In the wisdom teachings of Jesus, there are several pretty explicit (and challenging) teachings about love. Consider these words:
“Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.” Luke 10:27
“Love your neighbors as yourself.” Mark 12:31
“Love one another, even as I have loved you.” John 13:34
“Love your enemies.” Matthew 5:44
The teaching “love your neighbors as yourself” deserves some unpacking. I always interpreted it to be basically a two-parter: 1. Love your neighbors, (as you) 2. Love yourself. But this summer I was at a conference with Rami Shapiro, and he challenged me to see it more nondually: love your neighbor as yourself means to love the neighbor as if you and your neighbor are one. I like that interpretation, I think it’s faithful to the original Hebrew that Jesus is quoting (from Leviticus 19:18), and it tracks with contemplative experience. But either way you interpret this, it still means “loving yourself” is essentially linked to “loving your neighbor” — and then the teaching from John 13:34 reminds us that our love for one another (and ourselves) ultimately comes from God anyway, which is also echoed in I John 4:19 — which is also the same chapter in the Bible where God is described in this simple way: “God is Love.”
Loving one’s enemy is not easy or intuitive, but it seems to me that anyone who is committed to the practice of loving God, loving neighbors (and one another), loving self and recognizing that all this love comes from the Spirit, sooner or later will recognize that the circle of love must include everyone, with no exceptions — even the people we experience as adversaries. This is not an easy teaching. But it is a clear teaching of Jesus and there are clear echoes of this in the teachings of the Buddha (“Hatreds do not ever cease in this world by hating, but by love; this is an eternal truth” — Dhammapada 1:5). But how do we do this?
For years now I have been talking about love, figuring that was my job as a contemplative writer and teacher in the Christian tradition. But I have noticed something interesting especially in recent years: people are getting cynical about love. We’ve used that word so much, and in so many different ways, that it seems to have lost its shape — and its meaning. Culturally, love is a codeword for romance — or sex. In the shadow of that, how can we talk about Jesus’s teachings in a meaningful way?
We can look at the Greek, of course. ἀγάπη (agápē) is the word used in all four of the verses quoted above. It implies the kind of love that parents have for children or other family members have for one another: it is a love that transcends affection and positive feelings to represent a conscious and committed will for the good of the one who is loved. So Jesus is telling us: want the best for God, for yourself, for others, even those you experience as enemies, and it all comes from how God wants what is best for you.
But I still keep thinking about the cynics who think love has become a useless word. Can love be saved? Perhaps one way to do this is to think of synonyms or equivalent meanings. Agápē has given us one such equivalency: to want what is best. But let’s try a few others on for size. Here are the verses quoted above, rewritten with caring, charity, compassion, kindness, graciousness, fairness or justice, and responsibility. This is an exercise, of course, and not all of these words may work for you (I decided not even to bother with affection since I figured most people would quite understandably draw the line at “Be affectionate with your enemies”!) I offer these to you now, just so you know that when I talk about love, these (taken all together) begin to express the richness of what I mean. I suspect this is true for other contemplative writers and teachers as well. Yes, love is still a useful word, for it is a word that encompasses all that follows. But please, read on and see for yourself: do these ways of talking about love work for you? Why or why not? Maybe some work in some contexts but not in others? My hope is that you will approach this as its own kind of meditation: a meditation on the spirituality of Divine Love.
“Care for God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Care for your neighbors as yourself.”
“Care for one another, even as Christ has cared for you.”
“Care for your enemies.”
“Give to God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Give to your neighbors as yourself.”
“Give to one another, even as Christ has given to you.”
“Give to your enemies.”
“Be compassionate with God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Be compassionate with your neighbors as yourself.”
“Be compassionate with one another, even as Christ has been compassionate with you.”
“Be compassionate with your enemies.”
“Be kind to God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Be kind to your neighbors as yourself.”
“Be kind to one another, even as Christ has been kind to you.”
“Be kind to your enemies.”
“Be gracious with God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Be gracious with your neighbors as yourself.”
“Be gracious with one another, even as Christ has been gracious with you.”
“Be gracious with your enemies.”
“Be fair and just with to God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Be fair and just with your neighbors as yourself.”
“Be fair and just with one another, even as Christ has been faith and just with you.”
“Be fair and just with your enemies.”
“Be responsible to God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
“Be responsible to your neighbors as yourself.”
“Be responsible to one another, even as Christ has been responsible to you.”
“Be responsible to your enemies.”
I hope this helpful and that it encourages you to pray.
A seminarian I know is currently taking a class on the theology of Mary. She’s reading lots of stuff, both ancient and modern; as we were talking, I remembered an obscure pamphlet I bought years ago, called Mary, Mother of Socialism: A Jubilee Group Anthology edited by Andy Delmege. It was published back in the mid-1990s by the Jubilee Group, a collective of leftist Anglo-Catholic theologians and writers; I originally picked this up because two of the contributors were writers I admired: Kenneth Leech and Sara Maitland.
My friend had not heard of this particular booklet, and when I looked for it online, it was nowhere to be seen. To the best of my knowledge the Jubilee Group itself is defunct, and Ken Leech passed away in 2015. So it seemed to me that the only way she would be able to see it would be if I sent her a PDF of the booklet. So I created it, and figured it might be of interest to others who might be curious about how Mary, the mother of Jesus is written about from the perspective of Christian socialists. If it’s not your thing, pass it by; but if you’re interested, I’m offering the PDF here as a freely shareable download. Click here to download it: Mary, Mother of Socialism
The table of contents is itself most illuminating:
“How is it that the Mother of My Lord Should Come to Me?” by Sue Dowell
“Motherly Love” by Caroline Bailey
“The Politics of the Magnificat” by Kenneth Leech
“Poem of the Struggle of Peace” by Anonymous
“Hands of Mary” by Vandana Mataji
“The Magnificat — A Christian Manifesto?” by Graham Dowell
“Annunciation — for Huw” by Sara Maitland
“Dancing the Magnificat” by John R. Orens
Clearly, the Song or Canticle of Mary (the Magnificat) with its themes of “filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty” would appeal to socialists, so it’s not surprising that several of these essays focus on that ancient hymn, which is found at Luke 1:46-55.
I don’t own the copyright of this document, and of course if the copyright holder contacts me and asks me to remove this from my website, I will. If that’s you, please reach out to me using my contact page. Meanwhile, I’m offering it here for free for anyone who wants it for research or personal use.
Friends, I hope we can see each other at some point this year. Please review the list below to see the live and virtual events that I have confirmed for 2024.
The events are listed by date, followed by location (online or in person), sponsoring organization, and the topic of the retreat or talk. If the topic is linked, you can click on the link to register. Later events in the year have not been confirmed and/or are not yet open for registration, so please check back for more information as it gets closer to the date. I’m listing those events here so you can save the dates of the ones you’re interested in.
Please note that some of these events will sell out, so if you see one that interests you I encourage you to go ahead and sign up for it. Also, if there’s no event near you, please recommend me to your local church, monastery or retreat center. I’m currently booking events for 2025, so perhaps your local venue would like to host me. Click here to learn more about having me come visit your community.
Finally, please note that in addition to the programs listed below, I host a twice-monthly Zoom call for interspiritual meditation and contemplative conversation, open to all Patreon members — so if that interests you, sign up today by clicking here: anamchara.com/patreon.
Lenten E-Course, February 14-March 27 — Online (Spirituality and Practice) — Lent with the Mystics
Thursday-Sunday, April 11-14 — Asheville, NC (Montreat Conference Center) — Wisdom of the Christian Mystics, sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary
Thursday, April 25 — Online (The Rock Hill Oratory) — The Psalms and Poetry (with Alice Camille and Paul Boudreau)
Saturday, August 3 — Online — Caryll Houselander, Modern Mystic (sponsored by Spiritual Wanderlust) — Part of a series that begins in February, so sign up now!
Monday-Friday, August 5-9 — Charleston, SC (Mepkin Trappist Abbey) — Practical Mysticism (registration link to come)
Friday-Saturday, September 20-21 — Atlanta (Contemplative Outreach International Conference), I am tentatively scheduled to present a workshop at this conference, topic TBD
Friday-Saturday, October 18-19 — Minneapolis (Contemplative Outreach of Minnesota), topic TBD
Friday-Saturday, October 25-26 — Charlotte, NC (The Rock Hill Oratory), topic TBD
Hope to see you at one or more of these events!
Giving a talk on Celtic Spirituality at the Hill of Tara in Ireland, September 2023.
Friends, I’m happy to announce that for 2024, I’m creating a series of 24 guided meditations that I will be sharing with everyone who supports this blog with a Patreon Membership.
Over the course of the year 2024, about twice a month I’ll release a new guided meditation. You can join me on Zoom for the live meditation, or download the recording to use at your convenience. Each of these meditations is designed to help you grow deeper in your contemplative practice through the insight and guidance of three great spiritual wisdom traditions.
This series of guided meditations will draw from these three sources:
Christianity: The Beatitudes, Jesus’s eight principles for joyful living;
Celtic Spirituality: The Wheel of the Year: eight key dates that represent the turning of the seasons and the cycles of nature;
Buddhism: The Noble Eight-Fold Path, the Buddha’s practical, down-to-earth teachings for how we can reduce suffering in our lives.
Braid these three sources together, and you have 24 keys to contemplative living. And in 2024, I’m writing a guided meditation for each one, and will be sharing these with Patreon supporters over the course of the year.
Each meditation will be launched at a Zoom call for Patreon members; but then both audio and video recordings of the meditation will be available for members to watch or listen to at your convenience. By the end of the year, we’ll have a library of guided meditations based on the great wisdom of Jesus, the Buddha, and the Celts!
I’ll share the first of these 24 meditations at a Zoom call on Tuesday, January 23, 2024 at 7 PM Eastern USA Time. This live event is open for everyone, even if you’re not a Patreon member. So I hope you’ll register to join with me and our circle of friends to meditate together and reflect on the wisdom of Intention and Aspiration. Any spiritual practice, from Centering Prayer to Zen, begins with intention: a desire or commitment to grow spiritually. Our meditation will celebrate and acknowledge the courage and power in each of our hearts — and the grace that comes from an even deeper source, the Spirit’s abiding presence — and we’ll reflect on how accessing our innate intention and aspiration can help us to deepen (or begin) our contemplative spiritual practice.
If you can’t be there on the 23rd, register anyway — I’ll make sure you get access to the recorded version of the meditation.
Sound interesting? Come meditate with me! Please join us on January 23. Future meditations will be just for Patreon members, but this one is available for everyone. Hope to see you there!
As I said above, the entire series is available specifically as a gift for the members of Patreon.
If you’re not familiar with Patreon, it’s a crowdfunding website for individuals who support bloggers, podcasters, musicians, artists, and other content creators. Anamchara.com has been member-supported since 2017.
Each year I create something special as a thank you gift for the supporters who join Patreon to help keep Anamchara.com going. I’ve written poetry, meditations, and study guides for writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Howard Thurman. Everyone who joins patreon has access to these materials.
For 2024, I’m trying something new. During the Pandemic I began hosting regular Zoom calls for Patreon members, and those are still going strong: I affectionately call them “Contemplative Salons.” They usually include time for meditation, a short presentation from me, and then time for conversation/group discussion.
I do these calls m0re or less biweekly (the schedule fluctuates because of my own travel schedule), so basically 24 Zoom calls over the course of the year.
For 2024, I thought it would be fun to do a series of guided meditations, drawing from the three sacred traditions that I find especially meaningful: Christianity, Buddhism, and Celtic spirituality. Please join me for the free meditation on January 23, and then join Patreon to gain access to all 24 of these guided meditations.
The Encountering Silence team returns with an interview recorded last spring but unreleased until now! Cassidy, Kevin and I sat down for a contemplative conversation with Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk (she/they), a queer mystic who is the author of three books and the executive director of the Center for Prophetic Imagination in Minneapolis.
As the former co-producer of the Iconocast, Ashe interviewed Cornel West, James Cone, Bill Ayers, Starhawk, Wazayatawin and many others. These days, Ashe is usually on the other side of the virtual microphone — like with us here on Encountering Silence.
Ashe has a B.S. in Ministry from the University of Northwestern, an M.Div. from Bethel Theological Seminary, and studied Spiritual Direction at the University of St. Catherine’s graduate school. Ashe is currently working on her doctoral dissertation at United Theological Seminary.
