The Damascus Road
for Jim Holmes
Crossing The Tiber.

What does all of that have to do with my Damascus Road/Crossing the Tiber Experience? Nothing really, except it lets me introduce myself by name so maybe you won’t forget it.

As I have been thinking about how to formulate my testimony of coming into the Catholic Church I consulted with several people.  Their advice was to simply tell why I converted to the Catholic Church.  That sounds simple.  But it put me in quandary.  If I tell you the entire truth, you might send the men with the white coats and carrying a straight jacket.  I could tell you that I did it after a great deal of study, and then I would be untruthful.  I am not a book-a-holic.  Oh, make no mistake, I have been studying and am convinced that I will be studying until I draw my last breath.  But I am not a deep student, nor do I see a lot of things that others see immediately.  But what I did see caused me to make the conversion to Catholicism.  But that was not the only thing.

I have made decisions sometimes based on three things.  The Father has a way of implanting things in your mind that you could never have known or thought of, but you know it is true in your heart and soul.  The second thing is experience and the older I get the more of that I have.  The third area to based decisions on is the testimony of the Saints in the Canon of Scripture and the Revealed Truth in the entire Bible.  But as Catholics we have a fourth, and that is the testimony of the Early Church Fathers as well as the Church Fathers of later times.  With the preponderance of evidence, I have had no choice but to convert the Catholic Church.

Well that was not’t the quandary.  I will get to it in a minute.  This part is going to get a little risky though.  When I was six years old, July of 1952 to be exact, I shocked my parents and my Pastor in declaring my desire to join the Church, i.e. The Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, AL. I was six years old. This is why one time I said I never had felt lost, (Baptist terminology).  I passed from the age of innocence into the age of accountability requesting Baptism, again Baptist terminology.  However, no matter the terminology my Baptism was administered July 27, 1952 PRAISE GOD. 

When I was fifteen I attended a Teenage Vacation Bible School at my Grandmother’s Methodist Church in Gulfport, Ms.  I clearly heard the Voice of The Lord.  Now you may begin to pull out your phones and get ready to dial 911.  But I assure you I am not crazy.  There are days in this “walk”, that I wish He had not spoken to me, or more aptly, He would have completed His thought.  He said “I want you”.  It was like the old World War II army “I WANT YOU” in the Army.  Finally He said “In the Last Days, I have something important for you to do”.  Now I always assumed that He was speaking of the Last Days that the Bible refers to. And most Evangelical Protestants feel that we are in those “Last Days”.  Hence I started into the Ministry about the age of twenty.  But now, I feel I might have put the cart before the horse and started to early, because I feel that He was referring to my last days of my earthly life or my last days of Ministry

But between the age of fifteen and twenty I had to deal with growing up and life.  One of the things I had to think about was where in the Ministry God wanted me.  I did not even contemplate not going into the Ministry during college.  That was the way things were done.  But for some reason, I never really felt at home in the Baptist or any other Protestant denomination.  I became a Baptist Minister, because that was I had met Jesus and grown up in His Love. And I never really had checked out anything else, until I met a little girl while a sophomore in high school. 

This Daughter of the Church was Jane Elizabeth Siegfried.  She was probably the prettiest thing I had ever seen.    We spent most of every date discussing theology.  We attended at least three football games (The McGill {Catholic} Murphy {Public} rivalry each year and sat on the fifty yard line discussing theology.  You stay out of Moral trouble when you are talking about God.

But she and I drifted apart after our Senior Summer.  And I thought I was to enter the Ministry.  I met another beautiful and wonderful girl.  She was a wonderful Christian and accepted me.  We married and entered the Ministry in January of 1967.  We raised three wonderful daughters including a set of twins.

My Protestant Ministry was more or less uneventful.  We Pastored several churches and built large congregations in some of them.  We did Chaplaincy work and held other Ministerial positions. But there were conflicts in my soul about the truths I found in life but not in the written word.   I knew that there were only partial answers and truths in my denomination. 

