On the evening we met Mike Owen, there were four of us men walking together in tunics. There was Chris, Jeff and myself, and we were joined for the first time by Shawn, the organizer of the Men's Group at St. Stephen's parish. We stopped by the now-closed Clackamas Social Services office (torched by arson), and distributed cold Gatorade to the various street people who were gathered outside. Then we walked the narrow stretch up SE 82nd past used car dealerships to a 7-11 and the surrounding seedy motels. There we found Mike Owen laying on the pavement next to a shirtless young man with red hair who repeatedly picked at his scabs. Both men were still high on meth, and each stayed glued to the pavement during our 45 minute conversation.
It seemed our exchange would be a brief one until I urged Mike to recite a chapter from the Gospel of John that he had memorized. Mike recited it flawlessly, and once the Word was released into the air he couldn't stop talking about his life and how he got to be homeless at the age of 40. Mike had plenty of advantages growing up: he was intelligent and good-looking, and his father was a master electrician who tried to bring him into the family business. Unfortunately Mike had his father's temper, and Mike enjoyed letting his passions control his life. Mike would work hard and then party harder, eventually quarreling his way out of the family business. The same thing happened in the military where he was dishonorably discharged. Mike then took up carpentry and married one of his sweethearts. Mike liked women too much to be married to any one woman, and his wife felt the same way about men. They each craved the intoxication that they could get from a new love interest: the romance and challenge of the chase, and then coveting and making another person's body their own. Eventually they added new intoxications, and so turned to meth and other drugs. Mike soon lost his job, and things went down and then down and then even further down. He and his wife were constantly fighting, and they came to despise each other. Then God intervened. One day while driving Mike looked at his wife with disgust, and then by a supernatural feat his wife's face morphed into his own! God was showing Mike that he was the same "lying, cheating, filthy, dishonest person" as his wife. He was exactly what he hated in his wife. Then his guardian angel clearly said to him, "Mike, if you continue on this way you will go to Hell." Mike stopped the car in a panic, threw open the door and started running. He never looked back.
Mike began to study the Bible and try to practice the faith, but his passions always got the better of him. He suffered a back injury, and used it as a ready excuse to self-medicate himself. Mike could never shake the reality of God and Hell, but he bowed to his weak and sinful ways and tried to strike a compromise. He would do drugs, but he wouldn't lie or steal. He would womanize, but only those women who were already "fallen" like him. He said he was resigned to what he called "the upper level of Hell" or what we Catholics understand as Purgatory. He believed that he would be in a state of punishment and purification in the next life, but that one day he would be released through God's mercy and his constant profession of Jesus as the Christ. Mike was presuming on God's mercy, and we should never aim for Purgatory, but Mike also gave us reasons for hope. While talking to Chris and Shawn, he relieved his conscience and admitted to beating his dog so that it eventually died of internal injuries. It was clear that Mike didn't want to face this guilt at first, but he finally came clean amidst sorrow since nothing is hidden from the living God.
Romanticism and the Enlightenment
I found it curious that we had met two different men in such a short space of time who each had supernatural warnings of Hell. After reflecting on this fact, I realized that these two men had each travelled a different road to Hell, and that the two roads corresponded to the two great errors of the previous three centuries. In the first part of this series I described how David was a progeny of the Enlightenment in his deification of technology and reason. By contrast, Mike was a progeny of the Romantic movement and so deified women and his sentiments. While the Enlightenment was a disorder of reason and the life of the mind, the Romantic movement was a disorder of the heart and the affections. These two corruptions have shaped culture and society in the West, and have led to the current apostasy and widespread alienation from one's self, the other and God. They are among the Devil's greatest triumphs, along with the Protestant revolt and the schism between East and West. The philosopher Peter Kreeft and I once had a brief conversation to that effect.
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| A painting of the Romantic period by Girondet. Notice the beauty and tragedy of the young lovers versus the grim visage of the monk. |
If you would like a primer on Romanticism, read this little article on "How Romanticism Ruins Marriages" by the America Needs Fatima folks.
Speaking of Fatima, today is the one-hundred year anniversary of the Great Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. May the Blessed Virgin Mary triumph though her Immaculate Heart. May she intercede for us to her Beloved Son, so that we might possess clean hearts. May she finally crush the head of Satan, that ancient serpent, as foretold in the Book of Revelation.
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