MAT MAITLANDMushroom imagery in The Healing of the Leper, from a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript.
And so I sit there, high on mushrooms, taking a shit in the bathroom of the pastor’s home. It’s been hours since I ate the chocolate, and I still feel no closer to God. Everything remains so far away: Jesus, Sonya and the kids, and (most of all) any sense of self-worth.
That’s why I came here, to Colorado, to meet two of the clergy who are part of the underground movement. Sonya didn’t want me to. I had to convince her that this trip might save my career, save me. But taking psilocybin like it’s some kind of sacrament seems to only hide now the deeper truth of my life: I’ve fucked up everywhere, starting with the fact that two thousand miles away my wife is distressed and can’t even drive the lone car we have, because it’s broken. I’m muttering, and realize I’m muttering, as I stare at the candle in the bathroom. I finish up, wash my hands, look in the mirror.
I take a deep breath and open the door.
The pastor is standing right there.
He looks at me, asks, “You okay?”
The depression came eleven years into the life that was supposed to make him happy.
Hunt Priest was the rector at an Episcopal church in Washington state. It wasn’t the griping of congregants that got to him, and it wasn’t his wife’s Lyme disease, either, though that didn’t help—she still dealt with joint pain, heart palpitations, and brain fog six years after she was bitten by that tick, with no treatment covered by insurance. Her illness strained the family financially, strained their marriage. But the root of Hunt’s pain, he told his clergy friends, was a feeling that he was “out of alignment.” He explained how he’d felt called by God to give up a career as an ad copywriter in Atlanta to go to seminary at age thirty-seven. After ordination and jokes about finally living up to his name, Priest left the South to serve a church three thousand miles away, on Mercer Island outside Seattle. Here he was, eleven-plus years into the calling that was supposed to give him purpose, and instead he felt—in every rote church meeting and in the anguished hours it took to write a sermon—that his work was somehow already done. God seemed at a remove. Worse, God seemed uninspired. Where was the awe Priest had experienced as a child in Kentucky? The boy who’d walked behind his family’s home to the fields that stretched to the Appalachian Mountains and felt awash in God’s presence was now a fifty-year-old man who no longer knew what he felt.
He tried a therapist. “He coded me with an anxiety disorder,” Priest says.
FERRER BASSAMushroom imagery in The Healing of the Leper, from a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript.
Someone suggested reading the progressive magazine The Christian Century, which publishes stories that deal with people of faith who questioned their paths. In one issue, Priest found something more intriguing than any story: an advertisement. Johns Hopkins University was looking for religious leaders to participate in a first-of-its-kind study. You had to be a leader in a church, synagogue, or mosque, and you had to be “psychedelically naive.”
The university would give you psilocybin—magic mushrooms—and study its relation to your faith.
Tripping clergy? Priest thought.
He had never done a drug. But he had seen intriguing findings about psychedelics in the news. People in clinical settings at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had taken psychedelics and been cured of depression, or alcoholism, or PTSD. Maybe Priest could be cured of his existential dread.
He almost couldn’t believe it as he typed, but he filled out the application.
With my parents and two younger sisters, I had attended our small-town United Church of Christ pretty much every week in the 1980s and ’90s. The UCC is a mainstream Protestant church, with an open door and coffee and doughnuts after liturgy. But my faith, and life, pivoted when I saw something at thirteen. It was on, of all things, an episode of Home Improvement, the Tim Allen sitcom on which two men were implied to be suddenly, even passionately, in love.
I felt . . . not a sexual stirring, exactly, but curiosity. What might it be like if two men were romantically involved? To even pose that question must mean I was gay, I thought. I had never been attracted to boys and only had crushes on girls. The gay question persisted, though, and it didn’t matter how many times I jerked off to Playboy centerfolds or the naked heroines on Red Shoe Diaries. What if I become gay tomorrow?
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My pubescent brain didn’t have an answer, and my life turned bleak. It shouldn’t have, and it wouldn’t today, but it was the mid-nineties and the gay lifestyle wasn’t accepted in the mass media or in my rural Iowa church. I wanted to live up to the classic ideals of masculinity. Be like my dad and all his friends. Men who tilled the soil and hunted game and fixed whatever broken piece of machinery you put before them. Questioning whether I was gay seemed to prove what I suspected about myself, a kid who never liked to farm and never learned where the carburetor was.