During my Ministry, I had the opportunity to Pastor two different Churches back to back named The Damascus Baptist Church.  Without being specific about the two Churches, we will just say they were an experience.  While in this two to three year period we experienced things that began to cause me to second guess my position in Ministry; not my calling to the Ministry, but my position in the Ministry.  I was not questioning my location, that I new was wrong.  I was questioning my position.  That far back I was beginning to move toward the Church.  I had investigated it prior to this time.  But I really believe that this was the time I started moving toward the Church.  That is why I entitled this My Damascus Road Experience.  Like St. Paul on the Road to Damascus.  The Lord started dealing with me at Damascus.

I slipped lower and lower on the Denominational political totem pole.  I began to do secular work and bi-vocational ministries.  I even wound up in Federal Prison.  Was I guilty of any crime?  I do not believe I broke any laws.  But I did walk close to the edge.  And I did not as the scriptures admonish “avoid the very presence of evil”.  However, while there, the Lord started a renewal in my life.  A group from the Lexington Ky. area came into the Lexington Ky. Federal Prison and held an Emmaus Walk Retreat, similar to Kairos.  From that Epiphany, God rekindled my spiritual life to leading me to form what has now turned into an Apostolate Ministry - Inmate Family Ministry. 

Well now we are down to the crux of the matter.  Why did I become a Catholic?  The freedom of being fulltime in the Ministry and not tied directly to Pastoring in one specific denomination allowed me to begin to investigate where I was and where I thought God wanted me to go.  I started watching Marcus Grodi of the Coming Home Network on EWTN.  I started reading and I knew a change had to be made.  I met with some Methodist brethren.  I met with some Lutherans.  But still there was no satisfaction.

Also on the Home Front things were not good either. My wife had decided that I was not producing enough income from the Ministry and that it was embarrassing to her for me to stand up on Sundays and announce that I was a convicted felon, to explain the beginnings of the Ministry, and solicit funds to run it with.  She kept asking me for a divorce and saying that we never should have gotten married.  I need to explain at this point that we had separated at least three times before and if we did this time would have been at least the fourth time.  I had always attempted to put it back together, but it was outside of the Ministry, as for as income, and thus outside of His will.          

This time I suddenly felt a freedom to go ahead and give her a divorce and I did. We spent thirty five years together.  But I did received an annulment from the Marriage Tribunal of the Catholic Archdiocese of Mobile. 

After I moved out, and the Divorce was applied for, I kept thinking about the Church and if that was what God was leading me to.  One day sitting at the computer and browsing the Internet, I decided to see if I could find Jane Siegfried.  I knew it was shot in the dark, because I would not know her name if she had married.  What I accomplished was finding her brother.  She was working for him.  She had never married and basically did not want to marry unless she could find someone like me.  (And we all know they through the mold away when God created me.)  I wanted her wisdom for my seeking questions.  When I found her single, I began to think about marriage.  We did marry, November 7, 2002; about one year after my divorce was final.
        
However, while our marriage was probably not a mistake in the beginning, we have come to realize in 7 years that we are not the same people we were at age sixteen.  We actually are two different people because of the life we have led since highschool.  She had lived at home, with her parents, for 56 years, and I had been married for 35 years.  Additionally our work lives were entirely different, causing different views of life.  The bottom line is that we are totally incompatible on many levels.

We are separating by the end of 2009.  Please keep both of us in your prayers.  

But, I digress, back to my conversion to the Catholic Church.  This is the place that you might want to start dialing 911 and send me some help.  But you don’t have to; I am not crazy, just BLESSED.  So hang on to your hats here we go.

