My latter-day saints: conversion to Catholicism doesn't happen at the speed of light. As you take step by hesitant step, it helps to have friends who will give you a little nudge.

I call them my saints. They are the people who stood along the road to my conversion and walled with me for a while. Without them I never would have arrived at that Easter morning when I was confirmed in the church.

Over the last 20 years many have asked me how I was led to that much-maligned institution, "organized religion." The question is usually asked by people who have left one church or another--disappointed, perhaps, that no congregation lives up to gospel standards, that they are all composed of human beings.

I, too, left the church--at 12. The Methodist Church it was, where a devout grandmother had insisted I be baptized over and against the indifference of my parents. Jessie Lester Gies. I can still see her coming to her old upright piano with flour on her apron to play a Beethoven sonata while a pie bloomed in the oven. Throughout my childhood she nurtured my Christian education with Bible stories and heart-to-heart talks about what matters in the world. She pointed out the connections between the teachings of Jesus and the civil rights struggles in the South.

Yet, like so many others, I left the church as I was coming into adolescence--a time of great passion, when no equivocation will be tolerated. I raised my hand at Methodist Sunday School. "Must we believe in God to be here?" I asked.

A kindly youth minister answered, "No, not necessarily."

I politely excused myself and never went back.

It would be years before I met my saints.

In 1983 the world's attention was once again fixed on the terror of nuclear destruction. I was living in Seattle and found myself reading with interest every news article concerning Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen. He had declared Kitsap County, with its first-strike nuclear submarine base, to be the Auschwitz of Puget Sound; he had withheld half his federal income tax in refusal to support Pentagon spending; he had stood on the tracks of the White Train, protesting the delivery of missile parts. He also regularly showed up in person at the state legislature and Seattle City Council meetings to lobby for the interests of the homeless and the poor.

I wrote him a letter, remarking on his moral leadership.

He wrote back, quietly insisting that he did no more than he was bid to do by his understanding of the gospel.

Soon after receiving his letter, I resumed reading the Bible-after a lapse of 27 years.

I first saw Sister Rosarii Metzgar when she answered the door at Stillpoint, the retreat house I had chosen out of the phone book. A tiny old lady in slacks, she greeted me and showed me to my upstairs room.

During the week I spent fasting and--more to the point-giving up smoking, I often glimpsed her padding silently around the house carrying a volume of Alan Watts or mowing the spring grass barefoot, pushing a rotary mower. A couple of times I ran into her in the kitchen, and once we spoke. She had a handful of freshly cut daffodils, which she'd brought in from the yard.

"Father Jack Morris will be with us in the morning," she advised. "He's that priest who started the Jesuit Volunteer Corps." She was looking in the cupboard for a vase for her flowers. "We'll have Mass."

"I'm not Catholic," I announced.

She selected a plain drinking glass and filled it with water from the tap.

"I could never be Catholic," I said. "Just thinking about the role of the church in history, I'd be angry all the time."

She placed her yellow flowers on the windowsill above the sink and turned to me with a brilliant smile. "Oh my, agreed energetically. "Anger is important. We must always hold onto our anger."

Something lifted from me like a dark bird.

The next day Father lack Morris arrived. I came down to dinner and broke my fast. A Montana native in his mid-50s, Father lack struck me as bright and robust, with a great sense of humor and a fierce commitment to gospel values.

At the table, the conversation revolved mostly around his current project: He was leading a group of people from the nuclear sub base in Kitsap County to the Holy Land (Bangor to Bethlehem) in order to draw attention to the need for world peace. The group had already gotten as far as Idaho, and he'd flown back to Seattle for a day or two to attend to his mother, who was ill.

Eventually the conversation turned to me in the form of some unexpected teasing about where I should start going to church. Sister Rosarii said I belonged at St. Anne's because my address fell within that parish. Another sister, much younger than Rosarii, said I belonged at St. Pat's because they were Paulists and had a ministry to converts. Finally Father Jack spoke up and said, with a grin and a wink, "I think she belongs at St. Joe's, because she looks like a troublemaker to me, and there's always trouble up there."

What could be more intriguing?

The "trouble" at St. Joseph's, the large Jesuit parish on Seattle's Capitol Hill, turned out to be a commitment to social justice felt throughout the parish. Generally one or more parishioners were in jail for one or another protest. I signed up for inquiry classes in the fall.

It was at St. Joseph's that I met Mary Testin, one of two laypeople who, with Father Pat Carrol, S.J., was responsible for the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. Mary was then 24, a transplant from Milwaukee who had a day job as director of the diocesan worship office in Seattle. She was volunteering at St. Joe's in order to stay in touch with parish life.

I distinguished myself fairly quickly in the group with questions like "Why the right hand of God?" and "Did the church ever have a married priesthood?" The priest quickly put Mary in charge of me. We began to meet outside of inquiry class Friday nights. I would give her a written list and, one week later, sitting in the Sorrento Hotel's Fireside Room surrounded by Honduran mahogany, she'd have the answers for me. What exquisite patience that young woman had. Only once do I remember stumping her: She could not reconstruct the entire history of the antagonism between the Masons and the Catholic Church.

I was confirmed on Easter 1984 at St. Joseph's in Seattle. As a group, we catechumens stood in front of the congregation and recited the Creed, and I remember Mary's significant glance when I repeated the words, " ... he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father."

These are my saints. I lost my grandmother many years ago, but the others are still alive.

Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen retired in 1991, on his 70th birthday. I hear from mutual friends that this quiet, unassuming, and holy man lives a low-profile life in Montana, where he continues to be involved in parish life.

Sister Rosarii lives in retirement in Seattle. When I last visited, she told me she could rarely get out for Mass anymore, so she took the Eucharist with every morsel she ate, every breath she breathed.

Father lack Morris is back from serving 10 years as a missionary in Uganda, and still very much an inspiration for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. At 76, he's just been assigned as pastor for a small parish on the Oregon coast.

Mary Testin is the adult formation director at a suburban parish in the St. Paul, Minnesota diocese, where she teaches preparation for the sacraments and continues her work with RCIA. I recently e-mailed her, asking why in the world she ever took me on. "You were sincerely interested in knowing more and more," she wrote back. "I will go many extra miles for anyone like that. Besides," she added, "as I remember, you paid the bar bill."

In the nearly 20 years since my conversion, I have not made much headway in learning about the saints whose feast days we celebrate in the liturgical calendar. Having that happy task ahead of me, I await the time when the visionaries, theologians, and virgin martyrs rendered in plaster or stained glass are as real to me as my everyday saints. USC 

MARTHA GIES teaches creative writing at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and at a writing program in Veracruz, Mexico.