Between Incense and Inheritance: Caritas • Iustitia • Pax

I’ve been moving through something like an inheritance I did not know I was still carrying, part heritage, part grief, part return. Not belief exactly, but something closer to recognition forming over time through place, ritual, and memory.

My grandpa, Philip Oliver Correro, passed in March 2024. My Grammy, Dr. Carole Ann Lax Stewart, followed in July 2025. In the wake of those losses, grief did not arrive as a single absence, but something layered. It moved backward as much as forward, opening memory, lineage, and meaning I was still learning how to hold.

At first, it surfaced at my grandpa’s Catholic Funeral Mass at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Hernando, MS, his cremated remains present before the altar. The parish felt steady in a way that is hard to describe, shaped by a long Catholic presence in the region. The Mass unfolded in its familiar rhythm, readings, hymns, the Liturgy of the Word, communion, centered on the hope of Resurrection. What stayed with me was not the language but the way the space held it. Even the military flag folding afterward felt like part of the same quiet reverence, honoring his Marine service and my father’s Air Force service in a way that made lineage feel visible, almost physical.

On the drive home, I released his ashes over the Hernando de Soto Bridge near Memphis while Ave Maria by Andrea Bocelli played. The road moved forward, the river stretched below, and everything felt suspended between motion and stillness. Grief, prayer, and farewell were not separate in that moment. They were the same atmosphere moving through me.

Something in that experience did not stay contained. It shifted how I understood inheritance itself, not as something static but something that moves. I found myself returning to ancestry I had only partially known, Sicilian and Italian lines rooted in Cefalù and Palermo, the Correro (Curreri) name I had carried without fully tracing. It did not feel like discovery so much as recognition coming into focus, like something already present becoming legible.

Other lines surfaced more quietly. Scotch-Irish roots through my PapaRalph, my mom’s dad, Ralph Stewart, carried through his father’s Stewart line. English ancestry through my Grammy, Dr. Carole Ann Lax Stewart, through her father’s Lax line. They are not separate categories to me anymore so much as overlapping histories that show up in how I move through ritual, memory, and place.

Religion and I have always had our disagreements. I am not trying to wrestle with dogma or arrive at certainty. Still, I find myself returning to these spaces, not for answers, but for something quieter that feels closer to recognition than belief.

That return has its own scattered map. I was baptized in the Catholic tradition at Carswell Chapel at Carswell Air Force Base. A few years later, I found myself at Easter Mass at St. John’s Cathedral in İzmir, Turkey, walking from our apartments carrying stuffed bunnies from the Easter Bunny. My baby brother Anthony dropped his along the way, and suffice it to say, it was not his favorite Easter.

St. John’s Cathedral in the center of İzmir carries a layered presence, shaped by its role as the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and its dedication to St. John the Evangelist, tied to the early churches of Asia Minor named in Revelation. It holds both city life and long religious memory in the same space, as if neither fully replaces the other.

In İzmir, I also moved through places shaped long before me, including the House of the Virgin Mary (Meryemana), located on Mount Nightingale near Ephesus. The site is closely tied to early Christian pilgrimage tradition and is believed by many to be one of the last places she may have lived. Standing there felt less like encountering history and more like stepping into a kind of stillness that seems to have already been waiting there.

After moving back to the United States, I received First Communion at Reese Air Force Base.

By the time I was eighteen, that thread carried me into Venice at St. Mark’s Basilica through Loyola College Prep, my Catholic high school in Shreveport. St. Mark’s rises from centuries of Byzantine and Venetian devotion, its interior layered in gold mosaics that seem to hold light rather than reflect it. Inside, incense moved through the air, Gregorian chant filled the space, and the hymnal shifted between Latin and Italian. I remember not understanding anything in a literal sense and still feeling like something in me recognized it anyway. Later, I sketched one of the ceiling mosaics and turned it into a tattoo I got in college on my mid-upper back. Not belief exactly, but recognition.

Before graduating high school, we also had a graduation Mass at St. John Berchmans Cathedral in Shreveport, a Jesuit parish that feels like a threshold more than an ending, where ritual holds both farewell and continuation at once.

More recently, I attended Mass again at Holy Trinity Catholic Church here in Shreveport, a parish shaped by long continuity of community and priestly service, including the memory of the Five Priests who served during the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and are remembered there as Servants of God. I am grateful I went. I feel drawn to the ritual itself, the rhythm of standing, sitting, silence, response. The way meaning is carried through repetition instead of explanation. It feels meditative, like memory embodied rather than understood.

Here is a stanza from my poem I Was Raised, reflecting on my Catholic heritage:

I was raised

Catholic—

by incense and reverence,

the rhythm of ritual,

whispers in the pews,

the strange intimacy of communion.

Faith as choreography.

Love as offering.

God of wonder.

I may never fully land inside religion in a fixed way, but I do not feel separate from its language of longing. I feel connected to my ancestors, both those I knew and those I am still learning. I have also found myself drawn to Catholic social teaching, especially its insistence on care for the poor and marginalized. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That line stays with me, not as doctrine, but as orientation, a way of remembering what matters.

I am not trying to believe my way into certainty. I am trying to live my way into attention, into presence, into reverence that does not require resolution to be real.

In his early preaching, Pope Leo XIV emphasized that before anything else, we are called to be human.