Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie Page B

not the other way around. It just goes to prove what I firmly believe: The Work is about dealing with the most negative force imaginable, but God never lets evil happen without something positive coming out of it. And faith is the ultimate positive: It is in every person—all you have to do is a little searching, and it has the power to change your life.
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    Through the Work, I became friendly with an extraordinary man of truly awesome faith, Father Malachi Martin. Along with literally writing the book on demonic possession, in his best-seller Hostage to the Devil, Father Martin was one of God’s great warriors and had performed exorcisms all over the world long before I was born. Although he was a renowned Jesuit priest who spoke eight languages, had helped translate the Dead Sea Scrolls, and had been a close confidant to Cardinal Bea and Pope John XXXIII in the 1960s, he always treated me like an equal. Like Bishop McKenna, he was so pious that he seemed to have no ego at all, just a profound reverence for God that overshadowed his own brilliance.
    Yet, as I discovered the first time we met, over dinner at Sparks, a famous New York City steakhouse, this thin, scholarly Jesuit was a warm and worldly man, with a gift for putting people at ease. When I hesitated about ordering a drink, not sure if it would be proper to indulge in alcohol in the presence of such a holy man, he sensed my dilemma and said, in his thick Irish brogue, “Go ahead, Ralph, have a Jack Daniel’s—on me.” He slapped a five-dollar bill down on the table, and we spent the next two hours chatting away like old friends.
    A couple of weeks later I drove him to Connecticut, where he was giving a lecture. For three hours I drove along the dark, winding road, drinking in this great man’s remarkable knowledge about the Work. It was a great experience.
    “Tell me, Ralph, what do you get out of an exorcism?” he asked. We’d just parked at my favorite rest stop on the Merritt Parkway, where they have the best coffee in the world, and got out to stretch our legs after the long drive from Manhattan.
    I was a little confused by his question and replied, “I don’t get anything out of it.” He nodded his head, and I continued, “I am totally drained, physically, mentally, and spiritually.”
    “Good,” he said. “That’s exactly what you should be getting out of it.”
    More perplexed than ever, I asked what he meant.
    “You don’t ever come in such close proximity to evil without losing some of your humanity,” he explained. “The demonic take a piece of that away, because of the hatred they have for you.”
    “Will I ever get it back?”
    He had a big smile on his face, as he answered, “It’s like money in the bank when you go to your final reward.”
    “Father, all I want is a peaceful life.”
    He studied me for a moment, then said, “Sorry, Ralph, but that is one thing you’ll never have.”
    “Gee, Father, thanks a lot,” I said.
    “There’s something important God wants you to do,” he explained. “On what scale, I can’t tell you, but when your time comes, you’ll find out.” His smile was gone, and I saw the sorrow deep inside this man.
    Curious about his book, which describes five twentieth-century cases of possession, I asked if he was one of the exorcists in the book. He nodded yes. I longed to know which of these harrowing exorcisms he’d done, but there was such indescribable pain in his eyes that I couldn’t ask.
    No longer looking at me, but at something far away, he suddenly spoke in an achingly sad voice. “Ralph, I got my ass handed to me in Cairo.”
    We were silent for a while. I waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, I wondered what fearsome and mysterious peril he’d encountered there. In his book, Father Martin calls exorcism “grisly work … [with] the mordant traits of nightmare … a one-on-one confrontation, personal and bitter, with pure evil … a dreadful and