As I danced down the sidewalk, the monstrous cockroaches that emerged in hordes at night fled beneath my bare feet.
I was 23, very high on LSD, and starring in a rousing dance number of my own creation, choreographed to music only I could hear. I was aflame with infinite love light beauty wisdom awareness truth compassion (whichever abstract word or emotion I felt), a litany I shared with baffled friends once I’d reached my destination. I believed I was alive—really, truly alive. And LSD got me there.
A year earlier, a self-styled acid guru had offered me the drug at a low point in my young life, and I’d accepted. It changed everything—the series of botched jobs I’d had since graduating college didn’t seem to matter anymore.
My second trip on LSD felt so transcendent that I called my dad the day after to tell him, tearfully, that I believed in God now. Of course, I omitted the fact that I’d come by this revelation while on drugs and that I couldn’t begin to define this “god.” To my dad, a believer, it must have appeared to be a step forward, or at least a step away from the combative atheism of my youth.
After that, I became a rabid proselytizer for psychedelics. I had felt an unbearable chasm between me and the source of life, whatever or whomever that was. I thought maybe LSD could bridge it—and it seemed to for a while.
“It’s like it breaks you out of linear time!” I yelled to a bewildered former colleague at a noisy bar, scrawling an illustration on a napkin. “It’s like you inhale the whole world.”
I couldn’t have said where LSD was taking me. Here, there, everywhere, and that was enough for me. Or so I thought. But soon, a shadow of dread, barely perceptible, eclipsed my ecstasy. Where was I going? I couldn’t have said. What was life? What was death? Did it matter?
I met my husband at our drug dealer’s house during a snowstorm, in a giddy fever of acid-saturated infatuation, and we were married in less than a year. We were certain we were on the cusp of a psychedelic revolution.
After our first child was born, though, I began to question the New Age ideals I’d embraced, the ones that dovetailed so readily with my LSD trips. I believed we were all one and we were all God: The icon of the Hindu goddess Kali on our wall was as much a manifestation of God as the Ganesh statuette on a shelf. There was no such thing as sin. Suffering was an illusion to be overcome.
Yet the suffering of childbirth had felt very, very real. And the harder I tried to police my own thoughts, the more I found I couldn’t purify my own rancid heart, even though the concept of sin was anathema to the circles in which I ran.
A friend gave us a children’s book that aimed to introduce New Age concepts such as how we will be absorbed back into cosmic oneness upon death. “I am my ball, I am my feet,” the little boy in the illustrations stated happily. “I am the puppy across the street!”
I’d uncritically accepted these concepts when they came through more sophisticated words—but now that they were distilled into a child’s simple declaratives, my heart reared back in disgust. I looked at my precious son, golden haired with squishy toddler rolls, and I realized I didn’t want him to be absorbed back into the oneness. My heart rebelled and grew faint at the very idea, yet I didn’t know where else to turn.
With my pregnancy and the birth of our son, our psychedelic use had largely given way to practices like yoga and meditation, but we still relished the rare night to ourselves when we could trip. It was better this way, I convinced myself—rarer and therefore more transcendent.
But the truth was I could no longer seem to have a good trip. There was, at best, a hum of dread underlying the whole experience—or, at worst, terror and disintegration. And I couldn’t seem to shake the idea that LSD was no longer a glimmering path to destinations beyond.
Kerry was a childhood friend of mine who had never abandoned the Christian faith in which she was raised, and she embraced it with a fresh fervor in college. It made me roll my eyes. I cringed at the earnestness of her genuine belief that there was a God who acted directly in her life, and I felt allergic to hearing anything about Jesus.
We reconnected after we both had children, and she invited me into her home for playdates. She had a son a year or two older than mine and a daughter named Joella, an adorable baby with large blue eyes and a pigtail on each side of her head.
Joella and her older brother would sit next to my son and sift through Cheerios while I would talk to Kerry about whatever New Age theory I was into lately. Kerry would never balk or start in outrage at anything I said, but she would also never affirm me, only quietly and gently refute me with Bible verses, many of which she had memorized.
The Word of God had no immediate effect on me, but her persistence in reciting from it was like a consistent flow of water over rock. In the still of the night, after I’d gone home, my confident dismissal of it didn’t seem so firm. But I couldn’t yet yield to the mysteries of sin, blood, sacrifice, and God-with-us that Christianity offered.
And then Joella died.
Three weeks after her diagnosis, the leukemia did its evil work. She had just turned two. At her funeral, I approached the tiny casket, trembling, while my own eight-week-old baby moved imperceptibly in my womb.
Almost as confounding as the tragedy itself was how Kerry and her husband were being sustained through it by something that I couldn’t yet fathom. They were heartbroken yet not completely destroyed. They grieved, but as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, they did not grieve as those without hope. I was mystified.
Kerry told me the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul” had ministered to her and her husband in the wake of Joella’s passing. Horatio Spafford composed it just days after losing four of his daughters at sea, she said. I put it on a playlist but then promptly forgot about it.
It wasn’t until several months later that I listened to the hymn. Sitting on the front porch while my children played, my attention was drawn to the rich harmony of voices coming through the screen door:
My sin, oh, the bliss of this
glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross,
and I bear it no more.
Suddenly, all the trifling New Age conceptions of what ailed humanity were insufficient to account for the sordid mess of history. There was something very wrong with me, with us. The tragic death of a child woke me up to the fact that the world was broken, and so was I. All my journeys into the psychedelic hinterlands, all my attempts to clear my mind through meditation, all my grueling yoga sessions for the sake of some elusive “enlightenment” were worse than worthless. I couldn’t save myself. But Jesus could.
Jesus on the cross. Jesus resurrected. God who became flesh to save us. There could be no other savior, no other path to transcendence, I knew. It was humbling and wondrous to realize that Jesus Christ would not be co-opted into my pantheon of gods. He made a claim upon my whole life that demanded a response.
When my husband got home from work that evening, I told him we needed to toss all our syncretistic bric-a-brac. With gods like these, I thought as I pulled down the image of Kali, with her lei of decapitated heads, who needs demons? My husband readily agreed. All the while, God had been at work in his life too.
A couple months later, I met Kerry at a busy playground. While the buzz of screaming children whirled around us and our own children played in the sand nearby, I tearfully told her that I had embraced Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
“Praise God!” she said, her own eyes glistening with tears.
My husband and I started going to church regularly, and we never tripped again—though it took years to heal from the damage I’d inflicted on my fragile mind with drugs. I don’t thank the Lord enough for restoring me to relative sanity after how many times I assailed my brain with chemicals.
In the end, I finally found the thing that would make everything okay forever—in the last place I wanted to look.
Ashley Lande is a writer and artist living in rural Kansas with her husband and four children. She is the author of the memoir The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ.
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