That was the proposed title for my newest article, but I can understand why the editor opted to go with something a little more accessible: The Coming Psychedelic Moment. You can find it over at Mere Orthodoxy, an online and print publication that regularly features very thoughtful engagement with the culture from a broadly Protestant perspective. It’s my first piece there, and I’m thankful for the editor, Jake Meador, showing interest in my work and giving me an opportunity to contribute to the intelligent conversation which takes place in their pages.
The idea for this piece came to me one random morning while driving to work. I remember dictating some scattered thoughts and big ideas to my phone and texting it to myself. I saw in a moment of clarity that there was a collision coming our way as two speeding trains were heading for one another.
The first was the downward spiral of worsening mental health among young people. Too complex in its variegated causes to be parsed by me, it could still be presented as a fact. And a fact that meant a growing market demand for answers and solutions.
The second speeding train was the fast-growing level of interest in psychedelics for its medical, therapeutic, and spiritual benefits. With unprecedented institutional support, medical research, and breathless endorsements from celebrities, this train has been gaining steam for quite some time now.
Without some unforeseen intervention, I cannot see what would prevent the popularity of psychedelics from continuing to rise as a primary vehicle for meeting the demands of the mental sufferers that our nihilistic and digitally-addicted age produces. But what will be the result of this collision?
The article is my attempt to answer that question, and to frame all this as part of the broader re-enchantment overtaking the West in our time. The tide of atheism is receding, and the fringes are washing in towards the center again. The world will get weirder and weirder as our overdue payments to reality, which is endlessly weird, come due after deferring them under the pleasant illusions of materialistic naturalism.
This was one of those articles that took a few months to write, bit by bit. I find these the most demanding and most rewarding. I hope you’ll click over and give it a read and share it with someone who might be helped by it. You know, “like and subscribe” and all that self-serving nonsense that is part and parcel of the digital content-creation game.
One of the joys of writing and reading online is stumbling upon hidden gems, and that happened to me shortly after the article above went live. It was linked and suggested to a certain Ashley Lande, who it turns out is one of these New-Age-to-Jesus converts and the author of a fantastic essay, The Self Destroyed, about that journey. It was published at Ekstasis Magazine, an artistic offshoot of Christianity Today. It is a beautifully-written account of her journey through psychedelics and New Age practices (read: endless wheel of religious works) to Christ. You can find it here: Link.
One of the aspects of her story which struck me was how the experience of having a baby helped to deconstruct her false belief system. This was uncannily similar to the testimony of the brilliant and contrarian writer Mary Harrington, whose book I reviewed here a while ago. It has often been remarked that the idealism and ideologies of youth do not always survive the transition to family life, and perhaps these are two more examples of that. But for women there seems to be something particularly powerful about the process of growing a life, a soul, inside one’s body, and then getting to hold and behold that little person in one’s arms.
Is there anything more undeniably real and powerful than this miraculous experience? How can it not slip a few shafts of light through whatever umbrella of protective beliefs we have collected around ourselves? And I think there is another level of meaning here, for in the Christian story the salvation of the world is wrapped up in this very thing: the birth of a baby. We glimpse the first echoes of this in Genesis 3, when we read that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the offspring of the serpent. And you might have heard of this thing called Christmas, or the Incarnation.
The experiences of our lives connect us to these biggest-of-all themes in ways that our modern, truncated, and flattened mindset cannot easily grasp. But at a deeper level—on the mythic, symbolic level where most humans have lived throughout history—these experiences have purchase and weight enough to move the unseen things.
One of the great joys of the Christian life is making those connections at this deeper level; to recognize that we all participate in the patterns that govern all of reality, and that these patterns exist and extend fractally from the heavenly host around the throne to the church gathered in worship to the children sitting around my table – He upholds “all things by the word of his power.”
Phil's Scribblings 