One day when I was fourteen, I took a butcher knife from the kitchen and placed the blade against my forearm. I looked at that juxtaposition, the sharp edge against soft skin. Maybe that was the way to end the question that would accept no answer.
Eventually I put the blade back.
Eventually I gave the problem to God.
If being attracted to girls and dating them won’t answer this What-if-I’m-gay question, can you?
God did. The more I prayed, the less I posed it. It felt like a miracle. For two years, I can fixate on this and then the question can just . . . stop? I was amazed by God’s power.
Then I went to college. My ideology evolved into a cultural progressivism, and I saw how small-minded my fear had been. By my early twenties, my teenage question shamed me. Who cares about anyone’s orientation? That shame twisted around, then attacked my faith: If love serves as the foundation of the UCC, why would God intervene in a question of sexual identity? Wouldn’t a truly loving Jesus actually have ignored my prayers?
MAT MAITLAND
In January 2016, Hunt Priest flew to Baltimore, where he met Bill Richards, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins with a small frame, a white beard, and a warm smile. As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1963, Richards had taken psilocybin as part of a research project. It altered his life. The “unspeakable beauty” he saw on that trip, he later wrote, was psilocybin’s “potential importance for all of us.” Richards would spend the whole of his career studying the effects of psychedelics.
Only it didn’t work out that way. President Nixon and Congress saw too many news reports of blissed-out teens or American soldiers in Vietnam snorting coke and in 1970 enacted the Controlled Substances Act, which among other things banned all psychedelics, labeling them Schedule 1 drugs, as bad for you as heroin. The thousands of academic studies that since the 1950s had tested the benefits of psychedelics in treating alcoholism and mental disorders ceased overnight. In their place, the War on Drugs dawned. For three decades, Richards could not pursue his life’s calling until, in 2000, he and his Hopkins colleague Roland Griffiths helped persuade the FDA to allow research on psychedelics to resume. As Priest positioned himself on a sofa, Richards asked, “How do you feel?”
“I’m a little nervous,” Priest told Richards, who held a degree in theology and was an ordained minister.
Richards said with a smile, “You’re about to meet God.”
He offered Priest a tablet of psilocybin in a chalice, as if it were a sacrament.
Priest took the pill and drank from a glass of water.
He lay back on the sofa.
Time fell away.
At one point, he saw the latch of a screen door open and a vista before him like the one outside his childhood back door. Priest felt an electric current run up his spine, then from his spine to his throat, where something blocked it. Something strong. The pressure built. Priest’s Adam’s apple was about to explode.
Someone laid their hands lightly on Priest’s head, and the electric current increased its voltage tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold, and that current shot right out the top of Priest’s head and he began speaking in tongues.
He’d never done that. He was a sensible mainline Protestant, not some Spirit-catching Pentecostal. But for what seemed like hours, Hunt Priest spoke in tongues, not understanding a word, not wanting to understand, just accepting what he felt as God’s love. It was great, amazing, ultimately unitive to feel all this, to abandon the need to live in his head.
After he returned to himself, Priest knew he must return to Georgia and do something more daring than just lead a church. He had to change the whole of Protestantism.
Which is what he’s carrying out now.
You would never know it, of course, because it’s a completely underground movement, but the good word has spread, and today there are tripping clergy everywhere.
Years after my evolution from confused teen to confident nonchurchgoer, my wife, Sonya, and I took our kids one Easter to a local Congregational church, more in search of community than anything else. We lacked the fervency of the faithful, but we liked that the church had been part of the abolition movement and remained committed to change in the twenty-first century, and we became regulars.
I didn’t know what I believed. My secularism now seemed as naive as my childlike trust in Jesus. I felt something when I went to church, a warmth that spread from my heart and buoyed me. It also felt silly to pray aloud, and as I sat in the pews, I chose not to dwell on whether I believed the biblical stories any more than I had in college. I read deeper and found the Gospel of Thomas, who wrote that the way to honor God is to listen to and take seriously your life’s calling. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you,” Jesus says in Thomas’s gospel. “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” When the pastor asked last year if I would become a deacon—a lay leader at the church— I almost couldn’t believe it as I said it, but I accepted.
