Part 1:One part superstitious fundamentalism, a heaping portion of puritanical traditions of guilt, and a dash of logic, all combined with just a few dozen micrograms of LSD.
Despite having been licensed by the Baptist Missionary Association as a preacher, lysergic acid diethylamide was what ultimately brought me to Christ. This was a strange place to find myself, several years after having proclaimed, publicly, that God had called me, a ripe, young, fifteen year old evangelist, to go out and spread God's word as a full time minister. Years of earnest prayer, diligent study of the scripture, and a weekly attendance to church had brought me to personal experiences of God that I had not known were possible, but had never gotten me this close.Though my bedspread writhed with kaleidoscopic colors, and though the morning sun that streamed through my bedroom window shimmered with an impossible brightness, and though the positions of the room's walls seemed hardly fixed, I knew these sensations to be no more than superficial. Looking through the open door of my room, I saw the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Lord Christ Jesus Himself, parading down my hallway, "Hosanna!" following his footsteps as quickly as palm leaves were laid before Him. This was Christ's triumphant entrance into Jerusalem, one week prior to his crucifixion, according to the Gospels. I didn't actually see Him, of course. LSD, in my experience, doesn't induce such specific, reality altering visions. I had the image in my mind, but not on my visual cortex, and I had the feeling that I could see Him there, smiling softly as Jerusalem's crowd greeted Him as their King.
He did not look at me and acknowledge my presence, let alone speak to me, and I knew I was experiencing events long past. It was as if I were watching an old public service announcement regarding events that had exceeded living memory in their age. In that moment, I looked at Him, seeing his expression, seeing the way He carried Himself. He walked slowly, not to soak up the praise, but to take His time for their sake, giving as much of Himself as they required of Him, giving them time to touch His feet and grasp His garment, according to their custom. The look on His face was very soft, very peaceful, and He wore a very subdued smile, not showing teeth. It was not a face of bliss, but a face of sorrow, of understanding. In His eyes was a compassion for these folks that they would never know, as well as the knowledge that they would never know it, at least in this realm of human experience. In His eyes was the understanding that most would never understand, close though many may come, and it was in this knowledge of their ignorance that His compassion was rooted. It was in this moment that I truly understood the meaning of His words, uttered in a moment of intense suffering and humiliation, a moment of unparalleled clarity,
"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."
Part 2:If faith is the evidence of things not seen, where is the evidence of faith? When strength in one's desire to believe fails to satisfy an undeniable need for justification, some part of the self-delusion falls away, and we can catch a glimpse of our true selves.
The understanding that came to me in this moment is difficult to express clearly, but I'll do my best.
It was then that I understood what He was contemplating, in that moment, during his "triumphant" entrance as the king. Watching Him as He watched the crowd, I saw what it was that they failed to grasp. I saw Him as the Son of Man. Just as they had told me in church, and just as the Bible had always said, He was as much a man as He was God. He was a man! All the reasonable doubts I had been harboring came crashing down. I knew that there was no justifiable reason to hold blindly to a belief in the miracles of the Bible. The foundation of the resurrection came right out from under me, and as the absolute certainty of my own eternal salvation slipped away through this now heavily cracked and crumbling foundation. I cried and wept in ways that I had not previously known, even while "broken before God in prayer."
The next few weeks were some of the most difficult times I have experienced in my personal life. After the LSD had worn off, I tried very hard to dismiss the experience I had. I tried to tell myself that the drug had lied to me, or that I had lied to myself because I was high. I tried to give myself a hundred excuses and more. In my desperate attempt to deny what I had seen, I sought refuge in the various literary works of Christian apologetics that had been collecting dust on my bookshelf since being given to me by my mother. While I could tell that the authors of these works were convinced, and despite my desperation to convince myself of the literal truth of the resurrection and the immortal power of Christ's blood, I could find no reason to convince myself.
At some point, desperation started turning to panic. When a person, in utter futility, exhausts themselves and their known resources in a genuine, self honest, and earnest effort to confirm something they want so desperately to be true, a vacuum starts to form. A space that was once easily glossed over through the practice of regularly shoving aside one's doubts, reveals itself in its undeniable emptiness, its size and volume a perfect reflection of the size and volume of our self delusion.
To be continued . . .