The Center for Prophetic Imagination works to subvert the existing social order through deep discernment culminating with creative action. In the tradition of the prophets, we long for a world where all walls of alienation are torn down and we all live justly with one another, with the land, and with the spirit of liberation. In addition to a robust online presence, the Center for Prophetic Imagination offers spiritual direction, formation for spiritual directors with an emphasis on social transformation (in partnership with the Minnesota Institute for Contemplation and Healing), and other programs.
Our conversation explored Ashe’s commitment to the intersection of contemplation and justice, her unique perspective on both spirituality and activism as a trans woman, and more.
Today (November 16, 2023) is the 85th anniversary of the discovery of LSD, by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann. So happy birthday, LSD!
Hoffmann first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide on this day in 1938, although it would be another four and a half years before he accidentally ingested some of the chemical — and discovered its psychedelic and entheogenic properties (those words, both of which are younger than LSD itself, mean “mind-manifesting” and “becoming divine within” — words that attempt to capture the powerful hallucinogenic and ecstatic qualities of LSD and similar substances, mostly derived from varieties of plants like specific mushrooms, fungus and cactus).
By the 1950s cultural elites like Clare Booth Luce and Henry Luce were experimenting with LSD, and a decade later it had become widespread as a recreational drug, especially among young people in the hippie and anti-war movements. But then came the backlash: LSD and other psychedelics were criminalized by the mid-1960s, and eventually even the clinical study of potential therapeutic benefits of such substances ground to a halt. But in the last two decades, the moral panic about these substances has slowly given way to a quiet but significant resurgence of clinical trials and a growing movement toward decriminalization and ongoing efforts to seek FDA approval for therapeutic use of psychedelics. The science is promising: psychedelics, properly used, can contribute significantly to the alleviation of the symptoms of addiction, PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
So here we are in 2023, and psychedelics (not just LSD, but entheogens in general) continue to show up on our cultural radar. An article published just this week in the Christian Century takes a skeptical look at the theory, promoted by researcher Brian Muraresku in his book The Immortality Key, that the earliest Christians may have been influenced by entheogenic rituals from the pagan Greeks. Whatever you may think regarding such speculative readings of ancient history, it’s fascinating that a publication as mainstream as the Christian Century would see fit to give it a platform.
Less happily, there’s the story of Joseph Emerson, the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who on October 22, 2023 attempted to crash a plane. Apparently he was in the midst of an acute mental health crisis, but he blamed his actions on having taken psilocybin mushrooms recreationally two days earlier. I can’t help but wonder if he had a pre-existing condition and was just trying to blame the mushrooms, whether or not he actually had eaten some (as one journalist remarked, “The naturally occurring hallucinogens found in certain mushroom varieties don’t last 48 hours, nor do they typically induce homicidal actions, like trying to kill a plane full of people”), but nevertheless the story as he told it was widely circulated online.
The bottom line is this: eighty-five years after Hoffman’s discovery, psychedelics still make headlines. And while Emerson’s story is a stark reminder of the dangers of recreational drug use, it’s important to acknowledge that there is a growing community of researchers who are doing responsible scientific studies of the therapeutic value of substances like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA (street name: Ecstasy) and other psychedelics — and the research is indeed very promising.
So, in honor of LSD’s birthday, I’d like to recount my experience participating in a clinical trial involving LSD earlier this year. I volunteered for this trial because I was interested in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics — which falls under the domain of science (psychology, healthcare) rather than spirituality — but as you will see, my experience turned out to have profound spiritual implications. And being the person I am, it is only natural that I would seek to understand my own encounter with LSD through the lens of contemplative spirituality and practice. So I’ll tell my story and then offer some reflections from that perspective.
My Backstory
I did briefly experiment with entheogens like LSD or psilocybin—but those substances struck me as pale and physically jarring in comparison to the heart-expanding loveliness I had known (through my experience of God). — Unteachable Lessons
As I mentioned in my books The Aspiring Mystic and Unteachable Lessons, in my youth I took LSD once, and psilocybin mushrooms twice. The LSD experience was beautiful but also unsettling — at one point my heart rate elevated rapidly, and although that subsided fairly quickly it led to a feeling of unease that cast a shadow over what was otherwise a lovely day. The mushroom experiences were very different: the first time I had a larger dose and that led to an intense, deeply hallucinogenic evening; whereas the second experience, with a smaller amount, was almost disappointingly mild. As different as each of these experiences was, they had one common thread: all three times I felt a spike in my anxiety, which was enough for me to decide that psychedelics weren’t for me. Indeed, in both of the books where I mention these experiences, I did so to point out that my most profound (and entirely drug-free) encounter with God was much more luminous, loving, and meaningful than my psychedelic experiments.
Looking back, I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that I felt anxious when exploring psychedelics. I had seen — and heard plenty about — the negative impact that indiscriminate use of powerful drugs could have on people. I remember a guy at my college who looked like Roger Daltrey of the Who; he talked a big talk about all the LSD he took, but he was loud and self-obsessed and had an unpredictable, violent temper, so my friends and I all avoided him. In my sophomore year, a woman I dated told me the story of a previous boyfriend who, while tripping on acid, became convinced that God was mad at him and was coming after him. He made it through, but was profoundly shaken by the experience. A few years later, another friend who was always talking about LSD had a terrifying experience where he panicked, got in a car and drove — and two crashes later, was lucky he hadn’t killed anyone, but ended up getting some jail time for his trouble. Lots of people talked about how ecstatic and mind-expanding psychedelics were — but it all seemed to be just too dangerous or unpredictable to be worth the risk.
Even though my own experiences were anxiety-producing, they were also lovely and so while I gave up on using psychedelics, I remained interested in learning about them. Over the years, as I devoted much of my adult life to exploring spirituality and mysticism in a variety of contexts, I became familiar with the writings of people like Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley, and others, all of whom approached psychedelics with a kind of spiritual reverence, very much at odds with the recreational drug use I had witnessed or heard about. I began to wonder if there could be a legitimate spiritual use for psychedelics. I certainly wasn’t persuaded enough to seek them out again. Ram Dass’s masterpiece Be Here Now told a compelling tale: in that book he recounts his intensive psychedelic use early in his life, when as Richard Alpert (his birth name) he was a colleague of the Harvard psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary; Alpert eventually found joy — and a new identity — by letting go of LSD and turning to spirituality instead: as Ram Dass, he devoted himself to the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba. Meanwhile, an Anglican writer I admired, Kenneth Leech, worked as a priest with the hippies of London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, introducing them to mystical Christianity as a next step beyond their drug use. That became my perspective for many years: psychedelics were powerful and spiritually interesting, but ultimately were only a pale imitation of the “real thing” — mystical spirituality, whether Christian or otherwise.
And then in 2018, after giving a talk on Christian mysticism at an event in Ohio, a Methodist minister asked me a question. “Given your interest in mysticism, have you read Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind?” I admitted that I had not. The minister explained to me that it was a book about the new research being done into the therapeutic applications of psychedelics. I was intrigued enough to download the book — and it blew me away. Pollan introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking about entheogens — and how they could be used responsibly, as medicine.
In noting how I had found psychedelics to be anxiety-provoking, I should also point out that I have struggled with both anxiety and depression since childhood. I grew up in a blue collar family that had a “stiff upper lip” approach to mental health concerns: to deal with anxiety, depression, or any other kind of mental health situation, one simply was expected to “tough it out.” Given my family background, I suppose it’s not surprising that I did not begin working with a therapist until I was in my late twenties (looking back, I’m sad at the amount of anxiety and depression I suffered in my youth, without any recourse to counseling or therapy). But I should also mention that, while I was still in college, I first became interested in meditation because of its reputation as a holistic method for alleviating anxiety. And I’ve persevered with meditation all these years because it has been a great help for me psychologically. Yes, I meditate to pray and to draw closer to God, but truth be told, I also meditate to manage my anxiety and alleviate my depression.
Michael Pollan’s book documented the promising research into psychedelics as an effective medicine not only for people struggling with anxiety or depression, but also PTSD, addiction, OCD, eating disorders, and fear of death. Along the way, he reviewed the history of psychedelics, and gently criticized both the fear-mongering of the establishment and the excesses of Leary and the hippies. He also described his own experiences with entheogens. Surprisingly, I found those sections of the book to be the least satisfying — Pollan is a gifted writer but I suspect even the best writer finds it challenging to describe psychedelic experiences (you’ll see my own faltering attempt later in this essay). Pollan reminded me of my own experiences and I could see how his words were clunky and wooden compared to what I had experienced, even recreationally and even with the anxiety I had felt.
How to Change Your Mind gave me a new insight: while I had come to the conclusion that recreational drug use is irresponsible, and psychedelics are ultimately less satisfying than spontaneous mystical experiences, Pollan invited me to see psychedelics in a more positive light: as a potentially life-changing tool to help people find psychological healing. As someone with my own share of psychological suffering, I found myself wondering: what if I could explore psychedelics in a safe and healing environment, where my anxiety was being managed and I could simply be in the moment with the healing properties of the medicine? It was a compelling question, and by the time I finished How to Change Your Mind, I decided that, if I ever had the opportunity to participate in psychedelic research, I would.
But I lived in Georgia, for heaven’s sake! A few Google searches revealed that, as of 2018, pretty much all the research was happening either in the American northeast or on the west coast. It seemed like a good idea, but probably not available to me. So I put it out of my mind.
“I’m Participating in a Clinical Trial”
Five years later, the situation had changed, not only in America as a whole, but even in Georgia. Psychedelic research had arrived even here.
Back in the spring of this year, I was at a dinner party with one of Fran’s and my dearest friends, someone we have known for years. I met her at the Abbey Bookstore where I used to work; she regularly visited the monastery, so we struck up a friendship that has lasted to this day. Among other things, I knew that she struggles with anxiety, so it was not a surprise to hear her say, just in the course of our dinner conversation, “Guess what? I’m participating in a clinical trial that my therapist referred me to. It’s testing the use of LSD to alleviate the symptoms of anxiety.”
That got my attention. “An LSD study? Here in Atlanta?”
“Yes, right in downtown Decatur. There’s a large research center there, where all sorts of clinical trials take place. Mine is a dosing study, looking at different dosage levels of LSD to determine what the optimal dose should be.”
I told her I would like to volunteer. “Really?” she asked me. “But do you have anxiety?” She was so open and honest about her journey with anxiety, whereas I’m the kind of person who tends to keep my inner struggles hidden.
I admitted I had never been clinically diagnosed or had been prescribed drugs like Xanax or Valium, but that anxiety was an ongoing issue in my life which I had managed with meditation and talk therapy. She gave me the name of her contact at the research center, and said, “You’ll have to be screened, but see if you qualify.”
I emailed the person at the research facility the very next day, and a few days later she interviewed me on the phone. I was candid with her, explaining that I didn’t have a diagnosis but had long worked with therapists and had learned to manage my anxiety with my breath, rather than with pills. She explained that as a volunteer I would be screened, not only for general anxiety disorder but also for conditions that would disqualify me for the study, like high blood pressure, suicidal ideation or a family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder. If I did qualify, I’d have to go through a series of interviews, a complete physical, repeated blood work and urine samples, and then commit to spending an entire day on site for the dosing, even if it became apparent that I had received only a placebo (it was a double blind study, meaning that neither the on-site researchers or I would know the level of dosage, if any, administered to me).
I could receive a placebo, or one of several different amounts of LSD. Whatever I received, I would have to remain at the facility for twelve hours and be monitored closely before the doctor would clear me to leave. I wouldn’t be allowed to drive that day, so Fran would have to pick me up from the dosing center. Then I would need to return to the clinic up to six more times, for more interviews, blood work, and urine samples, all in the interest of providing data to help correlate my experience with that of the other 200 volunteers in this nationwide study. The goal of the study was not to prove that LSD could help with anxiety — that had already been established in earlier trials — but to help identify which dosage level(s) correlated with the best outcomes. Best of all, this study was safe, legal, and I even would get a modest stipend.
I went in, got screened, and was accepted for the study. One of the interesting points about participating in this study was learning an entirely new way of understanding and recognizing anxiety in myself — and others. This post is already too long, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here; let’s just say that having spent most of my life toughing it out in regard to my anxiety, participating in this study gave me a much more nuanced understanding of my own mental health. Even without the psychedelic therapy, that in itself was a tremendous gift to me. But a deeper dive into that topic I’ll save for another day.