Hunt Priest can talk about his psilocybin experience because he was part of that government- sanctioned Johns Hopkins study, which then gave him the cover to form an educational Christian psychedelic society in 2021 called Ligare, from the Latin for “to bind or unite.” Ligare, as a nonprofit, has quickly emerged as the preeminent source of Christianity and psychedelics. It has reached hundreds of pastors and priests through its newsletter and online forums with plans to offer retreats where clergy can experience the same deepening of faith Priest felt once the legal landscape becomes clearer.
The problem arises when the pastors return to their flock. They can’t share what they’ve learned. To evangelize about what they’ve experienced could cause the closure of their churches. Nothing in any church charter approves the use of psychedelics, still classified as Schedule 1 drugs regardless of what some Johns Hopkins team might say about their benefits. In Oakland in 2020, police raided and closed a church that promoted psychedelics. In Denver last year, a rabbi was arrested for his role in leading a synagogue that also grew magic mushrooms. The stigma places these pastors in a purgatory. By the hundreds—and more likely the thousands, Priest estimates—they talk with one another in this decentralized movement of secured chat rooms and Zoom calls about what they’ve seen or hope to experience or, mostly, what they wish to share with their congregations. But by the millions, other clergy and lay Christians want nothing to do with that message.
I did.
It didn’t help and actively hurt that I was a journalist, “out to understand them and their choices,” as I told the clergy with whom Priest put me in touch. Only when I spoke the other truth of my life—that I was just like them, a church leader—did a few pastors, warily and off the record, step forward.
FERRER BASSAGod Creates Plants, from the same manuscript, would seem to suggest that God was cool with psychedelics.
Even when they spoke, they shrouded deeper truths. For instance, one woman explained through tears how her years of experiences with psychedelics had helped her “decolonize” her Evangelical upbringing and root her in the ancient customs of her Salvadoran heritage, where she has guided even her own mother, a seventy-six-year-old conservative Evangelical who prays three hours a day, to the truth of “the medicine.” Her mother was at first suspicious of her daughter’s path but now says her own time with “the plants . . . has deepened me and opened up even more of a longing for God.”
Psilocybin-taking clergy would love to shout from the pulpits how for one United Church of Christ pastor, psychedelics have “deepened” his faith, allowed him not only to see and experience the stigmata—the wounds of Jesus on the cross—but also to stand near “the throne of the divine. . . . And it was a place of tremendous silence and tremendous awe.”
When I say that I get it, that as a lay leader I often want to skip out on church for all of Sunday’s routinized dryness, and how my wife and kids already have, and how America has—just 30 percent of us attend service regularly now—the pastor goes silent.
He is not upset so much as weighing something, he says. Something that’s even more of a secret than his psychedelic use.
He breathes out.
He says he has begun to organize psychedelic church services for Christian leaders, with psilocybin. Their next service is a few weeks away.
“Do you want to join us?”
New archaeological evidence strongly suggests that the earliest Christians—the ones persecuted by the Romans—used a form of barley with a fungal parasite on it called ergot, which when mixed with wine became psychoactive. That ergot-infused wine was believed to be offered as the Sacrament in church services. “The mind-altering Eucharist would be an excellent recruitment tool for the pagan converts,” Brian Muraresku, a lawyer and classicist, writes in The Immortality Key, his 2020 history of early Christianity and psychedelics. Through the Communion, early Christians directly experienced Christ. These experiences, some scholars argue, helped spread the faith, despite the persecutions.
This article appeared in the 90th Anniversary issue of Esquire
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As these persecutions subsided and the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 a.d., something strange happened. Christian artwork began to feature fungi. I see them in books of some of the earliest works. In Italy, in the Basilica of Aquileia, a church that dates to around 330 a.d., you see on the floor of a hall where congregants were believed to celebrate the Eucharist colorful mosaics, lined with the sort of mushrooms that are known by mycologists, the experts who study fungi, to be psychoactive. In some mosaics, the mushrooms fall into a communal cup or basket. These psychedelic-steeped works are a feature in a surprising number of early and medieval churches throughout Europe, where, say, God’s signature creations are the psilocybin-laced mushrooms that rise from the bottom half of a stained-glass window, or where Jesus heals a leper while both men cast their eyes to the psychoactive mushrooms that sprout from the bottom fourth of a painting.
