I have debated with myself for a long time about whether or not I should start blogging or talking publicly about my recent use of cannabis. In some ways speaking out about this subject poses certain risks, especially as one rooted in Christianity and an institutional church structure that has always been very distrustful of hallucinogenics. (Aside: However, as a former professor friend recently reminded me, "Even the Eucharist is half composed of mind altering substances," referring obviously to the alcohol in wine. And according to Dr. Jordan Peterson, even food (i.e. bread) changes our level of consciousness in ways we often ignore. What was the Eucharist originally but feasting and drinking with friends?!?)
Back to pot though. My own relationship with it is itself an interesting case study that I submit to the open examination of anyone who cares to read about my experience.
As a good evangelical Christian and Free Methodist, I avoided drugs and alcohol throughout high school and college. I was as clean and straight-laced as one could be on the issue. In fact, I remember a moment in high school when a girl handed me a flyer for a party at her house. No sooner was it in my hand than her friend snatched it back and scolded her friend, "Don't give one of these to Greg. He would never come to a party like this." So that was me in high school: square, stuck up, judgmental (I was a bible quizzer for God's sake!), and certainly not the kind of guy one would invite to a house party.
My first experience with pot came YEARS later while I was living in Durham, NC and attending Duke Divinity School in 2013. I had just turned 32 years old and -- wow! -- had my life changed! Skipping all the details about how I got married at age 21, lived in China for a year, attended seminary in Kentucky, pastored in urban Indianapolis for four years (during which time I really, truly lost my faith), and then returned to academia after admitting defeat in my attempts to serve as a spiritual guide for hurting people... skipping all of that, I found myself one morning with a pot brownie in my hand that I had ordered off of a shady website. I had no knowledge at all of marijuana other than what I'd seen depicted in films. No friend had ever introduced me to it or "coached" me through my first "high."
So one day when I was terribly depressed I took a huge bite out of the pot brownie and waited. Nearly an hour later (just when I thought that nothing was going to happen), I collapsed on the couch for what would turn out to be a long, lonely, and horrifying first trip into the world of hallucinogenics. I was deeply overwhelmed with a profound fear -- almost a "fear of God," I would say -- and I found myself repeatedly praying what I could recall of The Lord's Prayer. I spent nearly the entire day in sincere prayer, asking God to forgive me for toying with something I didn't understand. "Lord, forgive me" became a kind of mantra for me and I swore I'd never play around with pot ever again.
Fast forwarding to 2016 and I'm in another deep, dark depression. My long-time battle with opiates seemed to be losing, I still felt a deep and abiding failure over the abrupt ending to my pastoral tenure, my marriage seemed to be increasingly strained and unhappy, I was experiencing deep discontentment with my research and academic life, I played way too many video games, and my life generally felt quite devoid of hope. Without realizing it, I was a nihilist and was living within a hell of my own creation. I held other people at arm's length, not quite even knowing why I was doing it. Of course, ultimately, this "self curved in upon the self" led to my wife making the (courageous? foolhardy?) decision to insist on a separation in February of this year. As my life unravelled before my eyes, my marriage and church and home and career seemed to be all slipping from my grasp and the tighter I tried to cling to it, the faster it escaped from me. Though I had dabbled in pot a couple of times -- once with a friend around a bonfire in the summer of 2016 -- I didn't really try to get "stoned" because I was too scared of the stuff. I feared the paranoia that had overwhelmed me back in Durham.
Then came a night of severe, deep despair in early April. Courtney and I had been separated for six or seven weeks, we'd had a horrible counseling session that revealed to me how deeply she wanted to divorce me, and I was crashing at a friend's apartment (as I had been off and on for weeks). I bought some pot from a friend of a friend and decided that, because I had nothing left to lose and because I no longer cared whether or not I lived or died, I would say a prayer to God and get very, very stoned.
Now that juxtaposition struck me even then. The idea that I would pray and cry out to "God" that he would "bless" my use of marijuana -- this was an insane idea for a born-and-raised midwestern good evangelical such as myself. But I was in "screw it" mode and, since I didn't really believe in God anyway, I figured, "What the hell?"
What happened next changed (and saved) my life. I deliberately smoked a LOT of weed, and did so with a very low tolerance, knowing full well that I might be asking for trouble. Yet my desperation for God or comfort or for
ANY DAMN THING other than what I was experiencing in my "real" life led me to seek getting really stoned. And that's precisely what happened. Yet I did not -- and still do not -- really have the language to describe the experience. Words fail sometimes to really capture reality. Yet I will try to describe the "trip" that night:
I went and lay down on the bed my friend had provided for me and almost immediately felt the fear and paranoia rush in. I could feel my body and mind beginning to enter into a full-blown panic. It was all I could do not to call 911 and ask them to rush me to the hospital. Yet I was able to push through to my left-brained reasoning mind and to remind myself, "OK. Don't worry. No one dies from this. You've read the news stories and you know that people do not die from marijuana overdose. So try to relax." But as soon as this comforting thought entered my mind, it would be snatched away from my memory.
Many people experience this when stoned: a loss of short term memory function. So what ensued felt like a sort of spiritual or mental warfare between different parts of my mind. One side was saying, "Be afraid. Be horrified. You are in hell." But then the other side of my mind (or what it an angel?) would say, "DO NOT BE AFRAID. You are safe. Have no worries." This battle raged for... I have no idea. I had lost all sense of time's passage or importance. All moments were NOW and I had to decide which voice in my head to feed. So I opted, of course, to believe the voice in my mind that kept saying, "Do not fear. Trust. Believe. You are safe." (Can you already hear how this was a spiritual experience even though I certainly didn't intend for it to be so!?) And so in order to hold within my mind the truth that I would survive the night, I began to repeat to myself over and over and over like a mantra the words that the angel had spoken to me, "You're safe." But as time passed my mantra took on a double meaning: not only did it mean "You're safe. You don't need to call an ambulance or go to a hospital;" it started to mean instead "You're safe. Your life is within the hands of an all-powerful and all-good God. You should not worry or be afraid about anything in life because you are in God's hands whether you want to be or not." By this point, I obviously could not interpret my experience as anything but fundamentally spiritual. I believed and still believe today that I was having a kind of "prayer moment" or "communion" with the divine that I simply cannot explain. Of course some will make a joke of it and say, "Dang, Greg was trippin'!" or some foolishness like that, but I will insist that my experience was fundamentally spiritual and healing in its nature... and that it was
real to me. That night I proceeded to watch some meditative and prayerful videos send to me by my little sister. (I still regularly meditate to the videos produced by
these guys.) The next several hours were pure peace and rest and bliss; I was experiencing a deep healing and in a way that I would have least expected it. Could it be that at this lowest of my low moments, God had met me through this strange plant? I still don't know what to make of it, but I believe it is what happened.
The experience I had that night got me through the days and weeks to come: rehab, detox from opiates (and I haven't relapsed!), being served divorce papers by a sheriff while sick in rehab, losing my daughters in a nasty legal battle, and the almost complete "death" of my former life. As rehab in May turned into a June and July and August lived at my parents' home, the despair continued creeping in. What I had lost was staggering to my mind and I often did not wish to continue living. Not only had I lost my wife and kids and church, but I also lost my faith (again) to despair. I began to doubt the validity of the "weed" experience in April as the memory of it began to fade (isn't this one of our fundamental problems as humans: we always keep forgetting). That's when in mid-August I decided to turn once again to marijuana for help, especially since I seemed to have very little left to lose...
To be continued.
