Psychedelics to meet God??
One of my friends who identifies as “spiritual” sent me this link to an article called “This is Your Priest on Drugs,” published May 19, 2025. Prior to this, I held the belief that one can have genuine spiritual experiences while under the influence of psychedelics, with a caveat that the user may not know who or what exactly is interacting with them.
In Catholicism, we believe in the Holy Trinity, our God, as the one true God, with others called “false gods” to identify them as deities falsely claiming to be god-like. The Holy Trinity is made up of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father in heaven is the first Person in the Trinity, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; the Son, the second Person is Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, who for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit, was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man; the Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, Who has spoken through the prophets. We consider the false gods to often be the angels who fell from heaven, as noted in the book of Revelation, Chapter 12 verses 7-9.
“Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”
My assumption before reading this article is that the users most likely encounter one of these fallen angels and are misled by them, and the user is vulnerable to being misled because they are not grounded in the Faith to help them discern spirits.
To summarize the article, in fall 2015, a research group sent out advertisements to various clergy members (priests, deacons, etc., but not the parishioners, i.e. people in the pews) seeking clergy members to take part in a “research study of psilocybin and sacred experience.” Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms. The group of volunteers consisted of about thirty religious leaders, including a Catholic priest, a Baptist Biblical scholar, four Episcopalians, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, and a Zen Buddhist roshi. The final sample, skewed white (ninety-seven per cent), Christian (seventy-six per cent), and male (sixty-nine per cent).
As noted in the article, “scientifically speaking, the study had serious limitations, many of them acknowledged by its authors. The sample was small, self-selecting, and unrepresentative, several faiths were not included, and there was no placebo control. ‘Expectancy effects’ can also have a profound impact on psychedelic research, and a case can be made that participants were primed to have a certain kind of experience.”
Upon reading the article, I was quite surprised, in a different way than the users. The users were quite surprised by their experience being something they had never felt from God, however for myself, the descriptions are perfectly aligned with the Catholic teachings about God as well as my own experiences having followed those teachings.
Hunt Priest, an Episcopalian minister described a reversal of gender roles. “The divine felt more masculine, and I felt like I was experiencing it the way a woman would.” This is actually very common within Catholicism. The Church regularly teaches about the “wedding feast” with Jesus as the bridegroom and us as the bride.
“As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:24-25)
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul (one of the first Apostles) writes that the Church, subject to Christ, is akin to Jesus’s wife, and that the Church is made up of individuals, us, who are the bride of Christ. This message is a continuation from the Old Testament.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah said “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5)
And the Lord spoke through Jeremiah, “Thus says the Lord, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride” (Jeremiah 2:2)
There are numerous occasions where God speaks of us as a bride with Himself as the bridegroom, thus this experience of a change in gender roles is not foreign to Catholicism.
Ahmed, the only Muslim in the study described her experience:
“God was above gender, above everything . . . an existence, not a figure,” she said. “And God was love.” … “It was just mind-blowingly clear how wrong we have it as human beings, and how we need to nurture love, to put it at the center of our engagement with humanity and animals and the planet.”
Ahmed was very deeply impacted by this, showing this is not something she felt before with God, and again, her experience is normal in Catholicism.
Jesus said to His apostles during the Last Supper, “a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35). One priest at our parish regularly refers to the disciples of John the Evangelist saying they would ask John, “Can you preach about something other than love? We are tired of hearing the same thing” and John would respond, “that is what Jesus preached for us to do, to love.”
We are called to love one another, humans, animals, and the planet. When God created man, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’… And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:28, 31). God gave us dominion however, this does not mean we are entitled to a “scorched earth” mentality. We are to live with love for His creation, a love second to our great love for God.
The author of the article noted
“No one I spoke to, not even the rabbis, described seeing the stereotypical God of the Old Testament.”