It shouldn’t surprise us that Christianity turned to these so-called entheogens. People have always done them. The Spanish archaeologist Elise Guerra- Doce found that 90 percent of the 488 prehistoric societies she studied took them, primarily in their religious ceremonies. The earliest cave art depicts entheogens in use in religious traditions. As the recorded era continues, you see evidence of psychoactive- infused religious ceremonies in Central and South America and in the pantheistic traditions in India. In fact, the psychoactive ergot the earliest Christians seemed to take as the Sacrament? It was also consumed by elite Romans—and Greeks before them—in their religious ceremonies, Muraresku claims in The Immortality Key. Early Christianity, then, was likely just keeping up with the Joneses.
Why do I not know any of this? I think. Why am I only hearing about the link between ancient Christianity and psychedelics now?
Well, the history of Christianity is the history of all the faith suppressed. After a thirteen- hundred-year battle within the Christian faith, all forms of mysticism and psychedelia were banished, as was all mushroom-themed art in church mosaics and stained-glass windows, the book The Psychedelic Gospels points out.
That shit just stopped appearing.
I fly to Colorado in February of this year. I’m not going to name the city. Colorado passed a proposition in November 2022 decriminalizing a person’s possession of psilocybin-laced mushrooms, but the plants’ use in religious ceremonies of mainline churches remains taboo. The UCC pastor doesn’t want heat. I’ll call him Thomas, in honor of the disciple who wrote his own perhaps-hallucinogen-inspired gospel. In late middle age, he still has the broad shoulders and tapered waist and full stride of the college athlete he once was.
His wife, whom I’ll call Sarah, was his girlfriend back when he first tried psilocybin, around 2013. She’d had her own psychedelic experiences, and ultimately tutelage from shamans led her to try facilitation herself. About a year after Thomas’s first experience, he took psilocybin again, this time with Sarah as his guide. He saw the Inquisition—women in medieval Europe around the time of the bubonic plague burned at the stake for their mystical beliefs. “It hits right there,” Thomas says now, pointing to his heart, tears in his eyes. His trip was experiential Christianity, well beyond what he could read in any book. That was its power. “This is more like, ‘No, I’m gonna put you there and you watch this. You’re fifteen feet away, and you watch this.’ ” It took the pandemic—and a connection with Hunt Priest just before he formed Ligare in 2021—for Thomas and Sarah to attempt what no one else in the States had dared: officiate a psychedelic church service. He had the pastoral know-how. She had the facilitative shamanism. Convert enough pastors, they figured, and in time you change the faith. Six of us gather at their home, where for the next four days we will eat, sleep, pray, and, when the time comes, ingest the plants. A retired theologian sits next to me at our group dinner on the first night. He’s written songs that appear in Protestant hymnals and has taken psilocybin once, last year, after hearing from other friends in the pastoral underworld. The experience was “positive,” he tells me—the theologian had sung along to Brahms’s requiem as he saw “the mass of redeemed humanity,” including his own deceased parents, rejoicing—but not “intense.” He wants “a deeper exploration of my faith,” he says.
FERRER BASSAEarly Christian iconography, shown here, suggested practitioners embraced the power of the mushroom, one way or another.
Two chairs down, Wesley, a seminary student who allows me to use his first name, wants the same. He’s done psilocybin twice, with friends. Thomas says we aren’t all that different from ancient mystical Christians, gathering in shadowed homes, our questions and beliefs outside the norm of the law and acceptable Christianity. Do you have the courage to follow that belief? Thomas asks. Because, as with his trip into the Inquisition, the plants will take you where you need to go, he says. Not where you want to.
That night, in the basement repurposed for my stay, with a pullout couch for a bed and a nightstand nearby, Thomas’s question haunts me. For maybe the hundredth time in the past six months I can’t fall asleep. It’s not what might happen tomorrow when we take the psilocybin but really what’s happened in the past year, and what happened earlier today, representative of all that’s gone wrong: I got a call from Sonya minutes before my flight.
“I have bad news,” she said.
