Preaching about Psychedelics

The Pulpit and the Mushroom

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.” 

- from Abba Joseph of Panephysis, Saying 7

With apologies to Rob Bell, Christians dipping their toes into the psychedelic renaissance are wrestling with the question, “What we talk about when we talk about entheogens.”

The orientalism and exoticism bound up in colonial culture’s appropriation of first-nation entheogenic medicines is often “gestured toward” but rarely named in existent literature on faith and psychedelics.  Christianity has long suffered from a bad habit of reducing non-Western faith systems to caricatures of themselves in service to exoticizing their practices for consumption by white Christian audiences.

I believe that a remedy for all of this nonsense can be found in simply telling the truth about the bizarre things that many Christians proclaim to be either true or factual on any given Sunday.  As an example, we accept our eucharistic traditions as so completely normal and boring that we hyper-fixate on whether or not “our church” believes in transubstantiation, the “real presence” of Christ, or some mish-mash of the two.  Rarely do we spend any measure of time unpacking the mind-bending strangeness that comes with the statement, “on Sunday morning we gather together and try to eat God.”

Were I completely unfamiliar Christian traditions and I wandered into a regular, protestant church in any mid-size American town (with my children in tow) and a priest clad in black robes announced that, “in our congregation we actually welcome and encourage children to help us eat God!” I might have second thoughts.
Likewise we do a poor job of connecting our rituals around the font to the obviously yonic, natal characteristics of baptism by water.  Rather, we off-handedly discuss the propriety of “sprinkling” vs. “dunking.”
The reality is that Christianity is a phenomenally weird collection of traditions and rituals that has only been normalized the same way an old sheet of sandpaper is rendered smooth by years of frequent use.

We don’t need to steal from non-Christian traditions in order to embrace the radically transcendent capacities of entheogenic experiences.

Furthermore, I remain unconvinced that psychedelics must be relegated to the theological side-show of mysticism.  I say this in love - as I consider myself to be a practicing mystic and an inheritor of those traditions.  We have enough tools in our standard, orthodox (small “o”), protestant toolkit to engage with and describe the entheogenic revelation without resorting to any pseudo-herecies, gnostic rabbit-trails, or mystical via negativas.  Our liturgies, be they low or high or somewhere in between, are already steeped in transcendental, psychedelic language.

So what are we to say from the pulpit?

Early work on my first tattoo - by Tempest Anderson

I have made a commitment to preach about the potentialities of entheogenics in western Christian practices this year.  I know that there is sufficient support in my own parish to have these conversations and I know that these matters are front-and-center for many of parishioners - especially those who are advocating for the passage of Michigan Senate Bill 499, and those who are ready to do anything to find relief from the pharmaceutical-resistant pathologies of depression and addiction that are drowning them and threatening to extinguish their spiritual life.

What do I say?  How do I say it?  What must be said?  What must not be said?  Why is this so damned hard?

I can address a few lingering elephants.

How do we preach about that which is illegal or otherwise prohibited by the state?

I am reflecting, now, on the countless sermons I preached from that old pulpit in Kalamazoo when our congregation was wrestling with what we were willing to put on the line as a sanctuary church.  How brave I felt, declaring that the law of love superseded the laws of Immigration and Customs Enforcement!  I regularly pointed out our congregation’s storied participation in the underground railroad - as our church wantonly violated the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and assisted freed men and women in finding food, shelter, and assistance en route to Canada and liberation.
And we did become a sanctuary church, and we did welcome in a member of our community under an imminent and deadly deportation order, and we did move a mountain to keep her safe, and we did break federal laws in order to do this.

What’s more, I did not dismiss the children and teenagers from the sanctuary when I preached these sermons.

What’s the difference?

If I believe (and I do) that entheogenic medicines can save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives and that their ongoing state prohibition flies in the face of God’s commandments, ought I not treat these matters with the same level of seriousness with which I treated federal immigration laws?  What of the children of God currently incarcerated for possessing and distributing entheogens?

If I encourage people to break the law to save the life of an immigrant, am I liable and convicted by faith for doing the same to save the life of someone trapped in addiction or depression?

Do I have any authority from scripture and tradition?

Research has demonstrated that cannabis was used in early Jewish temple worship.  And regardless of whether or not I can state plainly that “John the Revelator ate magic mushrooms,” I can say without doubt or hesitation that John certainly had a psychedelic experience.  As did Peter at the Transfiguration, as did Paul on the Damascus Road, as did Jesus Christ at the moment of his baptism by John in the Jordan.

The psychedelic experience is utterly central to many of the signs of the New Testament.  Am I to banish these realities out of some filial piety to… puritanism?  Under the threat that consuming entheogens might make Christians feel better about themselves?  That doesn’t wash - because what were the psychedelic insights of the biblical narrative if they weren’t holy and wholly liberative to those who received them?  In other words - if Paul felt liberated by his psychedelic experience with Ananius in Damascus, am I to declare that Paul was “wrong” or “bad” for having this experience because “it made him feel good?”
I think my hesitancy isn’t coming from my fidelity to the Bible but rather my very white, very American desire to categorize “feeling good” alongside “sinning.”

Am I bounden to the status quo?

I sacrificed a lot to tell the truth.  I used to shy away from saying this but the reality is that I would be in a much better position professionally, my family would have more resources, my children would have better healthcare, if I had simply avoided any and all controversy.  In ministry there is nobody standing by to slap your wrist for risking nothing.  To the contrary - to take risks out of one’s sense of deep faith and duty to God immediately costs us something.
I used to think that any small consequences I may have experienced owing to my willingness to say the right thing at the wrong time was small potatoes.
I no longer feel that way.  It is a source of deep pain, for me, and a discomfort that sits in my throat like a lump of hot iron, or a thorn in my side.  I awake in the middle of the night filled with anxiety and frustration that, “I ought to have kept my damned mouth shut, we’d be doing so much better…”
But then I go to God in the privacy of my closet, I take the sacrament, I drink the tea, I remember my calling and my vows, and I am at least satisfied to know that I did what I thought was best in the moment I felt the Spirit taking hold of me.
And anyway, I’ll be very dead very soon and I’ve never once received a deathbed confession that went something like, “I wish I hadn’t told the truth.”
To the contrary, my hospice work is often spent extinguishing the fires of regret ignited by the realization that we ought to have told the truth when we still had time.

What could a clergyperson say from the authority of the pulpit that might bring a little more light and life into the United Church of Christ?  I am convinced that my people, my church, my tradition needs the clarity that comes from entheogenic therapies - psychedelics - regardless of whether anyone actually consumes exogenous compounds or instead engages with any of the countless psychedelic practices that don’t require taking plant or fungus-based medicines.

I am committed to preaching about these matters but it feels very, very heavy and I am sorely burdened by my own cowardice.  Perhaps the truth is for such a time as this.  Perhaps I should smoke DMT about it.  Perhaps I should start with a small, private Bible study.
Or perhaps I should become all flame.