Stef was a founding teacher of Treetop Zen Center along with his wife, Margaret. Stef died in September 2010 following a five-year battle with pulmonary fibrosis. His simple, unadorned style of teaching lives at Treetop to this day.
Stef became a Zen priest in 1983 and received dharma transmission in 1996 from Bernie Glassman at Greyston Seminary in New York. He was interested in teaching a Zen that anyone could do and understand, reaching ordinary people and using everyday down-to-earth language. He called this style of practice “the little way of Zen” in honor of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, one of his role models. He was the author of the book Zen Light: Uncommon Commentaries on the Denkoroku.
Stef was born in Brooklyn, New York. One of his greatest memories was of his first baseball game. He had been playing in the streets with his friends when the cops came, put all the kids in a van, and drove them to Yankee Stadium, where Stef watched Joe DiMaggio hit one home run after another. That event turned him into a lifelong Yankee fan.
On his 18th birthday, during the Korean War, Stef registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. Unfortunately his draft board didn’t agree with him. He was ultimately sentenced to a year and a day at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, for resisting the draft. This experience sensitized him to the plight of people trapped in the prison system, an issue that remained close to his heart for the rest of his life.
After prison, Stef went to Paraguay, where he lived for a decade in a pacifist Christian intentional community known as the Religious Society of Brothers, or the Bruderhof.
After returning to the States, Stef became a Quaker for the next 20 years. During this time, he worked as a fundraiser for the American Friends Service Committee and then for the University of Southern California, where he was director of development for the Center of Urban Affairs. He later served as the southern regional director of development for the Sierra Club Foundation and then as the executive director of the Jung Institute of Los Angeles, where he also did extensive fundraising.
While still a Quaker in Pasadena, California, Stef met Taizan Maezumi Roshi, a Japanese Zen teacher. Stef and Maezumi became fast friends, and Maezumi particularly appreciated Stef’s fundraising skills. It was during this period that Stef met most of the people who would eventually become the first generation of prominent American Zen teachers. Later, in 1980, Stef decided to chuck it all and become a Zen monk. Maezumi asked Stef to go to New York and help his senior student, Bernie Glassman, who had just started the Zen Community of New York. So Stef and Margaret packed up and moved to New York, where they lived and practiced at Greyston for the next several years.
After the Barragatos left Greyston, Stef began going to a maximum-security prison in upstate New York to teach Zen to the inmates. After Margaret retired, she also taught at the prison. Together, they taught there for about 15 years.
Stef and Margaret moved to Maine in 2003, finally settling in Oakland after about four years in the Bangor area. The mother-in-law apartment above the garage was transformed into a zendo and is now the hub of Treetop Zen Center. Stef was blessed to see the first few years of the vibrant, growing sangha that formed there.
Toward the end of his life, Stef enjoyed collecting and eating wild mushrooms, playing bridge, and expressing himself though writing fiction and playing the Baroque flute, recorder, and jazz vibes.
One of his greatest joys of living in Maine was walking in the woods with his dogs and quietly paddling his kayak along the edge of a lake, weaving through water lilies and visiting hawks, eagles, beavers, loons, and other friends.