Entrance of the Catechumen by Maryanne Hannan

We Carry Smoke and Paper
By Melody S. Gee
University of Iowa Press, 2024
$22   200 pp.

As a cradle Catholic—that is, one born into the faith—I have often asked myself: Would I have chosen this path as an adult? Would I have had the courage, the interest, the stamina? Would I have experimented with prayer, experienced liturgy, explored Scripture? Sought to educate myself in church history and teaching? In short, as an adult, would I have made the leap and become a Catholic?

I will never know for myself, but poet and essayist Melody S. Gee shares her journey to conversion in We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion. In nine beautifully written essays, Gee weaves together emotionally fraught details of her life as an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants, her marriage to a lapsed Catholic, his return to the faith, and his gentle sponsorship of her nascent spiritual longings after the birth of their daughters.  

Gee shares neither a biological genetic heritage nor a first language with her parents, but they, especially her mother, have encoded her with their unknown and unsayable apprehensions, along with a desire to belong to something greater. Gifted with the eloquence her mother lacks, Gee writes passionately about the isolation her mother experienced and generated in her daughter as a result of “living without her language, [trying] to catch up to the life happening in words that did not match her reality.” As Gee tries and tests the vocabulary of faith, “this new language of mystery, sacredness, intimacy, gratitude, hope, and belonging,” she hopes, unlike her mother’s experience, that it will “not rewrite me by erasure, but by expansion, that it moves me, past and all, out and into everything.”

An experience of God or a glimmer of the transcendent during Mass or a nagging desire to learn more about the faith can be a beginning, but there is much more to sort through before one can officially convert to Catholicism. Gee shares her spirit-filled and independent-minded navigation of the process in essays that combine personal experience, deep reflection, and wide reading. Her sources of inspiration are included in a helpful bibliography. On her journey, Gee is blessed to have a wise spiritual adviser in the person of Sister V. She also has shared goals with her husband and a local parish to which they have committed.

Even so, the path is not easy, as Gee does not want to participate in the regular Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, commonly known as the RCIA process. She navigates this successfully, but meets another stumbling block in the language of initiation: the idea, according to the RCIA study guide, that baptism makes us “sharers in God’s own life and his adopted children.” For Gee, the language of adoption is a loaded one: “rather than giving me consolation or making me feel less alone,” she writes, she instead feels it magnifies the the pain of not belonging.

Gee’s desire to belong in community may have particular roots in her adoption. But, more importantly, she understands this desire as a deep and universal human longing. As a result, she fully embraces the importance of parish life, quoting Ronald Rolheiser: “Spirituality is about a communal search for the face of God . . . Real conversion demands that eventually its recipients be involved in both the muck and grace of actual church life.” This is a challenge on which many Catholics (and other churchgoers) flounder on both local and global levels, but Gee approaches it with intention. As her spiritual director reminds her, “I think you know we cannot have faith without others.”

Her husband, Paul, whom she describes as “God-haunted,” shares her journey respectfully, without forcing any issues. Prior to his break with the Catholic Church, he had even considered a vocation to the priesthood. But like so many others, he withdrew from the church after the sexual abuse revelations. Gee mentions these scandals among other doctrinal points of difference, “the dehumanizing aspects of church teachings about birth control, gay marriage, women’s exclusion, and abortion.” Somehow she manages to keep at bay what others cannot, deciding, along with Paul, that “[w]e couldn’t hand the church over to the ones we were angry with.”

As she goes through the catechetical process, she understands more fully how the church provides the way to have a relationship with God, largely through liturgy, sacred ritual, and community prayer. As she writes in the essay “Pretty Liturgies,” Mass was “the shared ritual that called me, that kept me coming back even before I fully understood why I had shown up.” To her, Mass is not an obligation but an opportunity to join with “other bodies,” and the “rote movements,” sometimes vilified, free her “to experience something more than the words or the standing or the kneeling.” Beyond that, Mass which defines “human flourishing as equal to what we provide the least among us” gives shape to her passionate yearnings for social justice.

We Carry Smoke and Paper is an honest book. Gee confides her personal limitations and struggles. She does not set herself up as a saintly role model, especially in her relations with her parents; yet, to me, she is a role model for how seriously she takes her faith. She embeds her spiritual longing in lively, poignant stories, as good storytellers do. Out of a childhood spent in and around a demanding family restaurant, her trip to China with her mother, her a one-of-a-kind grandfather, the specificity of their life together, the salt-cured fish and medicinal ointments—all wounds, inadvertent and otherwise—she writes into a very different present as a wife and mother in a Midwestern US city, still trying to heal.

In sharing the details of her conversion, Gee offers readers a gift and a reminder. To paraphrase Tolstoy, every conversion story is the same; every one, different. God is always the seeker. The sought-after one brings his or her own personal “stuff,” resistance built with the straws and pebbles of childhood and societal expectations. But, in the final analysis, conversion is about acknowledging God’s stirring within and answering that call. As Gee writes, a convert is one moving “toward the single self I must now try to piece together in the belief that wholeness is what I am called to, what I am built for.” ♦

A poet and frequent book reviewer, Maryanne Hannan is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. A resident of upstate New York, she is the author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st-Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.

Image: A chart from a Catholic catechism, listing sacraments by form, matter, and minister, 1949.