Our seventeen-year-old Honda Accord had broken down again, and the estimated $3,000 in repairs was more than the car’s value. Its latest breakdown felt like it highlighted—yet again—how, despite my faith, nothing was working. In November 2020, I got laid off from a job I’d had for nine years. I decided after that to go out on my own, provide for my family as a writer and entrepreneur. The past two years have been at times satisfying but mostly harrowing. Projects fell through. I panicked. Sitting in Thomas and Sarah’s basement, I think about how I could hear a similar sense of panic in Sonya’s voice earlier today. That was new.
I think of my father, an entrepreneur—a farmer, in Iowa. Enduring childhood memories: My dad’s expression when he returned from another unsettling trip to the bank. The summer of ’93, when he looked out on another rainy day, in that season when the deluge of water flooded our crops, and projected the damage to their yields, which was total. When as a teenager I said I didn’t want to succeed him as a farmer, he’d said, “Good. This life is too hard.”
In that basement in Colorado, I think about the past six months and the late-night calls with my father, when he told me how his faith in God saw him through when he lacked faith in himself.
Over and over I told him, That’s great.
What I could never tell him, though, was that these days God and I weren’t speaking to each other. My trust in myself and my new career path was held aloft through a trust in God, but God no longer answered my prayers.
I should leave. I should leave Colorado right now and fly back to Connecticut and help Sonya look for some cheap-ass car and on Monday morning send my résumé to every multinational insurance company in Hartford and find some job as, I don’t know, associate director of internal communications or something (anything!) and provide for my family and shut up about my dreams because if my dreams are so right, if they feel so goddamn good in the moment, how come I question them the moment after? If I truly believe the kingdom of God lives within me, if I truly believe that following my purpose is a way to honor not just myself but the divine, then where is the divine now?
I look around this refurbished basement. The nightstand, the curtains that don’t block out the moonlight: alone.
I don’t leave. I don’t sleep, either, and in the morning, after cups of coffee, when the six of us gather cross-legged in the living room to talk about how we feel in the final hours before our trips, I explain everything that’s happened and then something beneath that, something endless and eternal. I tell them what I feel: “Shame.”
In indigenous cultures and, some believe, the early mystical Christian church, women were the high priestesses. They delivered the plants in religious ceremonies. Sarah leads our service now. With the sun setting and the room darkening into long shadows, Sarah has each of us scoot before her. When it’s my turn, she says the Spirit has told her to offer me two things: sassafras and then the psilocybin-laced mushroom. Sassafras is a hallucinogen, in my case derived from tree bark. “This is your first time with the plants,” Sarah whispers, “and sassafras is a bit milder. It’s a good on-ramp to the mushrooms.”
I nod my head and return to my spot on the living- room floor and sit cross-legged again. A moment later, Thomas and Sarah say we can ingest the holy plants. I bite into the sassafras. It’s hard but gives way, like a piece of candy, and I taste its chalky residue and swallow.
Up to an hour can pass before psychedelics take effect. Thomas and Sarah lead us to the dining- room table, where a loaf of bread and a chalice of wine sit. Maybe it’s the flickering candles and spreading darkness, maybe even the sassafras’s early influence, but the Colorado living room feels ancient. Sarah leads the Communion. The reading comes from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” Sarah reads. “Beware that no one leads you astray saying lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you.” Thomas breaks the bread and distributes it, and then we each sip from the cup. I feel a warm and almost tactile bonhomie at the communal table, spreading in the spaces between the seats.
When we return to the living room/sanctified temple, the big thing I feel is a female presence taking over.
I lie on my back and a divinity, what seems to be Mary Magdalene even, enters my consciousness. I feel her presence. I marvel that I’m thinking this, because I’m not drunk or even high. It’s more like I’m in a waking dream of my surroundings, but those surroundings acquire animate dimensions. I sit up and the walls vibrate. Wesley lies on a sleeping bag ten feet from me. The face of another member of the group, Cynthia, is puffy from tears—how much time has passed, anyway?—but smiling now. Where is the retired theologian?
I feel a tug. It’s the female presence, and she shoves me back to my prone position on the floor. Let go of this, she says, your need to assess and analyze and question. Let the plants take you where they need to.
I live in my head, I say.
