Of Men and Mary Page 7
My fiancée’s head snapped around so fast I thought she’d get whiplash. It would be a long ride home and the beginning of the end of our relationship. I never dated again, and in a certain way, I’ve never stopped loving her. She was a good woman, and she married a few years later. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I still pray for her and hope she found love with someone who brought her joy and children.
When I approached the diocese in which I lived and told the vocation director, who was several years my junior, my entire fantastic story, he looked at me with a puzzled and anxious expression and advised me to go home and pray about it for a year. I thought to myself, “Aren’t I supposed to discern the priesthood while in the seminary and not only before?”
I continued to attend Mass every day, and when I saw members of the Rosary group, I told them the details of my Medjugorje trip. All of them believed my hard-to-swallow story, probably because I had no reason to lie. After daily Mass, I began to lead the Rosary, and people enjoyed the way I would extemporaneously describe the mysteries. Soon, I was invited to other prayer groups to do the same. Meanwhile, interest in my conversion story was growing.
After about four months, I was asked to lead the Rosary for a day-long conference, which drew about 800 people, and during the conference, the organizers spontaneously asked me if I would tell the story of my conversion. I agreed, and when I stepped up to the podium, again, every trace of fear left me. I spoke of God’s love and mercy in my life, of how the dead will rise and proclaim the glory of God. Glancing down past the front of the stage, I could see the nationally known speakers of the conference staring up at me, captivated. Looking out into the crowd I could see the presence of the Holy Spirit wash over the listeners. I had not planned what I was going to say. The story came out more beautifully than I could ever have told it myself, and when I was finished, people sat in their seats, stunned; then they stood up and started an ovation that lasted for what seemed to me like too long. “How could this be?” I wondered. “What did I say that they enjoyed? I was just telling them about a lousy sinner who received God’s mercy, and of how the Mother of God had called me to Medjugorje that I might better know the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I hadn’t even mentioned my call to the priesthood. That I kept very close to myself.
That year, I began to travel across dioceses in other states to share my story, and the Lord used me to organize a Marian conference at the St. Paul Civic Center in Minnesota, which drew nearly 10,000 attendees. “Who is this long-haired guy with too much facial hair and no fashion sense?” people wondered. In time, a radio interview I gave was picked up by the Catholic Digest and printed.
Fall turned to winter, and winter to spring. As I was getting ready for Mass one Sunday morning, the phone rang. My mother said it was for me. “Mom, take a message!” I called out from another room. “Otherwise, we’re going to be late for Mass.”
“It’s a bishop,” she responded. “I suggest you take the call.”
“Hello?”
On the other end of the line, a gentle voice said, “I am Bishop James Sullivan of the diocese of Fargo, North Dakota. I just read an article about you, and I believe you have a vocation to be a priest. I want you to come to my diocese and stay with me and talk with me.” I fell speechless. That information was only between God and me. I don’t know what I finally mumbled—something like, “I’ll think about it, and I should go to church now.”
I decided to travel to his diocese, just to speak with him and attend a local shooting tournament. But the kindly Bishop Sullivan asked when I was with him, “Would you please go and talk to the rector of the seminary? Please do it for me.”
I said, “Okay, Bishop, but I am not going to enter the seminary. I simply came here to talk to you.” So I went over to the minor seminary where I was welcomed by a group of priests. They invited me to sit down with them in a conference room, where I shared my incredible story of Jesus asking me to be a priest. They laughed and they laughed and they laughed. There it was again. “I’m serious.” I told them.
“Don’t worry,” they said, “the bishop has told us we can’t throw you out, no matter how crazy you sound.” Suddenly, we heard a knock on the door. As it opened, I saw standing before me my good friend, Mike, from Wisconsin, all 6 feet 5 inches, 330 pounds of him. I had met big Mike a year earlier on a return trip to Medjugorje, where we bonded in the knowledge that one day we both had to enter the seminary. His story was similar to mine. He was recruited by the Cleveland Browns—a fulfillment of his life-long dream of becoming a professional football player, when the Lord called him in Medjugorje to the priesthood. Unbeknownst to me, the bishop had tracked him down, too. Mike walked forward and threw his arms around me, dwarfing my 5-foot 10-inch, 250-pound frame. “You know this guy?” exclaimed the priests.