My friend who had told me about the study was a couple of weeks ahead of me in the process, so she received her dosing in April and shared with me and Fran that it was a deeply beautiful, transformational experience. As my participation in the study progressed, I felt quite nervous about taking LSD, but everyone at the research center was very kind and reassuring that this would be a safe and carefully controlled experience. As we got closer and closer to my “dosing day,” I found I began to worry not that I would be taking psychedelics, but that I would be stuck with the placebo!
My dosing day was scheduled for the second Thursday in May. A few days earlier, I was taken to the room where the experience would take place. Unlike the clinical feel of much of the research center, the dosing room was beautiful and comfortably decorated. A futon, a couch, and plenty of pillows were available for my comfort, and tasteful art decorated the walls. The colors were muted earth tones, although two small projectors bathed the ceiling in a swath of ever-changing colors. A bathroom was adjacent to the room; for the purpose of safety, I would be asked to surrender my shoes, wallet and keys, and any portable electronic device I had with me (but I was allowed to bring a hard-copy book, in case I got the placebo).
Music would be provided — a playlist of gentle, soothing music, carefully selected for the study. Two people, a therapist and an assistant, would be with me throughout the day, and a doctor would be available at all times and would come examine me before signing me out at the end of the day. My blood pressure would be regularly checked, and my attendants would see to it that I remained hydrated and had a couple of meals — of my choosing, anything that was just an Uber-Eats order away. In the unlikely case I had a bad experience, sedatives and mood-stabilizing medicines were available (“but we’ve never had to use them,” my attendants reassured me); and if absolutely necessary, I would be transferred to Emory Hospital just a few miles away. “The worst case scenario is that we give you something so that you sleep it off — but again, we have not had to do that.”
My biggest concern was simply that I would have a “bad trip,” and when I mentioned this, the therapist suggested that such language was not useful and encouraged me to try to explain in my own words exactly what I was feeling nervous about. Thinking it over, I realized that my fear was simply about that anxiety spike I had experienced when doing recreational drugs; I was afraid of panicking or being terrified. As I articulated that fear, I had to smile at the irony of it — since the entire point of the study was to look at how LSD could helpwith anxiety. My therapist asked me to consider that I probably would experience at least some anxiety during the dosing. Again, she was gentle and compassionate. “We encourage you, when it arises to lean into it, that’s how the medicine is able to do its work.” That sounded so much like the kinds of instructions I give people who have unsettling experiences during prayer: the point is not to run away from such experiences, but to welcome them and gently set them aside. I began to consider that my years of experience with Centering Prayer and other meditation practices just might make this a totally different experience from what I had undergone years earlier.
Soon Thursday arrived. I was far more excited than frightened; I felt safe and cared-for by the research team. That morning we decided to let Fran sleep in and an Uber picked me up so that I could be at the research center by 8 AM. We had enough time for my urine sample, blood work, a final review of the day, and then settling in to the dosing room. At 9 AM sharp — the time mattered to keep us on schedule for the rest of the day, after all, this was a clinical trial — a nice looking young man with a locked briefcase walked in the room. He handed me eight capsules and a bottle of water and instructed me to take all 8 within sixty seconds. Each capsule could contain a placebo or 25 micrograms of LSD. If all 8 were placebos, I’d have a very quiet day reading my book. If all eight contained the medicine, I’d have a full-blown psychedelic journey. “Here we go,” I muttered to myself, and quickly downed the medicine as everyone watched.
On the Journey
The first thing I noticed, about a half hour or so in, was a spot of nausea — which my attendants assured me was completely normal. As soon as I mentioned it, I was handed a tablet of Zofran, and that cleared it right up. Shortly after that, I was clearly buzzing — I told my companions that we probably could rule the placebo out. Soon, I realized the entire room had a dreamlike quality, and I was simply awash with a feeling of gentle euphoria. I was definitely high — and as the morning progressed, I saw streaks of beautiful color and easily lost myself in the music and, ultimately, in my own inner experience. By 11 AM, my companions encouraged me to take some time for interior exploration: they invited me to lie down on the futon, wear headphones to let the music flow through me, and a blindfold to facilitate going within. After I gave her permission to do so, the therapist anointed my forehead and palms with an aromatic sandalwood/vanilla oil. Then I slipped on the blindfold, and in I went.
The medicine created a space for me to relax inward. In retrospect, I realize why my attendants encouraged me to go within, for I had been chatting rather aimlessly with them, and I realize now that talkativeness was driven by my anxiety. But once I slipped on the blindfold and settled in to the music, I was all alone. And yes, I felt some trepidation, but not a full-throttled panic, just a kind of low-level awareness of feeling some generalized angst. I decided to do a body-scan to figure out where my anxiety was embedded in my body. The first thing I noticed was a tingling in my jaw — where it had been broken in three places in a serious motor vehicle accident I had in 1992, the year I met Fran. Even though it has long been healed, as I lay there, floating in the music, I felt the trauma in my jaw from my accident. But that led to an even more insistent feeling, in my throat. I could feel that I was holding fear in my throat; perhaps in my throat chakra, or simply my esophagus. My maternal grandmother died from esophageal cancer, younger than I am now; she also was a smoker and suffered abuse from my grandfather. I have a condition called Barrett’s Esophagus, meaning that I am at risk for that same cancer, even though I don’t smoke. My throat felt scratchy, and I intuitively recognized that it was an embodiment of my fear, both arising my own health worries but perhaps also an intergenerational memory, inherited from the wounded and abused grandmother whom I never knew, who died before I was born. There I was, afraid of cancer, and that, I could see, meant being afraid of death.
“When you encounter fear, don’t run from it, lean into it.” What would it look like to lean into my fear of cancer and my fear of death? I didn’t want to do it! But that was the invitation, right? So I did — I leaned in, and the feeling was that I was being invited to sink right into my throat, and right into cancer and death. I realized that, despite the anxiety, I also felt very safe — I knew this was happening on an imaginal level, and that in my physical body I was secure, lying on the futon in the dosing room. With colorful music swirling in and through me, I imagined that I could simply dive, or sink, into my throat, into illness, and even into death.
And that’s what I did.
It felt as if the LSD was guiding me. “Come with me, let’s sink into your death, and I will give you a new understanding of your fear.” Not that such words were spoken in any kind of cognitive way, but that was the message, and I knew it as such. So I dove. At this point I felt like I was a bird, diving into — and through — a bank of clouds. It was exhilarating. It did not feel dangerous or threatening at all; on the contrary, it was a thrill, like riding a rollercoaster is a thrill. I dove into the darkness, the “cloud” (only later did I realize that this may have been an inner metaphor for The Cloud of Unknowing) and simply embraced the free-fall. I fell, I dove, I sank, I flew downward.
And then I came out the lower side of the cloud bank, and what greeted me was an infinite burst of beautiful golden light.
As I write these words six months after the fact, I am aware of how odd it must seem. After all, when we fly in an airplane, we have to climb above the clouds to find the luminous brilliance of sunlight. But in my inner journey, the light greeted me from below the clouds — and it wasn’t just sunlight, it was (to borrow Martin Laird’s evocative language) an ocean of light. I was immersed in light, bathed in light, dancing in light, flying in light. The light and I were one. I was the light, the light was me. The light was everything and everywhere. And the feeling was simply, purely, utterly joy.
It was ecstasy, happiness, serenity, bliss. And I realized the light was in me, emanating from in me and within me, and as I enjoyed the light, I saw that all my fear (and all my anger, jealousy, bitterness, sadness/depression, cynicism and other distressing or unloving feelings and choices) were nothing more than games that I would sometimes play with myself. They were simply games of hide and seek, my soul at play with darkness and light so that I could learn more about love by knowing all the various permutations of the ways I accept, allow, but also deny or reject love — love in all its forms: love of self, others, God, all. Almost in a flash I could see all the ways I had chosen fear, or angst, or depression, or sadness, or self-protective cynicism, not because they represented who I truly was, but because they signified different dances in the game, different dimensions of this soul-at-play in hide and seek, ways that I had chosen to resist or reject love (even including choices I feel shame about, like mistakes and choices that I have made that directly resulted in the suffering of others) — and I could also see how, for that matter, how holding on to feelings of shame or guilt or self-contempt is its own form of hide and seek — and, again, how all of these various energy fields of emotion are simply ways in which I judge, and the judging is what really lies at the root of all my anxiety.
Do not judge. — Jesus (Matthew 7:1)
So I moved through fear, and from fear to death, and then through death into the burst of infinite, oceanic light. And there, I saw not only the inner hide and seek that I play on an emotional level, but I also saw a similar dynamic at play in my vocational work — my work as a writer, a speaker (throat chakra), a teacher and spiritual director. In all my work, I see my common calling or vocation as being an advocate for mystical spirituality and contemplation — but for the last 18-20 years, I have done that work in the context of institutional Christianity, and I have long struggled with what I see are toxic qualities embedded within hierarchical religion. There in the midst of my journey through the limitless inner light, I saw the suffering I feel as I struggle with institutional Christianity, but that even that was a game of hide-and-seek.
When I chose to re-enter the church (I had been alienated from Christianity for several years prior to that point), I was making a decision to ground my contemplative practice in one specific tradition, Christianity. In the midst of my psychedelic experience, that decision felt like being a firefighter who enters a burning building, hoping (perhaps) to help save the building if possible, but also to help save/rescue those who are trapped within it (i.e., those who are “trapped” in the worldview of a God who judges and is angry with them). I saw all my spiritual practices — from Centering Prayer, to Zazen, to yoga and long walks in the woods and all the ways I seek to sink ever more deeply into silence — all as ways in which I have simply sought to pour myself into divine union (that is actually already there, but playing hide and seek with me), and that the LSD was not making me one with God/the universe/everything but simply was revealing to me how I already was (and am) one with God/the universe/everything.
And in a flash of clear, blissful insight, I could see that all my spiritual practices were just as effective as the entheogen (although obviously the dosing was a more intensive experience), just as effective at realizing and recognizing that blissful luminous union as always/already present within me. I could see that one of the most persistent ways I play hide and seek with my own oneness-with-the divine arose through my tempestuous relationship with institutional Christianity, with religious dogma and judgmentalism. To enter the burning building felt, to me, like I was going to be consumed by the fires, not of heaven but of hell — which is to say, not the luminous fires of divine love, but the scorching fires of unrelenting judgment. But even the fear of divine wrath and judgment was just another dimension of the hide-and-seek game that I was playing with myself.
I could see that my decision to work within religious spaces was not unlike the commitment of a bodhisattva (someone who chooses compassion for others as more important than their own enlightenment) — so I have “entered the burning building” of institutional religion, less for myself than for my care for others. But still, it’s a game of hide and seek, and in my own soul’s playful commitment to hide-and-seek, I was continually “forgetting” who and what I truly was, forgetting my oneness-with-divinity, forgetting my point vierge, my spark of the soul, my place that “has never consented to sin and never will” — and in the forgetting, I experienced myself (my “ego” or perhaps what has been called the “false self”) as just a network of stories and hide-and-seek games, stories that I used to create a sense of self.
Meanwhile, the medicine (LSD) acted like a cheerful agent of unexpected insights within me, as if it were shining a bright light into the center of my heart, revealing the entire project of my ego/self to be simply this vast network of stories and hide-and-seek games that nevertheless helped me to navigate ordinary consciousness, and therefore was not “wrong” or bad, but simply not always skillful. The LSD, I could see, was not creating this vision I was having of myself; rather it was like a spotlight, bringing illumination into what was already there. In this clear light of infinite joy, I could see that anxiety is not my enemy, not something to be carved away or excised, but was merely an invitation to find a more skillful expression. Perhaps the anxiety could be recalibrated into caution, or prudence, or carefulness, which is to say, into energies that serve me and keep me safe without causing me unnecessary suffering or distress.
In feeling and seeing this invitation to befriend my own fear, I could also see that the purpose behind therapy, or meditation, or spiritual practice, or even creative work like my writing, was that they are all ways to manage or ride the ever-flowing wave of my ego- construct, all for the purpose so that I can facilitate the most possible joy and love in my life — for the joy and love (and bliss of union) are always there, even though I do play hide-and-seek and thus often appear to “forget” who/what I truly am and who/what I am truly capable of being, both for myself and for others.
