Who's in charge here, anyway?

So, lately I have been experiencing something interesting. There is a segment of me that I have buried deeply in recent years. It is covered over by a tough, scaly callous, and honestly I forgot it was even down there. Until now. Little glimmers of past-ness are gleaming through in spots. I sat on my couch this evening and I actually felt it a little bit, like a vague warmth from someplace within.

I have been so damn angry for so long. It has cast a villainous shadow over everything else that is me. Yet I am astonished that THIS lay dormant and buried for so long that it was almost forgotten. This, that has always been of the most importance to me.

My father and I shared a common passion for all things related to Early Christianity, particularly the beginnings of monasticism, and the Middle Ages. I am a historian because of my father. He told stories--amazing stories--about the lives of people in the medieval world. I grew up in an Old Church world, the scent of incense in my hair and Latin hymns in my ears. I studied liturgy and ritual and philosophy and all things sacred. It resounded within me. And for me.

And when he died, that world died with him. I have not been to church. I have not opened a single book that I took from his office. I couldn't, because that was the thing he and I shared with nobody else in our family.

And now I am back in school, and studying--guess what?--Christianity and the early medieval period. Monasticism in the Celtic world. And every day for the past month I have railed at the knowledge that he is not here to help me, not here to cheer me on. I know he'd be so happy I am doing this. He'd read along with me, give me research topic ideas, send me books. I miss him. There is nobody else with his peculiar base of knowledge.

Well, except now, maybe me.

So I have begun to wonder. Is he up there running things the way he wants them run? He wasn't bossy, but he was a great leader, and somehow always ended up in charge of everything. And he liked it. I could imagine that he got there and didn't like how things were going, so he just took over. And since he's in charge, may as well check out what's going on with the kid, right?

Is he the cause of all this? Was it his nudging that brought me to this point? Did he somehow know this was what I needed to reclaim him, and myself?

Or am I becoming him? I am reading his books. Listening to his music. Immersing myself in the jewel-toned world he loved. I opened a book yesterday that he used in seminary. It had his name, 1962. And his painstaking underlinings, razor-straight, just where I would have put them.

Is it him that I feel gleaming through, or just a part of me that got buried with him when he died? And perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps they are one and the same.