First story

There is an incredible story in an incredible book that details the life and conversion of one Marino Restrepo — formerly of Colombia, now in California, whose life has a movie-like quality but emblazoned now with a touch that is ethereal — and heavenly.

It is an intense book not only because of the story but because it is full of deep and unique spiritual insights. Perhaps “powerful” is the word: Restrepo, who is now a Catholic missionary, with an apostolate in 21 countries, started out as did so many of his era in a world of sex, drugs, hippiedom, and slavish devotion to entertainment.

Born in the highlands of the Andes mountains, he moved to Germany in his late teens, where he married and studied music before relocating to Hollywood and entering the music and film industries — as well as debauchery.

It is not a pretty picture, although it is certainly a familiar one.

There were endless girlfriends, there was the pot, cocaine, hallucinogenic drugs, there was the alcohol and dabbling in the occult — every stylish Sixties thing from Eastern religions to yoga and tarot cards.

Playing a guitar for a living, Restrepo became what he himself describes as “astrological, superstitious, spiritualistic, and alchemistic.”

There was even voodoo.

It was the recipe that so many his age bought into; it was also a recipe for disaster.

When Marino’s marriage came to a predictable and early end, Marino moved to the U.S. and continued the waywardness. In his own words his life “became immersed in a world of bars, cocaine, and women who were as decadent as I.”

“The same spirit that had baptized me to the world of [a girlfriend who used drugs in Colombia], through the first marijuana cigarette in 1967, was still orienting my life in California,” he writes in the book, From Darkness into the Light, which we could not put down. “It was no coincidence that coming from the same dark force, it would beckon me, giving one last shake before leaving me in perpetual darkness.

As a musician and later in the film-merchandising business, the former Colombian was to encounter “many evil characters [who] had infiltrated Hollywood as famous writers working for the most prestigious film studios, or as producers of the greatest movies ranging from Disney’s productions for children to Warner Brothers’ horror movies. This spirit began to grow in the 1960s when the ‘love and peace’ generation was born, and has grown ever since.”

We get the picture: this young man was brushing up against dark spirits. And perhaps not coincidentally, his was a family of tragedy. By the early 1990s, Marino’s youngest brother had died in a sea accident, and six months later, his father passed away from a brain hemorrhage. A few years after that, another brother shot himself to death during an argument with his wife. And two months after the death of his second brother, Marino’s mother died. Intergenerational baggage?

It was here that the real drama began. Returning to Colombia to share the grief with his sisters — and at the same time to party in the loose atmosphere of his homeland — Restrepo left to spend the night — Christmas — at an uncle’s farm in Anserma.

For the next six months, he would find himself in a hell of former drug lords who now made their money kidnapping the wealthy and collecting ransoms.

“When I arrived, I was surprised to find the gate closed, for my uncle would always leave it open when he knew I was coming,” writes Marino. “One of my nephews was with me and I asked him to get out of the car and open the gate.

“The moment he opened it, a group of men holding guns, with their heads covered, jumped out of the darkness. A few seconds later, they put my nephew in the rear seat of my car. They opened all the doors, like hungry dogs, and looked for anything they could find. They forced me out of the car, tied my hands, covered my head, and took all my belongings.”

The abductors were to turn him over to other criminals who thought he was rich and demanded payment or they would kill his sisters. This was the mean territory of drug cartels. It was the beginning of a hell that would involve his detention — for endless weeks — in a cave filled with vermin.

“I was surrounded by thousands of bats,” Restrepo recounts. “The floor on which I had fallen was rotten and covered with bat excrement. At the same time, thousands of bugs came out of the excrement and crawled on my clothes, biting me from head to toe. Each bite produced a different itch. Some of them felt like electric shocks; others produced big skin inflammations.”

It was like the evil spirits had manifested. It is what his “glamorous” life had been reduced to — “a pile of ashes.” He was bound with rope. Much of the time, there was that hood over his head. This went on for days — then weeks. He was sure he was going to die — that he was to be executed. Every day were moments — listening to someone load a gun, hearing a knife being sharpened — that he thought would be his last.

“An immense loneliness enveloped my being and a great desperation covered the whole universe around and inside of me,” says the former musician. “I couldn’t even express the turmoil and pain I felt. Tied up with my head covered in a hood, I was incapable of walking or making any type of movement that would give me a little air or add hope to my indescribable pain. Nothing could change the reality of this moment no matter how transcendental the experience could have been. Even money could not have solved this problem because after paying the ransom they were going to execute me anyway.”

And that’s when it happened, what Restrepo calls an “encounter with God.”

The occultism had not helped. The magic failed. But then there was a crucial moment of clarity in which he suddenly began to see his entire life. It was like those who describe near-death experiences.

Images suddenly arrived with supernatural clarity. It was like Marino — so sure he was about to be killed, devoid of hope — was now “outside” of his body.

“I found myself lying face down on the grass immersed in the freshness of a very friendly field,” he writes of the visions. “All that was visible to me was my mind to which I could not close my inner eyes no matter how hard I tried. I lifted my head and looked to the right and saw a mountain. On top of the mountain was a small but very lit-up city, filled with apparent life. It was not lit up because it was night as there was no sense of day or night.

“In that instant I heard an incredible Voice that transformed my very existence the moment it began speaking to me — a Voice so majestic that not even a million words could describe it.

“If I took all the psalms that praise the Lord there wouldn’t be enough beauty to do justice to describe such a voice.”

Marino looked and saw his body as if through smoke. He was lying in that macabre room tied up with the hood on his head. “Yet, I didn’t feel dead,” says Restrepo. “On the contrary, I had never felt more alive than at that very moment. Gone were my aches and pains. No longer was I filled with fear or anguish. The Voice I heard was no human. It was the Voice of Our Lord. No one could speak that way. It seemed to come from everywhere and at the same time from within me. It filled everything around me.”

Instead of death, there was the Lord ready to show him the exact moment in which he strayed from Heaven — as well as how all of humanity had strayed.

This forms the crux of lessons in a book that is too deep to synopsize.

“The Lord conveyed to me that never in the history of humanity has the world been so far away from Him,” says Marino. “The state of idolatry has surpassed every single human cycle of the past that might be registered in the history of the sacred Scriptures. Our spiritual bankruptcy is of alarming dimension.”

Infused with knowledge from the Lord, Restrepo makes observations on everything from fallen humanity to why the devil and his evil minions attack us. There is power on every page. “The Lord showed me that our present times are worse than Babylon and Sodom and Gomorrah,” writes the former musician, now evangelist, who lived the life of Babylon before an experience that puts us in mind of Saul. “Everything has been justified so that we can live totally unattached to the Ten Commandments.”

As the world crumbles around us, there is however that Light, and the knowledge of God’s Voice — God’s Mercy.

It was that mercy that entered the darkest cave.

10/25/06

[next (on Tuesday): What he was told about demons]

[resources: Marino’s book, From Darkness To Light]

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