As I could clearly see all this, the joy and giddiness just overflowed, and then finally it seemed the LSD itself invited me to “Share this!” so I removed the blindfold, and headphones, and got up and tried as best I could to articulate all this to my two companions. They listened warmly and politely as I babbled on about how in my quest to heal my anxiety, I ended up doing some pretty deep contemplative spiritual work, which was entirely unexpected. After sharing all this with them, I asked them how long I had been lying on the futon, thinking it had been at least twenty minutes.
“About an hour and a half,” one of them replied.
At that point I realized I was hungry, so we ordered lunch. I got a salad from my favorite salad shop in Decatur.
After we ate, I decided I wanted to “go in” again, so I got back on to the futon with my headphones and blindfold. By now the peak of the psychedelic journey had passed, so this felt like a less deep experience. Instead of trying to explore any further within myself (in retrospect, I can see that I got plenty of inner insights before lunch), I found myself musing on the Heart Sūtra, one of the core texts of Mahayana Buddhism. I’ve written about the Heart Sūtra both here on this blog and in Eternal Heart — it’s a beautiful text, one of my favorite sacred writings of any tradition. But like the Nicene Creed, it is philosophically challenging. A key line in the Heart Sūtra is “emptiness is form, form is emptiness” — and as I reclined on that futon, I received a powerful insight into the essential truth of these words. The “form” correlates with the ego-construct: the stories and the narratives we tell ourselves to establish or maintain a sense of identity or self. Meanwhile, the “emptiness” is what Buddhist teachers have called “the clear light of bliss” — and that is always, already flowing out of the center of my heart, but sometimes I experience it as ecstatic silence, other times as pedestrian ego, yet these things are not-two. As I write these words, six months after the experience, I am chafing at how poorly they capture what I experienced. Let’s just say that I saw connections that intellectually I already knew were there, but now they seemed more embodied or experiential, and again, the result of this insight was a clear sense of cascading joy.
After the Dosing
The last half of my twelve-hour sojourn is now a blur to me; at the time I think I simply relaxed as the effects of the LSD wore off; I rested, chatted with my attendants, had an impossible burger for dinner (yum), and when the doctor came to check on me at 7 PM — ten hours into the experience — it seemed like the time had flown by. Soon it was 9 PM and my companions for the day escorted me to the street where Fran was waiting. I told her I wanted some ice cream — still feeling like there was an “energetic” scratch in my throat — so we stopped by Sprouts, got the ice cream, went home, and soon I was in bed for a long night’s sleep.
The days following the dosing were rich with my own reflection as I sought to integrate what I had experienced — which included how to integrate this therapeutic experience with my work as a contemplative writer, retreat leader, and spiritual director. If there was one over-riding take-away from this clinical trial, it was feeling that I needed to integrate my experience not only psychologically/therapeutically, but spiritually/mystically as well.
Thanks to Ram Dass and others like him, I knew plenty of books were available on the relationship between psychedelics and Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous spirituality, but was anyone writing about Christianity and psychedelics? I went poking around online and found a book called God on Psychedelics by Don Lattin. I wasn’t familiar with the author, but I respected the book’s publisher, so I downloaded it and read it quickly.
In the very first chapter of that book, I learned about a study that had taken place at Johns Hopkins University a few years before the pandemic; all the participants were clergy and seminary professors from mainline congregations, Christian or Jewish. Volunteers were chosen not on the basis of mental health conditions like anxiety or depression, but simply because they were religious professionals who had never experienced psychedelics before. In the study, the participants were given two experiences with psilocybin, and intentionally were invited to regard these as sacred, spiritually meaningful experiences. While the results of this study have yet to have been published, Lattin interviewed several of the participants for his book. One of them, an Episcopal priest serendipitously named Hunt Priest, had such a profound and moving experience that it led him to create a networking organization for Christian clergy, therapists and spiritual directors who were interested in the interface between psychedelics and spirituality. The organization is called Ligare, and it turned out that Hunt lived in Savannah, just a few hours away from me. I was scheduled to lead a one-day retreat in Savannah in the summer, so I sent Hunt an email and asked if he would be willing to meet with me.
Just a few hours later he replied. It turned out that I was on his radar — mutual friends, including a Trappist monk, had suggested to him that he should reach out to me, and he even had a few of my books sitting on his desk. He mentioned a few folks in Atlanta who were interested in this topic, including an Episcopal priest who was involved in psychedelic research at Emory University Hospital. Her name rang a bell, so I checked my contacts list and email archives — it turns out she had been one of Rhiannon’s chaplains during her many hospital stays in the months before she entered hospice in 2014.
Carl and Fran McColman, with Hunt Priest, August 2023.
I know that coincidences can just be evidence of the random nature of things — but I am a contemplative, after all, and as a person of faith I believe many coincidences are in fact serendipities — and “serendipity” often is just a code word for “the Holy Spirit is up to something.” It seemed at that point that the chain of events set into motion first by reading Michael Pollan, then having a chance conversation with a friend at a dinner party, led me to that very point where I found that a small but dedicated number of Christians are indeed asking the same questions that I was now asking. When Hunt and I got on zoom, he expressed it so beautifully. “Psychedelics are coming,” he pointed out; “the science behind their therapeutic value is simply too good. So Christians simply need to decide, are we going to be reflexively resistant to this emergent trend, or are we going to look for positive ways that we can support the ongoing spiritual lives of those who are doing psychedelic therapy?”
Ram Dass comes to mind, as does a conversation I had recently with one of my dharma teachers, who (not knowing I was participating in the study) brought up LSD, and said “LSD and other psychedelics are useful in that they give us a glimpse of what enlightenment looks like, but then we have do the ordinary work of preparing ourselves for enlightenment through spiritual practices like meditation.” I couldn’t agree more, and apparently that was how I got on Hunt Priest’s map: having a psychedelically-induced mystical or enlightening experience is one thing, but then comes the question of “Now what?” For many people, the answer to that question might involve ongoing spiritual practice. And contemplative spirituality is precisely the kind of practice that can meet the wonder and mystery of psychedelic experience on its own terms, and show a holistic, sustainable, and daily path forward.
What Are We To Make of All This?
Clearly, there is so much more I could say about this experience, but since this post is already so long, I’ll try to summarize some thoughts I’ve had in response to my encounter with psychedelics through a clinical trial. While I don’t expect psychedelics to become the center-point of my work, it’s a topic that I suspect I will return to again in the future. But for now, here are a few thoughts I’d like to share on this admittedly huge topic:
It’s time to put the moral panic about hallucinogenic drugs behind us. I don’t believe psychedelics should be freely available as party drugs; they are simply too powerful for that kind of indiscriminate use. But so much of the anti-drug rhetoric of the last 50-60 years is simply not backed up by evidence. We need to dial back the fear-mongering and work for common-sense drug policies that allow for the legitimate therapeutic — and spiritual — applications of psychedelics. Chemotherapy and other powerful/dangerous drugs are controlled but available to those who need them. A reasonable psychedelics policy should in a similar way balance control and accessibility.
For some people, psychedelics are contraindicated, and that needs to be taken seriously. The tragic story of Joseph Emerson illustrates this. I don’t know the man and certainly cannot diagnose him, but based on the news reports of what happened with him, I can’t help but wonder that if he had been working with a responsible therapist, they would have recognized that his underlying mental health concerns meant that he was not a good candidate for psychedelic therapy. People with personal or family history of bipolar disorder, psychoses like schizophrenia, or even suicidal ideation need significant mental health care before even considering psychedelic therapy, which might never be appropriate for some people. A reminder: I am not a therapist, so this is just a writer offering their opinion. If you have any questions about this matter for yourself or someone you love, please consult a qualified mental health professional.
Set and Setting matter. This goes all the way back to the days of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert doing research at Harvard. The “set” is the intention that a person brings to using psychedelics. Back in May, my “set” was to learn from LSD how I could alleviate and perhaps even heal from my anxiety. I did not expect or ask for the spiritual lessons that the medicine taught me (since such lessons arose anyway, I assume they were necessary for my work in dealing with my anxiety). Meanwhile, the “setting” is the environment in which one experiences psychedelics. My clinical trial took place in a beautiful, calm, comfortable room specifically designed for the comfort and safety of those getting dosed; I was always cared for by qualified attendants who were not under the influence of the drug themselves, and one of whom is a therapist. Having a constructive set/intention and a safe and comfortable setting can make all the difference for having a positive experience.
There is a lot of bias against psychedelics in the spiritual community; we need to revisit those biases. As a practitioner of meditation and Centering Prayer, for many years I myself had a kind of self-righteous attitude toward entheogens: I saw them as a kind of spiritual bypassing, a chemically-induced spiritual “shortcut” that did not provide a “real” mystical experience. Full disclosure: I have a long-standing personal bias against drugs of all kinds; which is one of the reasons why I never pursued even ordinary pharmaceutical relief for my anxiety and depression. But over the years, I have learned that for many people, psychiatric drugs can be lifesaving, and eventually I replaced my prejudice with a much humbler recognition that sometimes, drugs are really the best path to mental health and wellness. Psychedelics, likewise, can sometimes be the best choice for people struggling with PTSD, addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, or even simply fear of death. All this begs this question: if psychedelics have legitimate therapeutic uses, doesn’t it make sense that they could also have legitimate spiritual uses as well? Again, I’m not suggesting that psychedelics are for everybody, but perhaps for some people, the appropriate use of entheogens can be a profoundly meaningful initiation into (or deepening of) their spiritual life and practice. Certainly my experience, which was intended primarily as a down-to-earth therapy for my anxiety, turned into a profoundly beautiful and moving spiritual experience. I am not alone in that experience, so those of us who love and practice contemplative spirituality need to be thinking about how we can support the ongoing spiritual lives of those who take psychedelics and have meaningful spiritual experiences as a result.
Indigenous people can inspire us to reclaim the spiritual blessings found through entheogens. I’ve written this blog post as a white American of European descent, working with a psychedelic discovered in twentieth-century Switzerland. But many entheogenic plants have long been respected and used by indigenous peoples in their own sacred ceremonies. Indigenous communities that include peyote, ayahuasca and other plant-based entheogens in their spiritual lives have found wisdom, meaning, healing, and insight through their ceremonial encounters with the sacred plant medicine. This, right away, should point to an understanding that these powerful plant-based medicines (even LSD comes originally from a fungus) carry a profound spiritual potential. There are questions of cultural appropriation and white privilege at play here, so I’m not suggesting that indigenous peoples owe anything to the dominant society, nor should we expect indigenous healers to teach us or give us their ceremonies. But we both need to respect their spiritual use of entheogens, and reflect on how psychedelics might have spiritual blessings even in the mainstream. Incidentally, indigenous religious ceremonies that include the use of entheogens are technically protected by federal law, although I believe indigenous religious groups often have to fight for their rights. I think such freedom-of-religion rights need to be enshrined and protected in our society, in addition to the responsible therapeutic uses for psychedelics.
As psychedelic therapy is becoming more accepted, we need to be thinking about the spiritual application of psychedelics. Christians and others need to look at how we can provide spiritual support to those who encounter psychedelics as part of their healing journey, regardless of what therapeutic issues they are engaged in. Whether you are healing from PTSD, addiction, anxiety, depression, or some other situation, part of holistic healing is becoming available for a meaningful spiritual awakening and ongoing spiritual practice. This is true regardless of our religious identity or relationship (or lack thereof) with institutional forms of religion. Spirituality is something for everyone who breathes, and psychedelics can call anyone, of any culture or creed, into a deeper and more intentional spiritual life. Will those of us who identify as contemplatives be willing to show up to support people who are doing this kind of deep inner work? I certainly hope so — and intend to do so.
My experience with LSD this year — participating in a clinical trial that promised me a therapeutic experience, but then receiving spiritual as well as therapeutic benefits — illustrates a point that many healers and saints across the world, from Carl G. Jung to Ram Dass to Gerald G. May and so many others, have pointed out: therapy and spirituality exist on a continuum of care. In my ministry as a spiritual director, I need to maintain boundaries both for myself and my directees, so that we all understand my work is contemplative rather than therapeutic in nature: I am not a psychologist or professional counselor. I do not provide mental health solutions but I assist people in their Spirit-directed spiritual growth. Despite this clear and obvious difference, spiritual direction is a form of interactive care, which means it has a certain affinity to talk therapy. While it’s important to keep in mind the differences between therapeutic and spiritual care, it’s also important to acknowledge those affinities. Which begs another question: could it be that psychedelic therapy just might live in the space where therapy and spiritual care intersect? That’s not something to fear, but rather something we all can explore with open minds and hearts.