Right after my divorce was final, I had decided to go to Memphis for Christmas, where Jane was living, and stay with some friends.  I decided to go through Montgomery, AL and Birmingham to take care of some Ministry business.  When I was leaving Birmingham, I called Jane and she asked me to try and find Mother Angelica’s Church in Hanceville, AL.  I finally found it after several frustrating wrong and missed turns.  I saw a vision of Glory when I came over a hill seeing this beautiful Church and Campus sitting in this lovely, idyllic and pastoral setting.  I went in to the Church and the Rosary was being prayed over the P.A.  I noticed an Icon of Christ by the Altar.  While the Gold and finery took my breath away it also upset me.  This opulence had cost a Denver Mint.  But I heard the voice of the Lord say to me, but they respect me and they Worship me.  This startled me.  I had heard the voice of the Lord in this manner on three previous occasions.  But each time I did and do, it startles me.  About that time a Novitiate Nun walked across the front of the Church and genuflects in front of the Altar.  Again the Lord said, “They worship me and I and my Father are jealous of Worship”.  I then heard Him say “I want you to come into My Church.  I want you to come in for the correction of my people.” 

That word correction has given me a lot of trouble.   Mainly because it arouses anger in some people as to what correction can you give us?  And they are right.  I can not give correction.  And my move into the Church has brought about correction in my own life.  But I believe now what the Lord meant was that I was to teach the truths of the Church as they have been there all along.  And I was to share with His People the Joy I feel at the time of the Mass when Christ is present.  I was to remind them of the great truths that the Protestants do not have and the Catholics do.  Jesus does not make mistakes, but we interpret Him incorrectly at times.  So while I am not coming into the Church to bring Correction, the way correction is usually interpreted, I, along with many other Converts  are  holding up the Truths of the Church for His People to rejoice in.

Immediately after the Lord said these last words to me, I heard the sweetest feminine voice off to the left front side.  It was unlike any voice I had ever heard before; and it certainly was not a voice of a friend or relative.  I then noticed an icon of the Holy Mother in area from which I heard the voice.  The voice very calmly said “My son has asked you to come into our Church.  What are you going to do about it?  Now you must understand, this is being said to a Baptist Minister, with no background in The Marian Doctrine. It sent me into a mild state of shock.  I stumbled to my car and drove to highway, where I sat and sobbed for 45 minutes or more.

I was sobbing from fear, joy and sadness that I had missed these truths for so many years.  I had been reading in the Church Fathers for sometime before this and reading books sent to me by the “Coming Home Network”.  But I never dreamed I would actually desire to cross over.  But here I was and I knew what I had to do.  When I called Jane, she could only get a general idea of what had happened. 

You ask me why I became a Catholic.  What else could I do?  However, after dealing with the factual side of such a decision, i.e. the truth about the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Mother and other doctrines and dogmas of the Church, again, what else could I do?

These are the mechanics of “Why I became a Catholic”.  But how did I handle the practicalities?  Did I have doctrinal problems?  At the beginning, before my Epiphany at Mother Angelica’s Church, I did.  But since, where there have been questions, I have received an instant peace.  While I may not understand, I have a witness in my soul that the answer of the Church is correct.  Or, I have gotten an answer, after a period of directed research by the Holy Spirit. 

God has long given me a love and longing for Church Members and helping them draw closer to Him.  Does this mean that I am not into Evangelizing one that has never committed his or her life to Christ?  No.  But my gifts and focus seem aimed more at those that know Him, and seek a deeper walk.  I am not drawn to Members that are satisfied with their situation, but people that are not satisfied and want more of Him. 

Now does this mean that I think I am better or have more than anyone else?  No, but it means that through my life He has given me experiences and knowledge that can cause anyone to identify with and hopefully seek more of what God has in store for  all of us.

On June the 8th, 2003 I was officially received into the Catholic Community at Corpus Christi Catholic Church, in Mobile Alabama.  We had to wait for the Court of Second Instance, in Lafayette to confirm my Annulment.  At this time I was confirmed and my wife (my beautiful high school sweetheart renewed our vows and to seal them I received my first communion as we received a single wafer with presence of Christ in our Wedding Mass Communion. 

Now this is not the end of my Damascus Road Experience.  It is really the beginning.  I would love to come to your Parish and share the "rest of the story", as it grows daily.

 Here is a page two of my testimony!

 Our Testimonies Are Never Complete Are They?