Bishop Sullivan, a humble man, guided by the hand of God and moved by his profound relationship with the Blessed Mother, would pave the way for me to become a priest. Neither Mike nor I ever filled out an application or provided transcripts to the seminary. The bishop accepted us, protected us, and loved us. I arrived in Fargo with three pairs of dirty jeans, four different shotguns, seven cases of shells, one little, yellow lab named Sugar, and zero intention of staying. In the seminary, where there was a rule against pets, Sugar lived openly in my room for the next two years and ended up in every official picture taken.
My time at the seminary in Fargo turned out to be a blessed springboard for my eventual return to my home diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I would be ordained and where I would tend to my mother until the day she died on October 24, 2016. In her last conscious moments, as I sat by her bedside, I couldn’t help but shower my mom with my love. I kept kissing her through my tears and thanking her for bringing me into life, for being such a great mom, and for loving me out of hell. As I drove home from her place of care, I lifted up my hands to heaven, praised God for her life, and said to him, “You gave me your mom on the Cross, and now I give my mom back to you. Please come and take her to yourself.” That very night, she went peacefully to the Lord.
There exists an ancient belief that when a priest’s mother dies, at the moment she reaches heaven, she gives to Jesus a cloth with the sacred chrism oil that anointed her son’s hands for ministry and says, “I gave you a priest, my son.” When I attended my mother’s funeral, pains of love and sorrow and gratitude and loss overwhelmed me as I imagined this encounter between them, and I bowed my head and cried, like a small child. Now I await that joyful day outside of time when I will join her, when I will hear all about the reception she received in heaven, because I don’t just believe that God exists. I know that He exists.
* * *
1 To see Drawing Heaven — Akiane Kramarik, click here. To see the Paintings by Akiane Kramarik that are of the same face of Jesus that the boy from Heaven is for Real saw, click here.
THREE
JIM JENNINGS
A Murderer Changes His Eternal
Life Sentence
I'M AN EX-CONVICT. I’ve spent eighteen of the last twenty-five years in prison. My charges consisted of murder, attempted murder in the first degree, atrocious assault and battery, attempted murder of a police officer, armed robbery and escape. And there are a lot of things I never got caught for. But I believe in my heart that my attitude toward life was my worst sin. I didn’t at all like myself, and if I didn’t care for myself, I surely wasn’t gonna care about you—about hittin’ you in the head or takin’ what you had from your pocket. I was on a self-destruction trip with an attitude that wounded my mind and my soul. I’ve been a drug addict and an alcoholic; I’ve abused sex and satiated myself with every vice imaginable. If I was tempted to do it, I did it.
When I was first charged with murder in 1970, my home state of New Jersey tried to give me the electric chair, but the jury acquitted me of first- and second-degree murder and found me guilty of manslaughter. I got twenty to thirty years for that, but after eig
ht years, I was paroled. After stayin’ out six years, I got locked up again in Tennessee ‘cause of new charges for attempted murder and only got fifteen that time. They were lookin’ to give me three twenty-fives to life. I was lucky. I would’ve never seen daylight.
In 1984, I went back to prison, my fourth time in, for three counts of attempted murder in the first degree. In 1988, I finally got parole from Tennessee State Prison. I still had a possible detainer from New Jersey and knew I could end up there with ninety days for parole violation, but come June, I was goin’ home. I’m a carpenter—a good one, and I had plans of goin’ out into the world and makin’ a lot of money. Even though I’ve stolen a lot in my life, I’d rather work for a livin’; and since I’ve got a bad temper and been in subcultures where violence comes about, I figured I’d avoid all that and stay out of jail. But I was gonna live life the way I knew how to live it—in vice. My plan was to dedicate the rest of my days to my own pleasures. The last thing on my mind was God.