It seems clear that, with proper set and setting, psychedelics can open powerful doorways for deep spiritual transformation. Are they absolutely necessary for such inner growth and development? Probably not. But can they be of meaningful assistance to those who seek spiritual growth, nondual enlightenment, or mystical union with God? I am convinced that yes, they can.
Organizations like Ligare are emerging to support clergy, spiritual directors, therapists and other healers and caregivers to meet the ongoing care and support needs of those who integrate psychedelics into their mental health and or spiritual care. Since my own initiation into the world of therapeutic psychedelics, I’ve begun to participate in a spiritual directors’ working group sponsored by Ligare that is developing a statement of best practices for spiritual direction with psychedelic users. I believe in the future, spiritual direction formation programs will offer training to help spiritual directors to meet this specific need among those they serve.
To finish, let me repeat the quote from my Buddhist friend: “psychedelics are useful in that they give us a glimpse of what enlightenment looks like, but then we have do the ordinary work of preparing ourselves for enlightenment through spiritual practices.” In other words, psychedelics may shine a light on our inner lives that can be healing, inspiring, or joyous, but they really are not shortcuts, for once the medicine wears off, we are left with the ordinary tasks of making skillful choices in the interest of our own wellness and our ongoing spiritual growth. Organizations like Ligare are doing that kind of ordinary work to help connect the dots between psychedelic therapy and spiritual care. Perhaps spiritual directors and other contemplative leaders will have an important role in helping people using psychedelics, whether for therapeutic or spiritual purposes, to integrate their powerful experiences into a visionary life of ongoing care, compassion, hope and joy.
Epilogue: A Dream
Here is a dream that I had twelve days after my dosing experience. I’ve decided to share it, because I think it hints at how my subconscious was continuing to integrate the experience with the entheogen, almost two weeks after taking LSD. Like so many dreams, by the time I woke up and started to write it down, I had already lost much of it, so this is mainly just a few snippets of images and impressions. But hopefully it’s worth reflecting on.
A few notes: Tommy was a childhood friend who in high school became very involved in psychedelics; I’ve lost touch with him and have often wondered how his life turned out. I think the “vast underground world” is pretty self-explanatory, and “the key to the portal” — could that have been the LSD? Or even simply contemplative practices? The woman resembled what my mom looked like when I was a child, so I’m thinking she could represent a “super-ego” figure, and the child, I assume is what we might call my “inner child” — with a nod to Matthew 18:3, perhaps? (I do not have a son in real life).
In front of Fran’s and my house, in the middle of our road, I could see an access portal to a vast underground world, vast like the Mines of Moria in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This “portal” was made of brick and was about 6’x6’x6’ cube, right there in the middle of the road, with a locked iron gate/door on the side facing the home opposite of ours. It turned out that this cubed structure actually sat beneath the road normally, but there was some way that a person could make it “pop up” in the middle of the road to have access to it. And so now it was above ground and I could indeed have access to it.
I had been loaned a key, presumably from the county government, to visit this subterranean world beneath my house, it seems that it was a reward for a service I had rendered to the county. I stood there with a child, who seemed to be my son, and he and I and my old friend Tommy were examining the structure. We were talking about how the county had built this underground world years ago, and no one hardly ever visited it except for maintenance purposes. I unlocked the gate, and Tommy went down the stairs or ladder to have a look. The child and I waited outside. It looked very deep inside, descending multiple levels, and not exactly scary in a dangerous way, maybe just a little vertigo-inducing or awe-inducing. The kid wanted to explore it, and I promised him we would another time — after all, I had to return the key, even though I was already wondering about how I might be able to access the cube in the future.
As we were standing there waiting for Tommy to return from below, one of my neighbors (a woman I did not recognize, but she lookedlike someone with a lot of power/authority) drove by — and then stopped her car and called to me. I walked over to speak to her. She asked me how I had access to the portal. I told her I had the key on loan, but would need to return it soon. “It’s too bad that no one in the neighborhood has one of those keys,” she remarked. “There’s no chance you’re going to make a copy of it, is there?” I felt the need to be cautious with her — perhaps she was a representative of the county government and I would get in trouble if I told her that I wanted access in the future; for that matter, I realized that if word got out that I had the key to the portals, everyone would be bugging me for access. So I said, very noncommittally, “It’s not something I would officially do” and just then my alarm went off, ending the dream.
I’m not sure what the difference between “official” and “unofficial” access to the underground world means — but it seems to me that, for anyone who does not currently have access to safe and legal psychedelics, it’s helpful to remember that a sustained and intentional practice of deep meditation and contemplation can be, in its own way, a key to the mysteries deep within us.
On October 11, 1948, Harcourt Brace Publishers released a book called The Seven Storey Mountain. So this coming Wednesday marks that book’s seventy-fifth anniversary.
Chances are, most people who read this blog are quite familiar with Merton and probably with The Seven Storey Mountain as well. But in case you aren’t: this book is the memoir of a young man, the child of two artists who lived free-spirited lives traveling the world, although not without tragedy: both Merton’s parents died before he turned 16. He went on to study first at Cambridge and then at Columbia University in New York. Like so many youth, his was a worldly and hedonistic life, but the influence of friends and faculty mentors and an interest in medieval philosophy lead to his surprising decision to become a Catholic at the age of 23. Three years later he apparently threw away a promising career as a writer and college professor to enter the mysterious, cloistered world of a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky, where he embraced an austere and penitential life, seeking only union with the God who for him could only be found in the depth of prayerful silence.
The Seven Storey Mountain
On the surface, it doesn’t sound like the most barn-storming of books, and the story goes that the publisher (a college buddy of Merton’s) released the book mostly as a favor to his old friend. But The Seven Storey Mountain racked up over 20,000 pre-orders before it was even published, sold over 100,000 copies in its first sixth months, and eventually went on to sell over three million copies. For a non-fiction book on contemplative spirituality, those are impressive numbers.
The book’s unlikely success was due in part at least by how beautifully written it is, and while Merton does come across as a bit arrogant in his faith (a quality of this book that he would later regret), he also seems to be enough of an average Joe that his ascetic, medieval journey seems, well, accessible (indeed, Trappist monasteries had a surge in young people entering in the years after the book was published, which may not have been directly caused by this book, but no doubt Merton’s popular book helped make the monastery seem more attractive).
I think it’s also significant to consider that this book was published at a truly meaningful time. America, like most of the world, was still reeling from the horrors of World War II: the atrocities of the Shoah, the carnage of D-Day, the unthinkable destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some scholars have speculated as many as sixty million people were killed during World War II (military and civilian deaths combined; we know that six million of those were Jews in the Holocaust, and perhaps as many as a quarter million in the atomic blasts). World population at the time was about 2.3 billion, so that means about one out of every forty persons lost their lives during that horrific time. It makes me wonder: isn’t it possible that so much of the cynicism and despair in our world today is rooted, at least in part, in the trauma of WWII? Imagine what the world must have been like in the fall of 1948 — the war still fresh in everyone’s memory; and while the economy boomed at the end of the war, by 1948 a minor recession had set in. Uncertain times, indeed.
So here comes the voice of an articulate, confident young Catholic writer, who dares to offer a radically different vision of what a good life looks like. Perhaps war, racism, holocaust and nuclear devastation are not the final words on our culture; perhaps the ancient faith that God is real, God is love, and real embodied union with this God-of-Love remains possible, even following the horrors of WWII. I suspect for some people, this was the nerve that The Seven Storey Mountain struck, and no doubt that contributed to the book’s unlikely success and its legacy as a harbinger of the contemplative renaissance in our time.
Another early edition of “The Seven Storey Mountain”
Harbinger of a Changing World
The world did indeed change in the 20 years between the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain and Merton’s untimely death in 1968. Although nobody could have guessed in the fall of 1948 when the book was far outselling the publisher’s estimates, in retrospect it’s easy to see how this book represented an early sign of the spiritual renaissance that would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s.
I don’t want to oversimplify things, but let me point to at least a few significant shifts that took place during that time. First was the arrival of psychedelics. LSD had been accidentally synthesized in a Swiss lab in 1938 and its psychedelic qualities discovered a few years later; by the 1950s and early 1960s, research was being done both in nefarious ways (the CIA looked into how they might weaponize the drug) but also more positively, exploring the therapeutic and spiritual potential of psychedelics. Meanwhile, plant-based entheogens like psilocybin were being studied by researchers like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at prestigious institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Eventually, these substances leaked out of research facilities and became widely embraced by the 1960s counterculture (before they were criminalized by a frightened establishment, unfortunately setting back creative psychedelic research by almost 50 years). Other writers and researchers who explored the link between entheogens and mysticism included Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Walter Pahnke. Meanwhile, the hippie counterculture drew its own conclusions about the spiritual power of psychedelics; whatever you may think about the recreational use of such powerful drugs, it’s clear that as these substances became widely available in communes and college campuses across the land, for many they represented an initiation into a more spiritual way of seeing the world.
The second significant “megatrend” in the post-war years was an acceleration of interest in eastern philosophy and spiritual wisdom. There are many possible lines to follow here, so I’ll only mention a few. The Beatles popularized interest in the east with their short-lived but highly publicized relationship with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation. Richard Alpert, disillusioned with what he saw as the limitations of psychedelic research, went to India and traded in his LSD for devotion to a guru, and took on the new identity of Ram Dass. Meanwhile, a variety of Hindu and Buddhist teachers came to the west, or western seekers found them in the east and brought their wisdom home, all contributing to a blossoming of interest in practices like Zen, yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, insight meditation, Advaita Vedanta, and so forth. Of course, the interaction between western seekers and eastern teachers pre-dated World War II — Merton himself talks about encountering the Hindu monk Mahanambrata Brahmachari in New York in 1938, who had come to North America to participate in the World Fellowship of Faiths in Chicago. But the 1950s and 1960s became a time when eastern wisdom became much more visible in western society, impacting youth culture in a manner similar to the impact of entheogens.
While neither the psychedelic movement nor the immersion into eastern spirituality ever became truly mainstream — both were, and remain, essentially countercultural elements in our society — they became widely recognized as touchstones of our society’s deep spiritual hunger and yearning for an alternative to the horrors of war, the mindlessness of consumerism, and the creeping cynicism of our entertainment culture. But what about Christian spirituality — what were Christians doing in response to the spiritual hunger of the time?
From the earliest years of the twentieth century, Christianity experienced its own spiritual renaissance via the Pentecostal/Neopentecostal/Charismatic movement. This movement, originally occurring on the fringe of the evangelical world, became more mainstream after World War II as Christians in mainstream denominations embraced this joyful spirituality marked by dancing, ecstatic praise and speaking in tongues. But charismatic Christianity, from the beginning, was hobbled by a narrow, dualistic theology that emphasized fear of the devil almost as much as it celebrated God. Charismatic Christians all too often settled for a narrow theology where there is only one correct way to be spiritual — and that anything different (whether it be non-Christian spirituality, secular psychology, or new age practices) was rejected as “demonic.” (As someone who explored charismatic Christianity during my adolescence, I do believe there is real potential for inner transformation in that world, but the rigid/patriarchal theology that often accompanies it means that this movement often quenches the very Spirit it seeks to embody).
Back to Thomas Merton. His book came out in 1948 — before the modern charismatic movement went mainstream, before the psychedelic movement or the encounter with the east entered the cultural zeitgeist in any significant way. The spiritual vision he offers is different from the free-wheeling world of countercultural spirituality, but also quite different from the dualistic nature of charismatic experience. Merton plugs in to the ancient tradition of Christian contemplation, which for too long had been kept hidden in monastic cloisters. And while he wasn’t the first author to suggest that contemplation belongs to everyone, not just monks or nuns (Evelyn Underhill and Rufus Jones predated him by almost 40 years), the success of The Seven Storey Mountain meant that Merton became the face of monastic/contemplative spirituality for his time.
Evelyn Waugh edited an abridged edition of Merton’s autobiography, published in Great Britain as “Elected Silence.”
