AND SO I SIT THERE, HIGH ON MUSHROOMS, TAKING A SHIT IN THE BATHROOM OF THE pastor’s home. It’s been hours since I ate the chocolate, and I still feel no closer to God. Everything remains so far away: Jesus, Sonya and the kids, and (most of all) any sense of self-worth.
That’s why I came here, to Colorado, to meet two of the clergy who are part of the underground movement. Sonya didn’t want me to. I had to convince her that this trip might save my career, save me. But taking psilocybin like it’s some kind of sacrament seems to only hide now the deeper truth of my life: I’ve fucked up everywhere, starting with the fact that two thousand miles away my wife is distressed and can’t even drive the lone car we have, because it’s broken.
I’m muttering, and realize I’m muttering, as I stare at the candle in the bathroom. I finish up, wash my hands, look in the mirror.
I take a deep breath and open the door.
The pastor is standing right there.
He looks at me, asks, “You okay?”
THE DEPRESSION CAME ELEVEN YEARS INTO THE LIFE THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE him happy.
Hunt Priest was the rector at an Episcopal church in Washington state. It wasn’t the griping of con-gregants that got to him, and it wasn’t his wife’s Lyme disease, either, though that didn’t help—she still dealt with joint pain, heart palpitations, and brain fog six years after she was bitten by that tick, with no treatment covered by insurance. Her illness strained the family financially, strained their marriage. But the root of Hunt’s pain, he told his clergy friends, was a feeling that he was “out of alignment.”
He explained how he’d felt called by God to give up a career as an ad copywriter in Atlanta to go to seminary at age thirty-seven. After ordination and jokes about finally living up to his name, Priest left the South to serve a church three thousand miles away, on Mercer Island outside Seattle. Here he was, eleven-plus years into the calling that was supposed to give him purpose, and instead he felt—in every rote church meeting and in the anguished hours it took to write a sermon—that his work was somehow already done. God seemed at a remove. Worse, God seemed uninspired. Where was the awe Priest had experienced as a child in Kentucky? The boy who’d walked behind his family’s home to the fields that stretched to the Appalachian Mountains and felt awash in God’s presence was now a fifty-year-old man who no longer knew what he felt.
He tried a therapist. “He coded me with an anxiety disorder,” Priest says.
Someone suggested reading the progressive magazine The Christian Century, which publishes stories that deal with people of faith who questioned their paths. In one issue, Priest found something more intriguing than any story: an advertisement. Johns Hopkins University was looking for religious leaders to participate in a first-of-its-kind study. You had to be a leader in a church, synagogue, or mosque, and you had to be “psychedelically naive.”
The university would give you psilocybin—magic mushrooms—and study its relation to your faith.
Tripping clergy? Priest thought.
He had never done a drug. But he had seen intriguing findings about psychedelics in the news. People in clinical settings at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had taken psychedelics and been cured of depression, or alcoholism, or PTSD. Maybe Priest could be cured of his existential dread.
He almost couldn’t believe it as he typed, but he filled out the application.
ters, I had attended our small-town United Church the Tim Allen sitcom on which two men were implied to be suddenly, even passionately, in love.
