From LSD to Christ

With psychedelics, I was sure—sure I’d found a Way, and even more that I’d only begun to unlock the richness of its secrets, had only placed my foot on the first gilded stair leading—where? Heavenward? Onward, at least. Beyond.” In her memoir The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, Ashley Lande details how, as a wayward young woman from Kansas City, she became addicted to LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline. By the time of high school, Lande drank, smoked, slept around, and declared to her Protestant parents that she was an atheist. It’s a grim and agonizing self-portrait that leaves you wondering how such an observant soul could become so deluded. Lande tries to justify the drugs to herself as a natural enlightenment, a hippie pathway to reality, but only finds herself sinking into squalid addiction and paranoia. She marries and has children, but keeps using—“LSD was my friend, yes.”

Not until the end of the chronicle does the actual Word reach her. Her husband brings her to various churches; tears flow, and her religion of psychedelics starts to crack. It is frightening to surrender to the Lord, she recalls. It feels like danger. She hates Christianity, she’s a pantheist, she wants to run. To give up psychedelics would be to “[cede] half of myself . . . their death would mean my death.” One pastor in Topanga Canyon says that people “who are into all this New Age stuff” are really “just tormented”; she walks off,  but she cannot forget it. I won’t tell you how the Christian story overcomes her servitude to the drugs. I will only say that on a cold March day in Kansas, she was baptized in a freezing lake, “which accomplished something holy, something monumental, something unseen but no less real for it.”

In September, I included Pascal’s Pensées among the books that all Catholic students should study. It’s a dense volume, of course, and teachers who favor it tend to assign selections, not the whole work. As a guide to the selections, I recommend A Summer with Pascal, a nice little study by noted scholar Antoine Compagnon. Compagnon considers Pascal one of the founders of “our modernity, by which I mean the freedom to think.” In conversational prose he covers topics ranging from tyranny (defined by Pascal as “the universal desire for domination beyond one’s own order”) to self-love (“self-love has spread and overflowed in the void that the love of God has left behind”) to God’s fugitive presence (“all things conceal some mystery; all things are veils that conceal God”). The commentaries are keyed to interested laymen, not to philosophers and theologians, though Compagnon addresses the most profound matters of faith and God. 

Catholic educators have a duty to introduce students to the very best thought and expression, whose sophistication and complexity sometimes exceed an adolescent’s youthful grasp. The kids need intelligent, reader-friendly introductions to the masterpieces. Pascal famously asserts, for instance, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” an assertion that might baffle a twenty-first-century junior. Compagnon has a short chapter on it, though, which high schoolers can easily comprehend. His pages on Pascal’s famous wager make the stakes of faith entirely clear. This little volume should be in every Catholic high school library.

Saints, Angels & Demons: An A-to-Z Guide to the Holy and the Damned, written by Gary Jansen and illustrated by Katie Ponder, is another recent arrival that deserves shelf space in Catholic schools. A reference book with nearly four hundred entries, a glossary, a bibliography, and colorful illustrations, the prose is factual but not textbook-like. It is particularly valuable in the inclusion of demons whose names have become standard in contemporary parlance (Behemoth, Leviathan, and so forth). For instance, Lord of the Flies is a frequent reading assignment in 9th and 10th grades; readers of Saints, Angels & Demons learn that the phrase “lord of the flies” may be translated into Hebrew as Beelzebub. (As they sink into pagan cruelty, the stranded kids in the novel set a pig’s head on a spear and make it their idol). It will help students with coursework in history, too, for the entries on saints contain abundant information on the early church, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and political and geographical factors in episodes of martyrdom. School librarians should take note of the modest price, too: $32.

Finally, we have a volume of poems, Outside the Gates of Eden, by David Middleton. Middleton delivered our annual poetry reading the night before the 2022 Erasmus Lecture, and his verse has appeared often in the magazine.  Here we have fifty poems and a concluding “Statement on Poetics”: “our greatest verse and the mystery of human existence are at one.” (Middleton takes as evidence Socrates and Jesus turning to measured poetry at the end of their lives.)

Middleton favors blank verse and tetrameter quatrains, rhymed and unrhymed. The poem “The Potter’s Epitaph” opens:

Inside an urn my strong hands made
Those hands are in their ashes laid,
And I who quickened mother earth
Lie still within the place of birth.

This is a good example of Middleton’s technique. A tight form, a solemn occasion, and a clever conceit (the potter’s remains are inside an urn he’s made)—the lines are a joy and an edification. Mortality runs throughout the volume, but there are moments of frivolity, too, as in this expression of an experience we’ve come to hate:

Reception bad on my cable TV
I punch the 800-number. Technically
Pleasant, an artificial voice
Says “Hi, I’m here to help you. Make a choice . . .”

There is pungent social critique as well. In one poem, a headmaster converses with a mother who wants assurance that the school will provide her son good connections, elite college admission, and job success. When the headmaster speaks of the school’s tough curriculum, but adds that success “is not an end on which we dwell,” we get this final stanza:

“Then what,” quipped she, “is your primary goal?”
(Miffed and bewildered, letting out her breath);
And he, “To tend to body, mind, and soul
And to prepare him, in a word, for death.”

These specimens serve as fair recommendations of Middleton’s work. Diverse figures speak, historical personages and artworks appear (several poems derive from paintings by Jean-François Millet), and Old Testament motifs surface, while the poet’s devout sensibility underlies them all. I look forward to more poems by Middleton in coming issues of First Things.

Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.

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Image by Benh Lieu Song, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.