Worship: Instant Mysticism

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Perhaps the best-known deliberate effort to create religious experience with drugs was a special service in the basement chapel beneath Boston University's nondenominational Marsh Chapel on Good Friday last year. Organ music was piped into the dimly lit chapel for a group of 20 subjects, most of them divinity students, half of whom were given LSD while the rest took placebos. A minister gave a brief sermon, and the students were left alone to meditate. During the next three hours, all except one of the LSD takers (but only one of those who took placebos) reported "a genuine religious experience."

"I felt a deep union with God," reports one participant. "I remember feeling a profound sense of sorrow that there was no priest or minister at the altar. I had a tremendous urge to go up on the altar and minister the services. But I had this sense of unworthiness, and I crawled under the pews and tried to get away. Finally I carried my Bible to the altar and then tried to preach. The only words I mumbled were 'peace, peace.' I felt I was communicating beyond words."

End Run Around Christ. Most churchmen are duly skeptical about equating an afternoon on LSD with the intuitions of a St. John of the Cross or a Martin Luther. R. C. Zaehner of Oxford, a Roman Catholic and an expert on Eastern religions, holds that the drug-induced visions are simply one of many kinds of preternatural experience, and are qualitatively different from the ecstasies granted mystics. Presbyterian Theodore Gill, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wonders whether the drug experience might be a rival rather than a supplement to what conventional religion offers. Says he: "The drugs make an end run around Christ and go straight to the Holy Spirit." Clerics also charge that LSD zealots have become a clique of modern gnostics concerned only with furthering their private search for what they call "inner freedom."

Others feel that the church should not quickly dismiss anything that has the power to deepen faith. Dr. W. T. Stace, of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost students of mysticism, believes that LSD can change lives for the better. "The fact that the experience was induced by drugs has no bearing on its validity," he says. In an article on the drugs written with Leary for the journal Religious Education, Dr. Walter Houston Clark of Andover Newton Theological School argued that the structure of the drugs is similar to that of a family of chemicals in the body known as indoles. It may be, he suggested, "that a naturally occurring excess of the indoles might predispose some people to certain kinds of mystical experience." Says Paul Lee, an instructor at M.I.T. who took LSD while a student at Harvard Divinity School: "The pity is that our everyday religious experience has become so jaded, so rationalized that to become aware of the mystery, wonderment and confusion of life we must resort to the drugs. Nonetheless, many of us are profoundly grateful for the vistas opened up by the drug experience. It remains to be seen whether this experience is to be interpreted in religious language."

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