When I was 14 years old, the one movie that I really wanted to see was one that I couldn’t: “The Exorcist.” I was too young. If you want to know the truth, when I finally saw it a few years later, when I was in college, I was still too young to see it. It was truly terrifying. Nobody will ever confuse this movie with great art. But it’s a great way to give yourself nightmares.

And it’s what most of us imagine when we think of someone being possessed by an “unclean spirit,” like the man in today’s gospel. Spinning heads, levitation, strange voices. I won’t even go into the pea soup.

But in reality, the banality of evil is more subtle. It is more seductive. And that makes it infinitely more terrifying – and dangerous – than anything Hollywood can create.

Not long ago, I received in the mail an advance copy of a book that is going to be published this spring. It’s called “In Due Season,” and the author is a noted spiritual writer and journalist, Paul Wilkes. This is his autobiography. And it’s an astonishing story.

Paul Wilkes grew up a devout Catholic in working class Cleveland. He went to Marquette, studied journalism, served in the military, and eventually married. After several years, his marriage fell apart, and he found himself adrift. He became involved in social service work, co-founding in Brooklyn the organization CHIPS – Christian Help in Park Slope. For a time, he lived among the poorest people in New York, caring for them in their rundown tenements. But he continued writing, and won acclaim for some of his books. He worked for a time in television, and rubbed elbows with the rich and famous in the Hamptons. His life became consumed by sex and drugs, at a time when the mantra was, “If it feels good, do it.”

Needless to say, by the late 1970s, the devout Catholic boy from Cleveland wasn’t much of anything.

But it all came crashing down on him. He suffered a breakdown, and then began a long, slow climb back. Something in his heart and soul told him there had to be another way. He traveled the world. He spent some time with Trappist monks in Massachusetts before finally arriving at a place of peace, and joy, and fulfillment—becoming what God always intended him to be. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that happened. He’s now happily married, a devoted and committed Catholic who has written several popular books about religion and spirituality.

I’ve exchanged a couple e-mails with him, and we’re planning to do a profile of him this spring on my TV show. When I told him how much I liked the book, he wrote back, “Greg, it’s one man’s effort to show that even a ragged Catholic life can still have its moments of grace.”

That says it perfectly. I don’t think Paul would disagree if I described his book as a story of death and resurrection.

But I think it is also about possession — and exorcism.

More realistically than “The Exorcist,” Paul Wilkes’ story shows a familiar, attractive kind of evil. It comes dressed in Ralph Lauren, and lives in an apartment in Greenwich Village, and wins attention and awards and adulation. It becomes a one-night stand with a name you can’t remember, and it offers you a drug whose name you can’t pronounce. It eats your money, and breaks your heart.

That was the world that Paul Wilkes knew. But in the midst of it all, amid all the noise and confusion of his life, he heard a strong and steady voice.

“Quiet,” it said. “Come out.”

This week’s gospel tells us about Christ’s power over unclean spirits. They come in many shapes and forms – including, I think, the kind that took hold of Paul Wilkes.

They can overwhelm any of us, if we aren’t careful. They can come as jealousy, or self-indulgence, or arrogance, or neediness. They can make us spiritually bankrupt.

They are part of our broken, imperfect, wounded humanity.

And, as he did in the temple, Christ calls out to them – firmly, persistently, patiently.

Quiet, he says.

Come out.

How can we not listen to that voice, that stirring in our hearts?

That voice that asks us to be the best we can be…not the worst.

That voice that calms our fears, silences our cries.

Quiet, it says.

Come out.

St. Augustine famously wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

I think the anonymous man in the gospel discovered that. And, his life became a living miracle

Paul Wilkes would probably say the same thing about himself.

It is so easy for us to be possessed by our fears and anxieties, our insecurities and our hungers. Especially now, when every day the headlines offer us new reasons to feel anxious, or insecure, angry or overwhelmed.

But in the middle of it all, Jesus calls out. He quiets our demons. He exorcises them. He calms the storms in our hearts, if only we listen for his voice.

It is a voice, the gospel tells us, that speaks with authority.

It speaks with power, yes, but it also speaks with great love. The love of a Father for His children, the love of a God who doesn’t want anyone to be lost.

It is a voice that the psalmist celebrated. “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

Let us pray that we keep our hearts, and our ears, open – to hear Him when He calls, and to follow where He wants us to go.

As Paul Wilkes found, it may take us where we never expected, but to where we were always meant to be: possessed not by something unclean, but by something that we might even call…grace.