In early May of 1988, the prison called an evening headcount, which is when the prisoners stay locked in their cells for half an hour while the guards make sure everybody is accounted for. After the officer walked by, me and my cell partner rolled up a couple of joints and got high. Meanwhile, I turned on the TV to the public broadcasting station ‘cause I like animal shows and stuff like that. Well, they had somethin’ on there about the Blessed Virgin Mary. They showed these six kids lookin’ up and speakin’ in a foreign language, while the narrator starts talkin’ about the Mother of God. Lookin’ at those kids faces, I just knew it was real. I had years of experience sniffin’ out phonies, and I knew they weren’t makin’ that up. They were really seein’ Our Lady! And that’s the moment my life started to change.
I turn to my cell partner and says, “What do ya think of that?”
“What?” he says.
“They say the Blessed Virgin Mary’s appearing some place. The narrator was sayin’ it.”
He looks at me and says, “Who’s the Blessed Virgin Mary?” I laughed at him and figured he was dumb as a box of rocks. Everybody knew her. Then I forgot all about it. A week or so passed, and one day around 9 in the morning, I walked outside in the Tennessee State Prison into bright blue skies and warm air. It was a beautiful Saturday morning I’ll never forget. You could see all the way into Missouri across the Mississippi river. I was walkin’ around in circles with a friend ‘cause that’s all you can do in a prison yard. We weren’t talkin’ or anything, just strollin’.
All of a sudden, this pressure came over me, in me, and around me, and it just kept gettin’ more intense, scaring me to death. I thought I had finally crossed the line. I’d gone nuts. I wanted to run, just physically run away, out of my skin, but I couldn’t. I could only walk forward. From the outside, it seemed like I was doin’ exactly what I’d been doin’ a few seconds earlier, but I wasn’t. I wanted to talk to the guy next to me, figurin’ if I did, maybe I could get my mind off of this pressure. But I couldn’t even talk. I was stuck in a forward motion with my focus forced into what was happenin’ in that moment.
Suddenly, I knew there was a God. I had no doubt of his existence, just like I know that I exist. At the same time, I understood the reality of heaven and hell. I didn’t see nothin’ with my eyes; I just suddenly knew these things. Heaven was peace and love and happiness and all the things we hear about heaven being, and hell was an eternal suffering. I mean it was ugly, and there ain’t no parole. You’re there for the duration.
Then I saw myself in the light of God’s justice. I was standin’ on the brink of hell, and it terrified me. I understood that I had a choice to make. Heaven and hell were before me, so to speak, and in my fear, I grabbed heaven sayin’, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take that,” thinkin’ I was doin’ the right thing. But I felt pushed away when I reached for it, and that freaked me out even more. Not givin’ up, I tried again and said, “Yeah, I want that. I’ll take heaven.” But again, I was repelled from this choice. What I understand now, but didn’t understand then, was that I wasn’t making a real choice for heaven. In my understanding, there was a road goin’ to heaven and another goin’ to hell, and I was tryin’ to bend the road that leads to hell to make it wind up in heaven. So, no wonder I was bein’ repelled. That don’t work.
I guess God felt sorry for me because all of a sudden, I got clarity within this pressure—like a sense of him tellin’ me, “You have a choice to make that is entirely yours. You don’t have to pick heaven. You don’t have to pick hell. I’m not gonna bop you on the head and force you either way. But you must pick one or the other.” Then I knew that if I continued embracing this road to hell, which was my life, I also had to embrace that end, that consequence, which was eternal suffering. But if I wanted heaven, I had to relinquish the road I was on and embrace all that would bring me to heaven.
Then I sort of seen my soul. I was able to look down inside of myself at all the things in my life I held dear. One at a time, each of my treasures, my gods, my idols—all my attachments showed up before my eyes, so to speak, and I had to let each and every one of them go. My total abandonment to these sins had to be stopped through a deliberate choice, so I said in my head, “All right. Well, okay, I’ll let that go. I’ll be good.” “Yeah, I’ll never do that again . . . or that again.” This seemed to cut my sins at the root. It felt like I was goin’ into the bottom of a big trash bin as the garbage was turned loose. In my state of mind, it was easy to do because I felt scared to death. When I’d finally cleaned everything out, I thought, “Yeah, I want heaven, but I don’t know how to get there.”
