From Virginia comes this inspiring story of one man’s journey to the faith, involving Methodism, music and monks:

When Jeff Hendrix was 5 years old, he experienced a moment of “transcendence” while listening to the 19th-century symphonic suite “Scheherazade” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. For the next two years, he begged his parents to let him take up the violin in an attempt to recapture that pivotal experience.

“That really was to me, I think the Holy Spirit’s first entrée in my life into really what beauty and truth and goodness was like,” Hendrix said, sitting in the classroom at St. Charles School in Arlington where he teaches sixth grade. “Music has always been an important part of my life.”

Born in Bremen, Ind., in 1954, the youngest of five brothers and sisters, Hendrix was raised by an evangelical United Brethren pastor — a background that “taught me to love the Lord, to avoid sin, to seek salvation,” he said.

He followed his nearly lifelong attraction to music, planning to graduate from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., with a degree in music. Feeling continuously unfulfilled, however, Hendrix switched tracks and discerned what he thought was a call to ordained ministry in the Protestant church. He earned a master’s in divinity from Duke University in Durham, N.C. — where he met his wife, Mochel — and the two embarked on a life of ministering to the United Methodist community together.

For 20 years they served in the Virginia Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, ministering in communities all over Virginia. But despite his active ministry, he remained unfulfilled — searching for “more meaning, more purpose, something I couldn’t put my finger on.”

In the early 1980s, Hendrix was invited to an ecumenical book study led by two monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville. He developed long-term relationships with several of the monks, and Hendrix began attending regular retreats at the monastery, still searching for complete fulfillment.

“That started to open me up yet to another experience of transcendence that was more specific, especially in a time in my life when I was really searching,” he said. “Even though I will always love the United Methodist Church for what it taught me and what it has done for me, the best answers that I was receiving were coming from the Catholic sector of influences in my life.”

It was in Berryville that he found the closer relationship with Christ for which he had been searching — in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

“It was only really when I was in the chapel there at Holy Cross Abbey that I began to have an extreme awareness of the real presence of Christ in the tabernacle, in the Eucharist,” he said. “I started to really yearn for that.”

Realizing that a conversion to the Catholic Church meant leaving behind two decades of work, the common bond of ministry with his wife and his Protestant roots, Hendrix struggled with his decision. But he retired from his Methodist ministry in the spring of 2001.

Leaving the Methodist Church was not a rejection of that branch of faith that taught him so much, Hendrix said.

“I honor and respect the United Methodist Church,” he said. “But it’s not the fullness of the Faith.”

Check out the rest. And a h/t to The Dawn Patrol.