I remember when I finally admitted to myself that I was a drug addict.
It wasn’t one of the many times I’d downed a speed pill and spent hours drawing in a dopamine-saturated fugue. It wasn’t when, as newlyweds, my husband and I spent a thousand dollars on a sheet of LSD when we were barely surviving paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t even the time I pilfered a few opioid painkillers from my mother’s prescription when she’d fallen and broken her wrist and elbow walking my dog while I was in an inpatient psychiatric program after warping my mind for months on psychedelic drugs. (I didn’t even like opioid painkillers; it’s just that something was better than nothing.)
But no, even that shameful interlude didn’t jar me from my bottomless rationalizing and justifying of my drug use.
Instead, it was the night of my final psychedelic trip, when I finally realized I would never be able to chase God hard enough to catch him.
My Psychedelic Idolatry
Drugs had become my primary dependency by then, but the idolatry ran much deeper. I was a psychonaut, I told myself, a spiritual vagrant, an explorer of worlds uncharted. I was going where workaday squares feared to tread, a bold new frontier where ego and dualism went to die and where peace and love would surely prevail.
Never mind that I was content to leave “peace” and “love” as nebulous, ill-defined terms floating in the stratosphere with little connection to how I treated people. Never mind that this “frontier” had been stormed by so many before me and found wanting.
I was different, I was golden, I was invincible, a being of pure light behind the layers of putrefaction the world had placed on me and which LSD would surely, with enough time and devotion, lay bare. Heaven was ripe for the storming.
Yes, I threw around words like “heaven” and “God” back then — but it was nothing more than lip service, a peremptory nod to some kind of higher being or supraintelligence I believed I’d encountered while high. It was the high, and the high became my object of devotion.
The Irony of Spiritual Openness
“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18 (NIV). And it was indeed foolishness to me for many years — an impenetrable mystery of blood and sacrifice and atonement, of sin and salvation — whatever that meant, if it could even be found.
It was the great irony of “spiritual openness”: I was willing to listen to nearly anything except the gospel and the word of God. Over the years I’d explored astrology, chakra cleansing, kundalini yoga, energy healing and sound baths. I’d “om”-ed until I was hoarse at yogic kirtans (lengthy Sanskrit chanting sessions) and paid for a velvet-voiced hack in a dim, incense-choked room hung with mandala tapestries to tell me what my moon in Aquarius meant.
As time went on, my inflated pride and DIY spirituality were increasingly mingled with a profound spiritual confusion. My years of psychedelic use and embrace of motley new age spiritualities — which, despite their wild variance, shared the common theme of a kind of salvation-by-works cloaked in different flavors of Western hippie-fied Eastern mysticism and esotericism — no longer seemed to be progressing me toward some grand vista of enlightenment.
“God” receded to the vanishing point of the dimming horizon as the bad trips multiplied. I couldn’t get high anymore, and therefore, I concluded, I couldn’t “get” to God, because God was the high and the high was God. If my god existed only in the schizoid, lightning-dashed mountaintop of an acid high, the failure of the drugs called into question God’s very existence.
One Final Chase
I remember my final psychedelic trip more vividly than I wish I did, but the memory is also a grace and mercy of God — the true God.
I’d grown my own mushrooms worshipfully, with religious reverence, spreading my hands over them and offering “blessings,” desperately straining to retain my dimming credulity in the new age belief that the vibrations and energy I transmitted into them would, by some spooky process of hippie osmosis, yield a kaleidoscopic harvest.
I had such high hopes, and was crushed even more than usual when the tenor of the trip plummeted almost immediately after the walls started respirating and the colors of the room took on a day-glo saturation and faces and tessellating geometries flew out of the whorls in the hardwood floor.
It was a bad trip already, within minutes of its reception, and I was so tired, so weary. I lay down on the rug, so gutted by the utter meaninglessness and vacuity of the universe that I found it impossible to even cry, to even mourn.
Later, when I was, by some miracle, finally able to pick myself up, I imagined I was chasing God around our little rental house — yet I kept missing him as he robes whisked around the corner just as I entered a room. I oscillated between hope and despair, finally ending the night on a note of the latter.
The Power of the Cross
“But to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” Paul concludes the verse above. And it is indeed — were it not for the ferocity of grace and mercy, and the love that compelled Christ’s sacrifice, the shocking revelation that I was a drug addict, no better than the alcoholic who tips a nip of liquor into his coffee every morning, nor the junkie who sells all she has for one more hit, would have crushed me.
But the wretchedness of my sin — as soon as I faced it fully — was overwhelmed by the power of the cross.
Paul goes on to quote the prophet Isaiah: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
The power of the cross is subversive in the sense that it upends human wisdom; the cross compelled me at last precisely because I knew it was nothing a human system of wisdom would ever produce. It was counterintuitive, countercultural, counter to all the ways I’d been trained and trained myself to think of God and righteousness over the years, yet it made perfect sense in articulating the central dilemma of human existence — and of my existence — and its only possible cure. No other story was adequate. No other story was big enough. No other solution comforted, no other solution satisfied.
It was immensely and beautifully humbling to realize that the years I’d spent — so I’d believed — exploring the farthest reaches of consciousness amounted to nothing.
I’d spent years straining after God, or what I thought God was, culminating in that futile and pathetic chase on mushrooms.
Yet here, in Jesus Christ, was God come to me. No amount of chanting, contorting myself in yoga postures, or hijacking my serotonergic system with drugs could’ve breached the chasm. But here, in the impenetrable mystery of sacrifice and atonement, in the very flesh of God himself — Jesus Christ — it had been done for me.
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever tells my story of psychedelic devastation and spiritual rescue. It chronicles my trajectory from acid enthusiast to soul-weary druggie to psychedelic refugee. I finally found The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever — in the last place I thought to look.
Ashley Lande is a writer and artist based in rural Kansas, where she lives with her husband, Steven, and three (almost four!) children.She is the author of The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. Her work has appeared in Ekstasis, Fathom, and elsewhere.