This again, makes sense. Those who lack understanding of the Old Testament, consider Him to be a harsh, whip-cracking, mean Father while the God of the New Testament is considered to be soft and loving, but this is far from the truth. When I read the Bible for the first time, I started from page 1 in Genesis and read linearly through the Old Testament and into the New Testament to finish with the Book of Revelation. My first encounter with the New Testament was with the Gospel according to Matthew and my first impression was that this God sounds exactly the same as the Old Testament. That doesn’t mean Jesus was a harsh, whip-cracking, mean Father, but actually means the love expressed through Jesus was also expressed through the God in the Old Testament. Throughout the Old Testament, God routinely laments the lack of faith in Israel and is always ready to help them when they would turn back to Him. What was deemed as God’s punishments were actually God moving the Israelites into a physical location that was representative of where they were spiritually. By removing them from the physical presence of the land He promised them in the kingdom He built for them, they were made to feel physically how they were spiritually.
The author particularly noted that “not even the rabbis described seeing the stereotypical God of the Old Testament.” It is fair to call out that those who’s religion centers around the Old Testament did not describe a God familiar to them. The reason they did not recognize their God in their psychedelic experience is because they have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah, and thus they have not accepted the full Revelation that God has given us through Jesus Christ. This is key. There is a saying within Catholicism that “the New is found in the Old and the Old is fulfilled in the New.” Those who accept the Old Testament but reject Jesus are trying to connect the dots while missing the other half of the page.
The author continued and wrote “many of the religious leaders, men and women alike, experienced the divine as a feminine presence. Participants characterized God as ‘soothing,’ ‘maternal,’ or ‘womb-like.’”
These are all descriptions God Himself gave us in the Old Testament. Speaking through Isaiah, God says:
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)
Comparing Himself to a woman with a breastfeeding child, God says He will not forget His people just as a mother will not forget her child.
The Psalmist wrote:
“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother’s breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.” (Psalm 131:2-3).
The Psalmist speaking inspired by God tells us we are to “hope in the Lord” so we may be calm and quieted just as a child is being nursed by their mother.
The Lord spoke through the Prophet Hosea, “I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs,” (Hosea 13:8) comparing Himself protecting Israel to a mother bear protecting her cubs, thus showing His protective nature in the likeness of the maternal nature.
Lastly, to touch on the “womb-like” feeling of God, we visit the Book of Isaiah:
“Hearken to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.” (Isaiah 46:3-4)
God speaks of Israel of having been borne by Him and even “caried from the womb” and continues saying He “will carry [them]”.
(As an aside, we refer to God with male pronouns because that is how He revealed Himself. Jesus is the Son of God the Father, both male pronouns. Referring to God as female would be heretical and a distortion of the Revelation within Scripture.)
Jaime Clark-Soles, the Baptist Biblical scholar in the study, said, “God struck me as a Jewish mother at one point, which is funny, since I’m a Jesus follower.” The coming of Jesus Christ, Who was Jewish, was a fulfillment of the Old Testament, of Judaism, therefore it is not surprising that this individual felt a Jewish nature from God. Adding the previous notes about the feminine side of God, it is perfectly sensible to feel God as a “Jewish Mother.” Another possibility is this may have been more akin to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the Jewish mother of Jesus Christ. In Catholicism, we hold that Mary is our spiritual mother, a very fruitful practice.
After her experience, Ahmed, the female Muslim previously mentioned, reported that “what little tolerance she’d had for misogyny and patriarchy was gone.” While I am not fully learned in Islam, I can attest that Catholicism is not patriarchal within the secular understanding. Instead, Catholicism celebrates women very much. The most celebrated human is the Blessed Virgin Mary, a woman, and another highly venerated woman is Saint Mary Magdalene who is mentioned numerous times in the Gospels. While woman cannot be priests in Catholicism, this does not make it patriarchal or misogynistic in the secular sense. Women are celebrated heavily and their femininity flourishes within the Church.
We can also see the “expectancy effects” noted by the author. Hunt Priest said “’Driving to church, I pass the yoga studio, where people are lined up on Sunday morning,’…No such crowd was clamoring to get into church services. He called yoga an ‘embodied spiritual practice’”. This shows that Priest felt something was lacking from his own experience. Unfortunately, he was also mistaken because worshipping God is not designed or intended to bring spiritual consolation and transcendent experiences, instead it is how we show our love for God by following how He told us to worship Him, to express this love.