Let go, she says.
I exhale. I relent.
Warmth. A warmth that starts at my core and spreads outward. My hips shake from it. It feels so good to let them shake, and they move wildly now, quivering, dancing, their own being. When they at last slow, the warmth spreads to my extremities and I want to feel this good forever. At some point I scoot over to Sarah, who smiles at me.
“I think I’m ready for the mushrooms now,” I whisper. The others had bitten into chocolate-covered cookies laced with psilocybin. That’s what Sarah produces: a cookie lying on a napkin beside her.
She hands it over and I look at it. A moment later and I’ve eaten the whole thing. A moment more and I feel an overwhelming urge to lie down again.
A liminal space beyond words, images more felt than seen and certainly more felt than understood: me outside my body staring down at myself and laughing, me inhabiting the body of a lawyer in the 1970s, me seeing Sonya’s lineage across generations, until eternities pass and I come back to Thomas and Sarah’s living room understanding a single truth. Accept it all. Accept your imperfections, and ambitions, and you will accept God’s love, too. I open my arms wide and accept it all and stay in that position for hours.
With time, I sit up, and Thomas notices. He squats down next to me. “Have you gone to the bathroom?” I shake my head no and look around. I am the only congregant still in the room. The moon is high above the mountains now. What time is it?
“You should try to go to the bathroom,” Thomas says.
I sit up. I’m physically exhausted, sore all over, and groggy. I don’t feel impaired, but I rise with a heavy head. Thomas tells me to gather myself with each movement: stand, then walk, then take the rail that leads to the basement, then take the steps themselves.
When I close the bathroom door behind me, I have to shit. I stare at the candle flickering in this otherwise darkened bathroom.
I’m returning to myself, the psilocybin fading, and the theme even now is acceptance. With fuller faculty, I study my acceptance more closely. It doesn’t impress me. I can get the message of acceptance in some worn-down psychology textbook. I can get it from TikTok. Is this really what I flew here for? More to the point: If the female presence’s goal was to lead me to acceptance, what happens after I accept? What is the acceptance of acceptance? Is it serenity? Or a mental hall of mirrors, just as hard to find your way out of on the path to a better life?
Worse, is it mediocrity? To accept my life after this—that life sucks. No car. Dwindling funds. I didn’t get where I am across forty-two years by accepting my situation. I accepted nothing. And by refusing acceptance, I improved.
I got here, to this moment right now, a place in life this farm boy never thought he’d be. I can’t accept acceptance, because it leaves no room for the very growth I’m seeking.
Is this it? As deep as this trip goes?
I finish up and open the door. Thomas is waiting for me.
“You okay?” he asks.
Did he hear me muttering?
“Yeah.”
He nods and looks at me but says nothing else. He leads me back upstairs, where Sarah is waiting for me, too. They ask me to lie back on my cushions and pillows. “You’ve got about an hour left,” Thomas says. “Sometimes the biggest revelations happen in the last hour.”
There are two moons. One shines brightly, and the second trails behind it, its own orb, shadowed and brown. I move my head from side to side, up and down, and always: two moons.
I laugh. “There are two moons,” I half shout to Thomas and Sarah. The moons don’t alarm me. They don’t feel like the fumes of some trippy hallucination. They just represent the reality of this night.
I ask if Thomas and Sarah can see them.
They can’t.
I study the moons more closely, transfixed, and now the brighter moon shapes itself, transforms itself, into a cross.
FERRER BASSAThe excavations in the crypt of the Basilica of Aquileia, Italy
C’mon now, I think. That’s a little cliché.
I turn away, as if the fading effects of the psilocybin will turn the moon-cross into something else. When I look back, though, the cross is even more incandescent and the second moon still trails it, shadowed and brown. Now a pinpoint of light emanates from the brighter moon and the cross’s center. The pinpoint of light reaches down, down through the sky, through the window. It is inches from my face, this pinpoint, and the long stream of light behind it extends all the way back to the moon.
The divine female presence is gone, but the moon, or some other entity, wants me to know something. That much is clear from the light stream as it glistens.
I stare at it. I decide to listen with my heart and not my head.
I wait a long time.
It’s okay to be proud of yourself.