Merton and His Legacy
The success of Merton’s book meant he became a monk-celebrity, which is in itself something of a contradiction in terms. For Merton this meant he devoted the rest of his life to writing, journaling, correspondence, and reflecting on the “silent life” of the cloister. Merton’s writings cover a wide terrain, from poetry to devotional writing to social criticism and interfaith dialogue. Some of his books, like New Seeds of Contemplationand The Inner Experience, do attempt to invite the reader into contemplative practice, but The Inner Experience makes it clear that Merton, whose own experience is so fully shaped by the structure of monastic life, is somewhat at a loss about how to encourage non-monastics to enter the silent path. It would be the generation after Merton: writers like Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, along with others like John Main and Laurence Freeman, who would more definitively make the case for contemplative practice outside of monastic settings.
Ironically, The Seven Storey Mountain became (and remains) a popular book among conservative Catholics, who seem to resonate with its “I once was lost but now I’m found” story arc and how confident the young Merton was in proclaiming Catholicism as the one true faith. But Merton himself would not stay put, spiritually speaking: although he remained a monk until his death, his inner life because increasingly broad-minded, engaged with writers and philosophers of other religious traditions and other philsophical perspectives. As his early writings seemed to embody a more triumphal, traditionalist understanding of Catholicism, by the end of his life Merton’s voice was much more congenial to those who might label themselves as progressive or at least as “Vatican II” Catholics.
Of the three spiritual megatrends I’ve mentioned that became (relatively) mainstream in the decades following TSSM, Merton was perhaps understandably cautious about psychedelics. In a 1958 letter to Aldous Huxley, he expresses concern that equating psychedelics with mysticism could be a confusion of a natural experience with supernatural grace. He also seemed dismissive of Pentecostalism, once remarking that monastic contemplatives “are Pentecostals without necessarily having all the Pentecostal trimmings.” But when it came to interfaith exploration, there Merton proved to be prophetic. His early interest in Brahmachari led to the mature Merton’s interest in the work D. T. Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama and other voices from the east. Even during his lifetime, books like Zen and the Birds of Appetiteand Mystics and Zen Masters testify to his abiding interest in interfaith dialogue. Since his death, a wonderful series of books have been published detailing the many dimensions of Merton’s interfaith exploration, with titles like Merton and Buddhism, Merton and Sufismand Merton and the Tao.
December will mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of Merton’s untimely death, at the age of 53, in Bangkok. Sobering as it may be to ponder, Merton has been dead longer than he was alive. And in the more than half-century since his death, consider how spirituality in America has played out. Conservative Christianity, in its evangelical and charismatic forms, become politically allied with the Republican party and, more recently, Trumpism. In the last ten to fifteen years psychedelic research is finally happening again, with promising results. Contemplative Christianity has slowly but steadily gained traction thanks to organizations like WCCM, Shalem and Contemplative Outreach, although it is still very much a minority expression of Christian spirituality (I often hear of churches with a thousand members that can attract only ten or twenty people to centering prayer workshops). And interfaith exploration seems to have moved away from traditional religious practice, more embraced by people who identify as “spiritually independent” or “spiritual but not religious” rather than something widespread in Christian circles.
So, back to my question: Does Merton still matter? My friend and colleague Cassidy Hall offered an insightful and challenging response to that question a couple of years ago, with her essay “Maybe It’s Time For Me to Let Go of Thomas Merton.” Hall has served as the secretary of the International Thomas Merton Society and directed a short film on Merton’s hermitage years called Day of a Stranger — so no one can accuse her of not being a serious student of the monk. When I first read this article, I reacted defensively — “Merton is too important to ‘let go of’!” or so I thought. But when I took a deep breath and really reflected on what she had to say I found myself agreeing with much of it.
Merton, as a White cis man and vowed monastic in a patriarchal church, perpetuates damaging exclusivity alongside his wisdom… Maybe it is time to acknowledge that my long obsession with the words and wisdom of Thomas Merton did crowd out other voices and other perspectives, preventing me from hearing them fully—including my own.
The older I get, the more I come to believe that everyone (and every thing) casts a shadow, and rarely is anything in life anything other than a fascinating mix of what is good and what is not-so-good, what can lead to liberation and what can get in the way. Like so many contemplative writers of my generation, my debt to Merton cannot be measured. But like Cassidy Hall, I have to wonder if too much Merton isn’t actually counterproductive: that the time we spending listening to his voice just might be time that could creatively be invested in discovering many other voices including voices outside of traditional religious context, and voices that represent positions without the social privilege that Merton embodied.
In the years to come, I think it’s going to be more important to read Merton as a historical voice rather than a contemporary commentator. In that sense, Merton will always matter, alongside Evelyn Underhill, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin, and other important twentieth century contemplative voices. But reading them is a way of honoring the ancestors. It’s important that we do it, but we need to pair that honoring with a recognition that the challenges and opportunities of today look a lot different from the world of 1948, 1958 and 1968. Can Merton inspire us, inform us, and even educate us? Yes. But his is only one voice, and we make a mistake if we neglect the diversity of voices from today that can speak to the contemplative call in our present circumstances.
The other day I was speaking with a dear friend who said she really loves to read the endorsements in a book — the short blurbs that get printed on the book’s cover or before the title page, where other authors share how much they enjoyed reading the book. For any author, asking your peers to read your not-yet-published book (and waiting to hear back from them) is an angst-producing step in the book’s production process, but it’s always a joy when they respond, usually in ways that make me feel both honored and humbled.
I know not everyone cares about book endorsements, but if you are like my friend, then this post is for you. Here is the advance praise that The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism has received (along with the older endorsements for the first edition as well, which I’m calling the “legacy” endorsements).
Praise for The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism:
“Fine dining here, divine nutrition, a feast of good flavors, each dish more than satisfying and yet seducing you on to the whole grand buffet. Carl McColman has gathered into one place the salty, the savory, the sweet, and the sensuous of the mystical Tradition. He cooks with all the ingredients of the collective unconscious– which is the One Holy Spirit. Taste and be very well fed!”
— Richard Rohr, author of The Universal Christ and The Naked Now
“The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is a guidebook for going deeper on the mystical path. This revised and expanded edition remains thoughtful, insightful and grounded in scholarship; as before, what really makes it sing is the authenticity of the author’s own contemplative journey.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Heart of Centering Prayer and The Corner of Fourth and Nondual
“Mainstream religion, highjacked to a dualistic and zero-sum worldview pitting us against one another and against the planet, is poisoning the human soul. The antidote isn’t reason or secular humanism or even liberal religion, but mysticism: the direct seeing into the nondual Divine happening as all reality. Carl McColman’s The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism provides this antidote for anyone who dares to read it. If you identify as Christian, make this book a new Gospel. If you are not, read it as a catalyst to finding the mystic heart of your own spiritual identity.”
— Rami Shapiro, author of Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent
“Comprehensive, accessible, and dynamic, Carl McColman’s New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is a masterpiece! Chock-full of everything you need to know about mysticism, it’s practical, too. When we read books on spirituality, we want to sense that the author is a practicing contemplative and writing from experience. This meaningfully revised and expanded edition of McColman’s acclaimed classic shows that it transformed during the last decade and more in the author’s own walk along the contemplative path. Offering us a rich mix of history, clear explanation, expertise, practical application, attention to the social dimension, inclusivity, community, and resources for further learning, the New Big Book of Christian Mysticism helps us realize: “If your heart is truly open, it will change your life.” For these chaotic days, this wisdom leads us gently into the deeply ordinary, very human, keenly subversive, and joyful activity we simply call contemplation. McColman’s treasure helps us know more presence, silence, self-compassion, compassion for others, hope, and peace. A must for every spiritual seeker!”
— Carmen Acevedo Butcher, translator of The Cloud of Unknowing, Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, and Hildegard of Bingen
“The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is the right book by the right author at the right time. It is accessible to experienced contemplatives and curious not-yet-beginners alike, and it will guide you to the most fruitful pathways in what Carl McColman rightly calls the best-kept secret of the Christian tradition. I’m so glad that I can recommend this book to many of my friends!”
— Brian D. McLaren, author of Do I Stay Christian? and Faith After Doubt
“Carl McColman’s The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is accessible for those brand new to mysticism and a deep dive for those who have been studying it a lifetime. In this new edition, McColman explores mysticism’s direct connection to topics like embodiment, social justice, eroticism, and sexuality, inviting the reader into mysticism’s aliveness.”
— Cassidy Hall, author of Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality
“A mystic is one whose eyes are open to seeing the Eternal in every fleeting moment of human life on this Earth, and whose heart is open to the Love that permeates through each and everything in this universe. This new volume lays out more of the rich treasures of the Christian tradition for those aspiring to awaken their mystic heart.”
— Ruben L.F. Habito, author of Be Still and Know: Zen and the Bible and Living Zen, Loving God
“The greatest gift of the New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is Carl McColman’s masterful ability to make obscure and esoteric terms clear and accessible. Bringing mysticism and contemplation out of the clouds and down to earth, Carl provides everyday mystics and spiritual seekers with a portal to embrace the Presence unceasingly. I particularly loved how Carl clarifies and offers new perspectives on the basic components of the Christian mystical journey (purification, illumination, union). He also addresses the underside of mysticism and contemplation which include dark nights, spiritual bypassing and ego intrusions. In this extraordinary contribution to the vast body of writing on mysticism, Carl ushers the discussion into contemporary times by noting the ongoing impact of Christian mysticism on struggles for liberation and human dignity. I believe the timeless wisdom contained in this volume will feed and enlighten those who follow in our footsteps.”
— Lerita Coleman Brown, author of What Makes You Come Alive—A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman.
“With The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism, Carl McColman has reawakened in me that deep, radical, relational, tenderness that called me into the practices and lineage of Christian Mysticism. This book offers helpful definition without ceasing to dance, and makes present, both the mystery of Presence, and the wonderful companionship of those who have gone before us.”
— Alana Levandoski, Singer-Songwriter, whose albums include Behold, I Make All Things New and Hymns from the Icons
Signing a copy of the new book at the Ignatius House Retreat Center in Atlanta.
“The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is a must read for anyone wanting to deeply explore the riches of the Christian contemplative tradition. Carl McColman is a trustworthy guide and teacher who beautifully synthesizes the wisdom of the Christian mystics, and invites us to experience the new frontiers of interspirituality. Additionally, McColman’s work includes vital yet often overlooked contributions of BIPOC mystics. This book is truly a gift!“
— Adam Bucko, author of Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide and coauthor of The New Monasticism
“In this wonderful book, Carl McColman reveals the essence of Christian Mysticism in an eloquent, inspiring and powerful narrative. A master teacher, McColman artfully weaves tales from the Bible, together with the lives and insights of Christianity’s best known mystics, to reveal the mystical paths of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In doing so, he invites us into the heart of the Mystery, that which gladdens our hearts, and manifests God’s Love for all of us. A beautiful journey awaits!”
— SeiFu Singh-Molares, Executive Director of Spiritual Directors International
“Carl McColman’s New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is a grace-filled, invaluable resource and practical handbook that invites us into a life more attuned with the Holy, enabling us to live into who we are meant to be as contemplatives-in-action. I will be recommending it to all my “anam charas” – my soul friends on the journey to fullness of life in God’s Love.”
— Caroline Oakes, author of Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What It Means To Be Fully Human
“An amazing resource! If you want to have a sense of the varieties of the Christian spiritual life and insight into the Mystical way; this is a necessary read. You can spend hours wandering through this amazing book. I have.”
— James Ishmael Ford, author of If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break: Field Notes from a Zen Life and co-editor of The Book of Mu: Essential Writings on Zen’s Most Famous Koan
“The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is a true gift! The new edition draws us deeper into the heart of the divine, and Carl McColman is a skillful and trustworthy guide on this journey. He offers ancient and modern examples that both inspire and instruct the reader on how mysticism can be a part of our everyday lives. I am so grateful for this book – I know I will turn to it again and again!”
— Kate H. Rademacher, author of Reclaiming Rest: The Promise of Sabbath, Solitude, and Stillness in a Restless World
“This is not only a big book of Christian mysticism, it is also an extraordinarily accessible book. In clear and engaging prose, McColman lays out what is distinctive of the Christian mystical path, but in a way that calls Christians to learn from the mysticism of other traditions. He describes Christians as “little Christs” who can truly share in Jesus’ awareness of oneness with the God he called ‘Abba.’ – Highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand and practice the mystical foundations of Christian faith.”