With that, the pressure eased off of me, and I was back in control again. Dazed and confused, I started walkin’ away from my friend to be alone in my cell. When I got there, I couldn’t do nothin’. I just sat there awestruck. I mean this rocked me. I’d never even thought about anything like this. With all the drugs I’d used, I didn’t think I could ever get that high to have somethin’ like that happen to me.
I started starin’ at a rosary a priest had given me when I first went to prison in Tennessee. It had been hangin’ there on my cell wall for about four years—who knows why; and it was just a mess with so much grease and fuzz hangin’ from it that it looked like a poorly decorated Christmas tree. I’d never had a devotion to Our Lady and had said the Rosary maybe two or three times in my life, when I’d gone to Catholic school in my earlier grades, but somehow, I remembered parts of it. I didn’t get religious right away, but I started thinkin’ about God and tried to pray.
Over the next couple days, this peace comes over me, and I start to think about God. Then about a week after my incident happened, a guy comes runnin’ up to me, who wasn’t even one of my buddies, and he says, “Hey, Jim, you Catholic? There’s a priest comin’ here on Thursdays, and he’s gonna say Mass.”
Now, I was in West Tennessee—the Bible Belt. The only thing they had goin’ on were Protestants comin’ in and tryin’ to evangelize people, and I didn’t want to hear anything about anything. I didn’t care if they was a priest, or a minister, or what. But all the time I’d been in this prison, I’d never seen a Catholic priest or a Catholic service. Even if they’d had them, I wasn’t gonna go, but still, I didn’t see none.
That Thursday, for the first time, I went down to Mass and to Confession, which I thought was a pretty good idea in light of everything that had happened. I had given away the few drugs I had left and said I wasn’t dealin’ no more. My friends thought I was crazy. Then every Thursday for the rest of my time there, I went to Confession and received the Eucharist until June 29, 1988, when I got picked up and transported back to New Jersey. It turned out they did want me.
For nine days, I was in transit. An eighteen-hour trip takes nine days when you’re in a prison transport van. Travelin’ all over the country, handcuffed, shackled, and belted down, all I could do was pray, look at the trees goin’ by, and think about what had happened to me. At least, I’m pretty sure I was prayin’ because the
guy was goin’ about 100 miles per hour. I was strapped down—couldn’t even put my hands up to protect myself—and afraid of goin’ right through the steel mesh in front of me. So when I got to the state prison, I was a little more devout.
In New Jersey, there were five prisons on this one big acreage, like a big prison farm. They quit growin’ vegetables, and now they’re just growin’ prisons. Instead of the ninety days I was expectin’, they wanted me to max out. I would be there another two and a half years. A Catholic priest named Fr. Hewett was on the grounds, if you could catch him runnin’ through those five prisons each day. It made all the difference that he was there.
At this point, I was goin’ to Mass and doin’ a lot of things I figured God wanted me to do, but I didn’t see my experience with God as a gift of mercy. I didn’t see it as love. I’d been happily goin’ off to hell, and he came in unannounced and threw a monkey wrench in the deal. Now I was scared to death of goin’ off to hell, figurin’ I was goin’ there anyway.
So I served God for the next six to eight months in complete fear to the point of anxiety attacks. You can’t imagine how scared I was. God was a giant cop up there in heaven just waitin’ for me to mess up. I used to catch the priest whenever he came to the prison and make him hear my confession, and when I left the confessional, I’d wanna run right back in. If I wasn’t Godlike from the second I walked out—”Oh no, here come the lightning bolts.”
Everything I was doin’—prayin’, Mass, goin’ to Confession, sayin’ a zillion Rosaries—was so that maybe, maybe, God would keep hell off of me. Fr. Hewett, the priest chaplain, told me casually, one day, to pray all the time. He probably meant that I could offer my work up as a prayer, or somethin’. Me, I start sayin’ Hail Mary’s at my prison carpentry job. All through the day, I was bangin’ my fingers, tryin’ to hammer nails while takin’ papers out of my pocket to read the Hail Holy Queen. I wasn’t gettin’ any work done.