It’s my voice, in my register, but also not. I wouldn’t word it that way.
And I think, Okay, moon: I get it. Take pride in what you do. Will do, moon.
But the light inches from my face shines brighter. The moon and its cross grow more incandescent. I stare at them again.
Paul, it’s okay to be proud of who you are.
This time it hits hard—hits my heart. I suddenly see it all before me. The striving, the analyzing, the comparing, all that’s come my way by refusing to accede to my station in life, all that self- improvement—it has also been a self-negation. For forty-two years. The reason I would not word the line that way is that I would never say the line and have never said it: It’s okay to be proud of yourself.
I have never been proud of myself. I realize it now. And that judging and comparing and cynical posturing has masked something else, a deeper truth: a self-hatred. Does everyone feel this, in some way?
The light before me, stretching down from the cross of the moon, tells me now is the time to accept, to take pride in who you are.
Because, Paul, I am proud of you.
I gasp.
Tears well in my eyes.
I have never before realized that, either.
Late in the morning, Thomas asks that we gather again in the living room to talk about last night’s service. We sit cross-legged, six of us in a circle. The retired theologian says his hope for a more intense experience and to understand how faith endures through the final phase of one’s life—well, be careful what you wish for, he says. He says he saw Jesus’ death. Felt it, really. Not just the wounds and pain but the indignity, the befoulment. The theologian was sick from diarrhea, from the purging brought on by the plants. That’s why he wasn’t in the sacred space for most of the evening, he says. That and a sense that he might die. He had to go to bed.
Cynthia says her wish to feel deserving of love after a long relationship placed her, repeatedly, in communion with her mother. She and her mother didn’t have a great relationship after her parents’ divorce, but last night she saw through her mother’s eyes how much she loved Cynthia. She then saw beyond that, to a future in which she was by her mother’s side as she died and the two women held hands on her mother’s deathbed. She tells us she called her mother already this morning, crying, to say how much she loves her—and how grateful she is to be loved. Wesley, the seminary student who spent almost all of last night cocooned in a sleeping bag, says he positioned himself there for a reason. He felt God’s presence and felt safe. He blasted through the walls he’d erected across his peripatetic youth and invited his friends to see him as he is. A unifying night, he says.
I leave Colorado and months pass. I remain hopeful and confident. Sonya and I use our savings to buy a car, new projects land, and I am in a better spot than I’ve ever been. Best of all, I don’t revert. What-if questions don’t trail my days. I still don’t know what biblical stories I believe or how, even, to classify my faith. But a peace within spreads outward, and I know it is God’s love. That truth gives me more than peace. It gives me courage.
So much, in fact, that when I Zoom with Thomas and Sarah in May, part of our pastoral check-ins, I say the me I’m writing about for this story feels like someone ancient.
“No longer you, huh?” Thomas says.
“Yeah.”
He says this is why he does this work. If he can take certain Christian leaders to “the mountaintop,” he says, perhaps they can convince others of the views and truths they’ll find there. Perhaps they can convince others to change as they have and “help us all regain the experiential aliveness that the faith has so often lost.”
I tell Thomas I’ve been talking with Hunt Priest about my trip and Priest’s hope that mainline Protestantism will adopt psychedelics. I ask Thomas how he thinks the movement might spread. His answer mirrors Hunt’s: through firsthand accounts of what the faithful saw and experienced on psychedelics. As with the earliest of Christians, Thomas says, faith spreads individual to individual. But it does so faster than you think.
And it may spread faster still in the months ahead. In June, the FDA said that it is nearing approval of psychedelics for therapeutic use. If that happens, Thomas says, it’ll allow more Americans to see psychedelics as beneficial tools and not terrifying poisons. It’ll allow Christians to be open to a faith that wants to evolve. “God is still speaking,” he says.
And people want to believe, he adds. Roughly 90 percent of Americans believe in a higher power—even though only 30 percent of them regularly attend church. The problem isn’t God, Thomas says. The problem is the world of the modern church. It’s old, and if you examine it from a remove, you see that this world is like the trailing moon I saw: parched and brown and tired. It has served its purpose. It is a dying orb. But a new world circles close to it, and it’s okay with whatever you believe. It offers light, incandescent light, a light that reaches you where you are.
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