Why God Doesn’t Need Psychedelics
By Joseph Murphy, originally publish by Plough.
Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article with the eye-catching title “This Is Your Priest on Drugs.” The article reports the findings of a study in which “spiritually hungering” religious leaders from a diverse array of religious institutions were invited to take the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin to test how effective psychedelically induced “religious experiences” could be in rejuvenating participants’ sense of spiritual well-being. Unsurprisingly, the article explores with hopeful curiosity the drug’s therapeutic potential. Yet its potential is not constrained to merely enkindling a new flame in flagging spiritual lives. Rather, as one of the researchers and an avowed enthusiast of psychedelic medicine puts it, psylocibin has the broader power to inject “new life” into institutional religions suffering from waning popular interest. It has the power, the researcher implies, to make available to all and sundry those immediate experiences of God that were once the special province of mystics, unshackling common folk from the bonds of stale doctrine and placing in their hands the freedom to encounter the divine whenever they should please.
The article details the study’s tenuous case for drug-assisted spiritual therapy using testimonies of the participants themselves. Of the admittedly small, self-selecting sample size – thirty religious leaders of a largely homogeneous demographic – 79 percent of participants who completed two sessions claimed the experience enriched subsequent experiences in their prayer, vocation, and awareness of the sacred in everyday life. Nearly every participant reported an intense and immediate encounter with God. These encounters are variously described as impressions of the feminine presence – soothing, maternal, and spiritually erotic. One Episcopalian pastor reports experiencing a “total deconstruction of patriarchal religion.” With such presumably desirable outcomes, how could we ever doubt psilocybin’s potential for meeting our unfulfilled spiritual needs?
Whatever you think of the study’s methodology and morals, one thing it brings into sharp relief is that our inborn desire to access the mystery of the sacred has not gone away. We yearn for the sacred to intrude once again into the mundanity of our lives. We want God to speak to us. We want him to make his being known and felt.
This ingrained thirst cannot simply be postulated as a by-product of the evolutionary process. It bears witness to the fact that we were made for communion with God in all his mystery. Nor is this thirst reducible to a desire for propositional, impersonal knowledge of God. Rather, it is a thirst for someone who is infinitely transcendent but also infinitely close, who has placed longing for himself at the center of human identity. We desire that God make himself known to us, that the mystery of who he is captivates the entirety of our hearts, imaginations, and wills. But we desire that this captivation be an authentic union – a communion – where God, in the freedom of who he is, chooses to give himself and make himself known. Like any authentic relationship, this self-revelation cannot be contrived or forced.
This article was originally published by Plough and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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