap into the interactive online community he co-founded, Network for Grateful Living, for information and guidance on the transformative power of gratefulness as a mindfulness practice.
Brother David was born in Vienna, Austria in 1926 as Franz Kuno. He grew up in a small, nearby village in the Alps with his mother and two younger brothers. Living in the Austrian countryside meant Br. David was surrounded by devout Catholic tradition. Religious customs and divine feasts were so abundant that, in his eyes, the elements of nature, culture and religion blended together as one.
As a young boy he attended primary school in a two-room schoolhouse. He then moved to Vienna as a young teenager to attend a progressive boarding school. As the Nazis rose to power, his mother grew concerned for his safety and decided to move to the city with his brothers to be closer to him. In response to the Nazi regime, the boys at the school rebelled primarily by becoming deeply religious.
Unfortunately, a group of Br. David's closest friends were soon drafted into the Nazi army. After only six months, half were killed in battle. Their deaths prompted him to start thinking about his own mortality; Br. David was convinced that he would die young. He was eventually drafted as well, but thankfully was never sent to the front lines. After a year, he abandoned his post and went underground, working to set up refugee camps and to clear rubble from university grounds. Although she was scared for him, Br. David's mother encouraged his activities.
It was during this period that a friend lent him The Rule of Saint Benedict. David was fascinated with its emphasis on humility, introspection and one's sense of community. The Rule inspired him. He imagined being near death, and felt that following this monastic tradition was how he would have liked to have lived. Unfortunately, David knew of no Benedictine monasteries, so he decided to put that dream aside. Instead, he went to study at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. There he learned painting and art restoration.
Vienna had always been a focus of European culture, with a sense of history and human solidarity. During the post-war years, David worked on restoring art that had been damaged during the war. It was then that he became interested in children's art and its relation to primitive art, which in turn led him to begin studying child psychology. In 1952 David earned his PhD at the University of Vienna in experimental psychology, with a minor in anthropology.
After finishing school, Steindl-Rast immigrated to the United States and within months located Mt. Saviour monastery, a Benedictine community on a small farm in upstate New York. He found his home at At Mt. Saviour, where the monks were practicing The Rule in its purest form, joining the order and beginning his monastic life as Brother David in 1953.
During his years of theological and philosophical training and service at Mt. Saviour, Br. David enjoyed communing with the many Protestant and Catholic clergy, intellectuals, and social justice activists who visited the monastery. In 1958-1959, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell University where he became the first Roman Catholic to hold the Thorpe Lectureship. He also began to develop an interest in the monastic traditions of other religious traditions, seeing commonalities in monasticism across traditions and incorporating themes of commonality and social justice into his lectures.
His interest in Zen eventually led to a meeting and friendship with Zen monk Tai-Shimano (later known as Eido Shimano Roshi) from Japan. Tai-Shimano was invited to visit with the monks of Mt. Saviour and his theological interchanges with the monks laid the groundwork for revolutionary dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity. In 1966, Mt. Saviour gave Br. David permission to pursue Buddhist-Christian dialogue, receiving Vatican approval in 1967. He is one the first Vatican-sanctioned delegates to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Br. David went on to study Zen with teachers Hakkuun Yasutani Roshi, Soen Nakagawa Roshi, and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Br. David's dialogue with Buddhists produced The Ground We Share: Buddhist and Christian Practice, co-authored with Robert Aitken Roshi.
Br. David met Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a fellow writer, poet, social activist, and proponent of comparative religion and together their theoretical teachings and practice ignited a renewal of religious life. After Merton's untimely death in 1968, Br. David went on to write several explorations of Merton's writings including Thomas Merton: Now at the Crack of Dawn and Recollections of Thomas Merton's Last Days in the West.
In 1968, Br. David co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies with Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi teachers and received the 1975 Martin Buber Award for his achievements in building bridges between religious traditions. He was a leading figure in The House of Prayer Movement, which affected more than 200,000 members of religious orders across the United States and Canada. Since the 1970s, Br. David has been a member of the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association.
For decades, Br. David divided his time between periods of a hermit's life and extensive travel while delivering lectures and interviews around the world, advocating for international peace, social justice, and environmental responsibility. He has contributed chapters or interviews to a wide range of books and periodicals from the Encyclopedia Americana and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, to the New Age Journal and Parabola magazine.
His writings include Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, The Music of Silence (with Sharon Lebell), and Belonging to the Universe, winner of the 1992 American Book Award (co-authored with physicist Fritjof Capra). Many of his books and writings have been translated into other languages, including German and Spanish. His most recent books are Words of Common Sense, Deeper than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed, 99 Blessings: An Invitation to Life, and the upcoming The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life.
Recently, Br. David co-founded A Network for Grateful Living, a global organization offering online and community-based educational programs and practices dedicated to gratefulness as a transformative influence for individuals and society.
Today Br. David is officially retired and living in Austria, but that has not stopped him from continuing his quest to speak about social justice, bridging cultural communities and interfaith dialogue. He hopes to do as much he can for as long as possible to inspire gratefulness in the lives of all global citizens.
