My father attended St. John’s Institute for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin.  He made the yearly pilgrimage from Detroit, Michigan to the school and remained there for the entire school year outside of Christmas and Easter breaks.  Every once in a while I still open a box containing my father’s memorabilia.  Most treasured of these are a few yellowed, fragile journals written between 1931 and 1934.  They describe his daily life while going to school at St. John’s.  He writes of his friends in a manner that centers on their feelings.  I think he did this because he was very receptive to the emotional welfare of his fellow students.  Yet, he wrote in a very cold and factual manner.  This never changed as he got older.  I remember distinctly thinking that my dad wrote like a scientist.  I don’t think that this was reflective of his process of thinking.  Rather, I think it was just his style to write briefly and to the point.  It was never flowery.

I’d heard my father mention St. John’s Institute often as I grew up.  Usually, the school was used as an example of how hard life could be and that my complaints about school work or church were truly trivial, relatively speaking.  St. John’s seemed to me to be a jail.  Of course, I was a just a kid and going to church on the weekends seemed like mild torture.  There were times that I would ask my dad questions about where he went to school and I would get a few answers.  Typically, my father would just quickly mention that it was a strict Catholic school and all the brothers who taught there had masterful control over all the classes.  Also, this school was where my dad learned how to play chess.  One of the resident brothers taught my father and they would compete head-to-head fairly often.  He loved chess and passed this love on to me.  Chess seemed like the perfect game for my father to exercise whatever drove his engine.  I never figured what it was that drove him when I was a child and had some difficulty dissecting him as a young adult.  My dad was a staunch, old-fashioned Catholic.  Everything about him was Polish first and Catholic second.  There were times when these two combined or the Catholicism took the lead, but for the most part he was Polish first.  He even looked like Pope John Paul II, which was kind of creepy to me.  All this aside, I still didn’t know what drove him.  What kept his fires kindled?  What made him live so purposefully?

After my father died in the early part of 2000, my curiosity in spirituality began to take form.  I’d searched for some semblance of religion at times, often turning to Buddhism to find more clear answers to what may provide some filling to this spiritual void I thought I had.  Buddhism, though, as most other religions, is not so clear with answers.  I did not understand at the time, and may very well not fully understand now, that I was already spiritual and that my schism with Catholicism didn’t mean that I’d abandoned the unknown for the known.  It actually was the impetus for curiosity.  It was the beginning of what would turn out to be what you all read here.  My divorce was actually a commitment to journey beyond what I already knew.  It was a chance to search.  It was a chance to get to know more about my father.

What I failed to realize until this past weekend is that I am my father.  I say this in the same way that we are all our parents, but sometimes we forget this.  I am my father.  While searching elsewhere for answers about God and spirit, I forgot that sometimes there are answers on the tips of our noses.  So many avenues dimly lit my path.  In Buddhism I searched for the all-encompassing peace.  In music, both creating and listening, I desired to inhabit a space no one else could invade.  In searching for God, I craved not answers, but more questions.  In silence, I find clarity.  In all that I do I search for those fires that move the greatest of us.  There was no bright light or clear sign to guide my way.  I only knew that I felt something somewhere.  Sometimes it takes death and then rebirth to realize such things.

This past Sunday I found my father again, closer than he had ever been in life or death.  Speaking with my mother, I asked questions about my father’s intentions while attending St. John’s Institute.  I asked if he intended to be a priest.  I wanted to know if he ever searched.  Did he ever not know his path?  By going to a seminarian school, did he look for answers?  Or did he just accept doctrine as it was?  Did he search for the things I search for now?  Am I a continuation of my father or a bleak end?  She thought for a few seconds and said yes and then stopped.  My mother briefly thought again.  Then she started.

“Well, no, he wanted to be a monk.”

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