— Paul Knitter, author of Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian
“The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism is an invitation to reclaim the mystical heart of Christianity. Written with the depth of a scholar and the soul of a pilgrim, it is accessible, challenging, heartfelt and practical. With clarity and passion, Carl McColman urges us to recognize how relevant mysticism is for our time.”
— Colette Lafia, author of The Divine Heart and Seeking Surrender
“In this generous theoretical and practical exploration of Christian Mysticism, we are offered a compelling Christ-shaped vision of how each of us can live uniquely in the mystery of God’s love. In his usual accessible and down-to-earth writing style, Carl McColman both deepens our longing to know this Great Love for ourselves and to make it more real where we live and work. This labor of love will be a treasured gift for God’s children from all backgrounds.”
— Trevor Hudson, author of Seeking God: Finding Another Kind of Life with St Ignatius and Dallas Willard
Legacy Endorsements (Praise for the first edition):
“Mysticism is not mystifying at all, but simple, always available, and utterly clarifying. Carl McColman’s much-needed book will allow you to experience this for yourself! Christians and all Seekers will find both meat and dessert in such a full meal.”
—Richard Rohr, author of The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See and Everything Belongs
“A wise and supportive guidebook for those going deeper on the Christian mystical path. This book is grounded in sound scholarship and thoughtful reflection (often surprisingly fresh and insightful!), but what makes it sing is the authenticity of the author’s own contemplative journey.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening and The Wisdom Jesus
“Before I heard about The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, I had been think- ing about how such a book has been needed for a long time. Now, having read it, I’m glad we waited for Carl McColman to come along to write it. It’s accessible, human, well-informed, balanced, broad . . . just what we needed.”
—Brian D. McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christianity and A Generous Orthodoxy
“McColman’s book on Christian mysticism is a masterpiece of scholarship and wisdom. This author obviously earned his understanding of mysticism through years of research as well as his own personal spiritual journey and there is no more powerful combination for inspired writing.”
— Caroline Myss, author of Entering the Castle and Anatomy of the Spirit
“With his “Big Book” McColman has pulled off a tour de force: a work on Christian mysticism that is broadly accessible, but deep; scholarly but not pedantic; reverent, but judicious; thorough, but a good read; an excellent introduction to the subject for the general reader, but with plenty of meat for the specialist. Highly recommended for the neophyte, the informed, and the expert alike.”
— Robert D. Hughes, III, author of Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life
“In The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, Carl McColman offers us a thorough and engaging exploration of Christian mysticism which he defines as a form of alchemy – that is, transformation through the Source of all Love. His wise and clear writing takes us on a wide journey through both classical and contemporary mystic guides. Ultimately he invites us to catch a glimpse of the heart of Mystery through concrete suggestions for mystical practice and be transformed ourselves.”
— Christine Valters Paintner, author of Water, Wind, Earth, & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
“If you are looking for both a primer on Christian mysticism as well as an in-depth treatment of this oft-misunderstood aspect of the spiritual life, here is your book. Readable, useful, well-researched, Carl McColman’s Big Book of Christian Mysticism helps both the novice and those already well along on the journey toward a deeper relationship with God to see that mysticism is ultimately not at all a mysterious quest, but a human— and possible—one.”
— Paul Wilkes, author of Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life
“A brilliant contribution from a clear, concise and articulate author! Carl McColman’s Big Book deepens the conversation as he explores the paradoxes of the mystical/traditional approaches, outlines the bias against cultivating an interior life and illuminates the reader on practices to embrace in order to relate to a dynamic Living God.
— Lauren Artress, author of Walking a Sacred Path
“McColman’s book is wise and wonderful, deceptively simple! Are you interested in having a relationship with something that’s ultimately unknowable? Me too. It’s not easy, but dig in, here!”
— Jon M. Sweeney, author of Almost Catholic and The St. Francis Prayer Book
“In this delightfully accessible book, Carl McColman dispels the notion that Christian mysticism exists somewhere in the ether, and reveals its solid, earthy roots. If you want a rich, nourishing life of faith, and virtues that flourish like wildflowers, read Christian Mysticism, and let the good news in it transform you.”
— Claudia Mair Burney, author of God Alone is Enough: A Spirited Pilgrimage with St. Teresa of Avila
“Mysticism is at the heart of faith, whatever religious or denominational flag we raise. Thoughtful, well-written doorways into these mysteries, such as this one, matter a great deal to all of us who seek communion with the Mystery Itself.”
— Robert Benson, author of In Constant Prayer
“Carl McColman’s new book is truly a work of art as well as a spiritual guide for those who want to know more about Christian mysticism. Writing for a broad audience of readers, Carl wants everyone to become aware of that rich history and its potential meaning for today. He writes in a lively, engaging style, but his work comes out of deep wells of spiritual wisdom. Appealing to both head and heart, his book not only makes the history of Christian mysticism accessible, but also provides for readers guidance in prayer, contemplation, and transformation itself. For Carl, the great mystics are not just people specially gifted, but soul friends and spiritual mentors for anyone who seeks to live today with some degree of interiority, integrity, and joy. I highly recommend this book not only for general readers interested in mysticism and spirituality, but also for undergraduate or graduate students who need an introduc- tion to what Carl himself calls “this ancient wisdom tradition.”
— Ed Sellner, author of Wisdom of the Celtic Saints and Finding the Monk Within: Great Monastic Values for Today
In Loving Memory (Endorsers from the First Edition Who Have Passed Away):
“Carl McColman has both studied and practiced the Christian mystical tradition, stressing its earthiness and ‘ordinariness.’ Like Thomas Merton, Michael Ramsey, and others, he holds that mysticism is not an esoteric realm reserved for the very holy, but is what all Christian life is about. I strongly commend this book.”
—Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), author of Soul Friend and Prayer and Prophecy
“Charmingly and conversationally written, but also rich in nuance and thorough in its coverage and its attention to detail, The Big Book is, as its name suggests, a big—even an enormous—contribution to our current literature on the subject. Highly recommended.”
—Phyllis Tickle (1934-2015), author of The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why and God-Talk in America
I’m happy to invite you to register for an online offering Contemplative Prayer Summit that is taking place on September 23 and 24, 2023. Click here to register.
Just for the sake of transparency, I am not speaking at this event (I’m leading a retreat that week) — but plenty of wonderful people are, like Kaira Jewel Lingo, Ruben Habito, Cassidy Hall, Matthew Wright, and Margaret Benefiel! Any one of these people would be worth the cost of this event — so it’s a bargain to have access to all of them!
This event is sponsored by Closer Than Breath, which is one of the most exciting contemplative prayer organizations on the internet today. I’ve done two programs with them this year, and the plan is for me to do others in the future. But this event is a great opportunity to connect with a great group of contemplative writers and speakers, that I am confident you will love.
The Contemplative Prayer Summit is an online program designed to support anyone interested in starting or deepening a silent prayer practice, and ultimately to find healing, renewal, and spiritual insight in God.
The theme for this September summit is Contemplation and Interspirituality. This two day event will feature presentations from eight contemplative teachers drawing on the wealth of insight from the world’s great contemplative traditions.
Some of the of the topics and presentations will cover themes like:
“This-ness”: The Franciscan spirituality of John Duns Scotus & Ilia Delio
The way of remembrance: Sufi practices to awaken the heart
Contemplative spirituality & activism
This sacred body: the body’s essential role in contemplative prayer
Nonduality and the heart of prayer
And much more.
When you sign up, you’ll also get access to the recordings of this summit; so if (like me) you can’t attend in person, you can still enjoy the depth and beauty of wisdom from these contemplative teachers at your own pace. But to have access to the recordings, you need to register!
The Contemplative Summit costs only $99 if you register by September 1 (the price goes up starting September 2). But please do not let finances be a barrier. See the “FAQ” section on the registration page to find out how to apply for a partial scholarship.
This event is hosted by Keith Kristich and Jana Rentzel of Closer Than Breath — each of whom could easily be featured speakers at this event in their own right!
Full disclosure: if you register after clicking on this link on my website, I’ll get a commission (I appreciate it, that supports my work!) but I’m not just promoting this for the money — in all honesty, I believe so much in this line-up of speakers that I would promote this event even if there was no commission for me. (but since there is, please register after clicking on this link here, and thank you!)
Friends, I’m running a flash sale on the first edition of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism — I only have a few copies left in stock, and I need to find them new homes to make room for my forthcoming inventory of the second (new) edition!
I’m selling them now for only $4.99 plus shipping! Each one will be autographed, so get a copy or two to give away! Once these are gone, they’ll be discontinued from my website.
Be one of the first persons to get an autographed copy of the new edition! Pre-order your copy of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism today, and I’ll ship it to you as soon as possible once my shipment of books arrive (expected mid-August). Remember, each book will be autographed.
If you order both, I’ll send you the old edition when I receive your order, and the new edition when the books are available.
Why get both? Well, the first edition is now dirt cheap, so isn’t that a great reason to get a copy? And the second edition contains all the goodness of the first, plus about 100 pages of new material!
Does the experience of interspirituality open one up to charges of some sort of ‘cultural misappropriation’ because I might adopt some practices or texts or whatever from a spiritual/religious tradition that was not my own? Is it only a hardened fundamentalist who would level that charge if I’m seen not staying inside my own house and yard?
Kurt, this is an important question. Thanks for posing it. Let me begin by reviewing what cultural appropriation (or, in your words, misappropriation) is, in case any readers are not familiar with the concept. Wikipedia’s definition is actually pretty good:
Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be especially controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. (accessed 6-28-2023)
I remember back in the early 1990s, when the movie Dances with Wolves was such a big hit, there was a period of time when Native American spirituality was all the rage. And suddenly white people were lining up to participate in sweat lodge ceremonies. It sure seemed like, for many of them, this was a kind of spiritual tourism where they were eager to have the unusual (for them) experience of a sweat lodge, but without any real engagement with the depth of Native American spirituality, or the guidance of a Native American elder, or an understanding of how indigenous spirituality is linked to an entire way of life with ethical and moral values that matter just as much as the ceremonies or rituals.
In other words, white folks were appropriating (taking) an important element of Native American spiritual culture, without meaningfully acknowledging what was going on, or how it might be experienced by many native people, who saw the taking of their spirituality as just one more dimension of the longstanding of whites taking from indigenous people whatever they wanted.
So no wonder that many Native American people really want whites to leave their spirituality alone.
I’m using sweat lodges as an example I’m familiar with, but cultural appropriation can happen any time members of a dominant culture plunder a minority culture without meaningful respect. And cultural appropriation isn’t just a spirituality issue: any aspect of culture (art, technology, architecture, music, clothing, etc.) can be taken by members of a more powerful/dominant culture without proper acknowledgment or recompense. Cultural appropriation is basically a form of theft.
So back to Kurt’s question. Interspirituality involves the conscious and intentional integration of spiritual teachings and practices from different cultures and religious traditions. Christians exploring Buddhism; Jews practicing Vedanta — that sort of thing. As a contemplative whose spiritual background is Christian, I have long been interested in the east-meets-west ethos of Christians who integrate their spirituality with elements of other faith traditions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Paganism. But is this an “inappropriate or unacknowledged” type of cultural consumption? Or is interspirituality a more balanced and respectful practice of “acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange”?
The short answer is, it depends.
Christianity, at least in the west, is a dominant religious tradition embedded in dominant cultures, especially white European/American culture. Given the tragic history of white chauvinism and the long practice of enslaving people of color, colonizing their land, and stealing their natural resources, those of us who are white need to be mindful that our interest in spiritualities from marginalized cultures is not about our feelings of entitlement or self-directed need to consume other spiritual cultures just because they are different or “exotic.”
Meanwhile, some types of spiritual exchange are not properly speaking forms of “appropriation.” I remember asking an Asian Zen priest I know if it is a form of cultural appropriation for me, a white Christian, to practice zazen. “Of course not,” he replied. “I, and most Buddhists I know, want white people to practice zazen! We think that would make the world a better place.”
So it’s important to understand the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. Appropriation is a type of theft. It’s a consuming act where members of a more powerful society “consume” the spiritual culture of a less dominant community, typically without any meaningful acknowledgment or humble commitment to learn from the people who are being ripped off. It’s a form of hubris: “I’ll just help myself to this, thank you very much.” It is not relational and not respectful.
But what if members of the dominant culture (such as whites from Europe and America) were humble, respectful, and considerate in their desire to learn and practice other spiritual practices? And were able to connect with qualified teacher and elders who could instruct them, not just in the fun bits of a spirituality, but in the entire tradition? And what if these students recognized that they needed to pair their interest in spiritual practices from other cultures with a meaningful commitment to support the people from that culture? These are the kinds of questions that can help us to understand the difference between a one-sided appropriation and a more interactive/egalitarian exchange.
Now, I know there are Native Americans who would say “We don’t want to share our spirituality with you, go home and practice your own faith better.” Clearly, this needs to be respected. Meanwhile, there may be other native folks who are willing to share, as long as their wisdom is received with respect and humility. Each person will have to decide for themself whether they should respect the boundaries of the ones who say no, or go ahead and learn from the ones who are willing to share, even though that ignores the wishes of others. But I hope that in any case, the effort to learn a spiritual practice from another culture will only be undertaken with care, respect, and sensitivity to the cultural issues that make many people unhappy about sharing their spirituality.
Cultures cross-fertilize each other for many reasons (and have been doing so since the dawn of history). Sometimes cultures merge as a result of war, conquest, migration or trade. Interspirituality represents an invitation for cultural encounter and exchange, in terms of religion and spirituality. Some people (in all cultures) will oppose this kind of acculturation, but their reasons for such opposition may vary from culture to culture. For people in dominant cultures, there can be a desire to keep their culture “pure” (think of Hitler trying to expunge all elements of Judaism from German society). Meanwhile, people from marginalized cultures may be desperately trying to keep their spiritual traditions from disappearing or dying out. We need to respect how these are different motivations, even though the end result (let’s not mix our cultures) looks the same.
As much as I believe interspirituality is good for the entire human family, I understand these reasons why some might oppose this kind of spiritual cross-fertilization. My only hope is that we can foster a society where cultural diversity is respected and preserved, even if a broad “mainstream” culture emerges that integrates interspiritual ideas and practices.
Kurt, again, thanks for a great question, and there’s no easy answer. But if you want to explore interspirituality, I encourage you to approach the topic with reverence, respect, and humility. If you are trying to learn about other religious and spiritual traditions from a book or video, don’t stop there; seek out qualified teachers who can help you to understand the fullness of the tradition that you are drawn to. Take the time to learn with depth, care, and gratitude. Ask yourself “What gift or blessing can I offer in return for the spiritual wisdom that I am gaining?” It’s a serious and important question. How you answer that one question may be the key to the difference between respectful exchange and toxic appropriation. So be discerning.
My good friend and colleague Jana Rentzel of Closer Than Breath invited me to answer a few questions about interspiritual mysticism — which is the topic of my forthcoming talk at Closer Than Breath’s Christian Mysticism Summit. I’ll be speaking at this online summit on Thursday, June 22, as part of a week-long event with either other amazing speakers, including Valerie Brown, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, David Cole, Michael Gungor, and more! This event is free, so please register and join us this coming June! Click here to register.
Meanwhile, scroll down to see the questions — and my replies.
How did you get interested in interspiritual mysticism?
I came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when “interspiritual mysticism” was in the air (although we didn’t call it that back then). Everyone knew the Beatles went to India to study meditation with the Maharishi, and George Harrison came back and wrote My Sweet Lord, which 50 years later is still the most beautiful interspiritual song I’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, writers like Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ram Dass, Carlos Castaneda, and many others were writing about spirituality from perspectives other than the garden-variety Protestant Christianity that I grew up in. It was part of the zeitgeist of the post-hippie era that spiritual practices from the east: yoga, zen, advaita vedanta, and so forth — were widely accepted as meaningful paths for inner exploration. Meanwhile, other authors, like Evelyn Underhill, Morton Kelsey, and Thomas Merton, were introducing me to the mystical tradition within Christianity, which (again) was not really a topic of exploration in my neighborhood suburban church. For me, it was a revelation to see that I could read books like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and Underhill’s Mysticism and recognize that, at a level deeper than the cultural distinctions of our different religious traditions, there is a universal oneness: what Wayne Teasdale (who coined the word “interspirituality”) called The Mystic Heart.
For me personally, while I was raised as a Christian and in many ways it remains my “home” faith, thanks to the cultural zeitgeist of my youth, I’ve always been a bit of a wanderer. In my young adult years I was active in the Episcopal Church but also studying meditation at the Shalem Institute, where I was introduced to Tibetan Buddhism. Meanwhile, many of my friends were engaging in Wicca and other forms of nature/goddess spirituality. Again and again I could see the mystical unity beneath all these different religious forms. And in the words of Pete the Cat, I could see that “It’s all good!”
What benefit is there to approaching spirituality from an interspiritual perspective?
Ultimately, I think interspirituality is about the truth. As much as I love Christian mysticism, the long tradition within Christianity of labelling other faiths and spiritualities as “demonic” or “erroneous” or “superstitious” or even merely “inferior” is simply a great tragedy — and manifestly untrue. Granted, individuals (and even entire communities or nations) might find that they are more comfortable with one particular faith tradition, or find it easier to go deeper by being loyal to their one chosen path. I have no problem with that; in fact, I believe it is a good spiritual practice to be faithful to one particular tradition — it’s a great discipline for lessening the hold of the ego. So Christianity (or any other positive spirituality) might be “the one true path” for some people. But that doesn’t make it universally the “only” way. So interspirituality helps us to remember the basic, evident truth that there are many paths up the mountain (and you can be interspiritual while also diving deep into your primary spiritual path; in fact, I suspect most interspiritual contemplatives follow that model, diving deep into one particular tradition but getting richly nourished from others as well).
Interspirituality is also beneficial because it can help individuals (and groups) to be more compassionate, hospitable and generous toward those who are different from ourselves. Religious violence — from the Holy Land to Northern Ireland to the violence against Muslims and Jews in America — is always tragic and utterly needless. Interspirituality teaches us to respect the humanity of all people, and the more people who get that lesson, the less violence there will be in the future.
What is unique about Christian mysticism when compared to other mystical traditions?
There are two dimensions to mystical experience: that which cannot be put into words, and that which can. My sense is that it is the “words” — the stories, myths, legends, doctrines, dogmas, teachings, instructions about practices, and so forth — that ultimately distinguish Christian mysticism from Hindu mysticism from earth-based mysticism, etc. etc. etc. The ineffable experiences: the experience of silence, of ego dissolution, of infinite light and joy, of overwhelming compassion — those experiences exist beyond language, so we can’t use our words to try to describe, but that also means our words cannot divide this mystical experience from that. I hope that makes sense — it’s always tricky trying to use words to describe what cannot be put into words!
To answer your question: so what is unique about Christian mysticism is all the “wordy” stuff: the stories that shape our identities, that help us know our history, that give us the wisdom of great mystics from the past whose writings (words) continue to inspire us, etc. Yes, this includes doctrines and dogmas: for example, Christian mysticism is very Christ-centered, which would be unique among the great mystical traditions. Now, interesting question: when a Buddhist enters satori, is she having the same kind of experience as a Christian caught up in a sense of union with God? Different people will have different opinions, but ultimately you simply can’t answer that question: because as soon as you start using language, you are back in the world of duality and distinction. Even if someone was raised a Christian, had a Christian mystical experience, and then began to practice the dharma and ultimately realized satori, we still would never know for sure, because their experience of Buddhism would be forever colored by their Christian upbringing (in other words, someone raised in a Buddhist culture and never exposed to Christian doctrines: would their experience of satori be identical to that of the Christian-turned-Buddhist? Again, the answer could never be definitively put into words). Mysticism always has an element of mystery about it, and that mystery ultimately lies beyond the limit of human language.
Another problem here is that once we inhabit the dualistic consciousness shaped by language, it is so tempting to play the compare game. Is Christian mysticism “better” than Buddhist mysticism? Is Christian mysticism “inferior” to Advaita Vedanta? See how pernicious that kind of thinking is? Again, no one can answer these questions! So even to speculate is to get caught into the stickiness of the ego. The best practice is to let silence be silence, mystery be mystery, joy be joy, and so forth; and then enjoy the stories, myths, teachings etc. of your faith, but without getting ensnared by them. I love the doctrine of the trinity, for example, because it suggests that “God” is at heart a circle of loving relationships. I think that’s beautiful. But the minute I start saying that’s the “only valid way” to talk about God, I’ve fallen into another snare of the ego.
What advice do you have for anyone interested in interspirituality and mysticism?
I’m going to assume most people who read this blog come out of the Christian tradition, so my answer will be geared toward Christians, but hopefully followers of other faiths can adapt it to their specific circumstances. My advice (it’s always dangerous to give spiritual advice, by the way!) has pretty much already been touched on in this post, so this is really just a summary.
First, go as deep as you can in your own tradition. I love it that the Dalai Lama encourages Christians to be faithful to Christianity rather than just running off to become Buddhists. Not that there’s anything wrong with becoming a Buddhist (or a Christian, or a Buddhist-Christian!) But you don’t have to change religions to find your way to the center, and if you keep changing religions every time you get bored or restless or someone or something offends you, it’s just your ego in the driver’s seat. Dilettantism can be as corrosive to the spiritual life as fundamentalism (although fundamentalism tends to be more annoying to others!). In other words, avoid getting lost in the idea that your religion is the only true way (that’s a key component of fundamentalism), but also beware of flitting from one religion to another looking to be entertained or find a spiritual quick fix — that’s dilettantism. Aim for the golden mean, where you allow yourself to dive deep in one specific path, even while you remain open to learning from others.
Next, hold your teachings/doctrines/dogmas as lightly as possible, while still respecting universal wisdom. This is another problem of fundamentalism: it takes dogma and doctrine way too seriously, to the point of weaponizing religious teachings. That’s such a pointless error! Religion and spirituality are meant to cultivate love, and joy, and compassion and forgiveness, not to provide refuges for being afraid of, angry toward, or aggressive toward others. Now, “holding your teachings lightly” is not an excuse to just ignore inconvenient teachings, and a good rule of thumb is, the more universal a teaching is, the more seriously we should take it. Christianity is the only religion that requires you to believe God is a trinity, but every major religion prohibits violence, lying and theft. Guess which teachings are the more important?
A third suggestion is to learn what you can about the path(s) that interest you. No one has the time to fully embrace all the world’s wisdom traditions — indeed, no one has time to fully know even one tradition! So interspirituality always involves a measure of discernment. Take me for example: I am a committed Christian, but also deeply engaged with Buddhism, and to a lesser extent love shamanic/indigenous/pagan traditions. Those alone keep me plenty busy! So I don’t spend as much time exploring other traditions like Kabbalah, Sufism or Vedanta (even though I find them all interesting). You can cultivate a general knowledge of all the great paths, or go deep(er) in one or maybe just a few traditions. Be realistic, and humble: you can’t master it all, but you can find great joy in exploring that paths that call to you.
When possible, get to know people who practice the faiths you are drawn to. I’ve been reading books about Buddhism since I was in college, but it’s only been in the past few years that I have actually begun visiting sanghas and forming friendships with Buddhists. As much as I enjoyed doing the research, forming meaningful friendships is so much better. Again, our adversary is time: most people don’t have enough hours in the day to be actively involved in a church and a sangha and a Sufi order! So we have to be discerning. But it’s people, not books, that make interspiritual exploration so enriching.
Finally, remember the heart of interspirituality is practice. Now we’re back to the two dimensions of mysticism. If you read a bunch of books about different spiritual paths, you can learn a lot and widen your perspective, but you’re still swimming dualistic waters. At some point you have to augment all your research with embodied, heart-centered spiritual practices: going on retreat, practicing zazen, centering prayer, Ignatian exercises, yoga, working with a koan, and so forth. Practices take us beyond the limits of human words and concepts, but that’s also pointing us to the top of the mountain, where we all hope to go, even though we walk different paths. One of my first teachers used to say “Don’t let reading about prayer get in the way of actually praying. Set the book down and pray!” Or meditate, or contemplate, or serve those in need — take your spirituality out of your head and into your heart. That’s where you’ll ultimately discover that we are all one.
One last suggestion: sign up for the Christian Mysticism Summit that will take place June 18-22, since I will be speaking on this very topic! (yes, that’s a plug) — it’s free, and you can register for it here: www.christianmysticsummit.com.