An Eastern Orthodox priest who participated, and knew nothing about psychedelics or psychedelic-assisted therapy until he heard about the study, said “I was not only burned out but I wanted to burn other people.” He added “I struggled with Church politics and bureaucracy. I was a bitter person, someone other people would avoid. I had gotten stuck in this cycle of anger, frustration, pornography, isolation, and was kind of spinning out of control.” This participant had not fully embraced Church teachings and was under dark influence causing him to seek something else outside of the means he had. After the experience, he reflected saying “I hated the liturgy. Dreaded it. It was mechanical, something I put on a mask to do. But now it’s a lot more meaningful and satisfying.” The participant went in with a slew of concerns which were thankfully rectified, however the expectancy effect can be noted by having an experience tailored to his desires.
While the Orthodox priest experienced some positive outcome from the use of psychedelics, another participant, Roger Joslin, who serves two Episcopal congregations noted “The experience made me a better person and a better priest,” a positive thing, however the author noted Joslin “argued that pastors have a role to play in helping parishioners make sense of psychedelic experiences, even while psychedelics are illegal.” The danger is in violating the law against psychedelics rather than being obedient. It is dangerous to encourage behavior to violate the law in pursuit of spiritual experiences is dangerous. While there are times where the law may truly be unjust on religious practices, one must consider where it becomes sinful to violate the law in the name of spirituality.
One last experience to note comes from participant Rita Powell, now an Episcopal Chaplain. She declined a second session citing her first session which “brought her face to face with ‘the abyss.’”
She said that, at one point in her session, she was “nowhere”: “There was neither color nor its absence. There was no form, or its absence. There was not fear. There was not joy. There was not revelation. There was nothing.” She described it as “maybe the hardest thing I had done in my life,” something that took her to “the furthest limit of human capacity.”
One of the dangers of psychedelics is not knowing what results you will receive. Powell noted “her facilitators had not prepared her for something so dark” and instead were trying to reassure her that experiences of psilocybin are “good, beautiful, and unitive.” This experience of Powell’s was either spiritual or gives insight into how one may respond to the effects of this psychedelic.
The author of the article concludes by referring to Elaine Pagels, a historian and a professor of religion at Princeton.
“Pagels has written extensively about the early years of Christianity, when religious leaders suppressed followers who were more mystical. In certain ways, clergy who embrace psychedelic rituals resemble the second- and third-century Christians that Pagels has written about, many of whom believed that revelation was potentially available to everyone, that God had a feminine dimension, and that it’s possible for individuals to experience God directly.
Organized religion often opposes such figures. Religions can’t survive if they’re wide open to the claims of every individual with supposed experience of the divine. ‘You can’t have people going around saying, ‘God told me to do this or that,’ Pagels told me. ‘Because you can really go off the rails.’ Even so, she was heartened by the depth and passion exhibited by many of the religious leaders in the study. ‘Traditions can become fossilized,’ she said. Religious institutions will need to be ‘enlivened and reimagined and transformed’ if they are to survive and serve people today. ‘It’s like art,’ she added. ‘We don’t just stay with the art of the fifteenth century. People are still making paintings!’”
Pagels has written about a group of early Christians called “Gnostics.” Gnosticism, a word from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge, began possibly before the time of Christ. Gnostics viewed themselves as “those who know.” Gnostic Christians believe all matter is inherently evil and due to this, they believe Christ did not take on human flesh and that His humanity was merely an illusion, and similarly, He did not actual die on the cross and only appeared to die. They often deny the divinity of Christ and instead believe He was a created being below God but above man1. Much can be written regarding the purported “suppression” of these followers, we can touch on it to some extent.
While the timeline is uncertain of when Gnosticism developed within certain parts of Christianity, we see the Apostles themselves had to combat a form of it during their time. In the first letter of John (one of the twelve Apostles who walked with Christ), he writes “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:1-2). John is exhorting the reader, someone near Ephesus, to not believe everyone who speaks to them of God but to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world” and he clearly was referring to a form of Gnosticism by noting “every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God” because the Gnostics did not confess that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.
Writings from the Church Fathers at the end of the first century also indicate the early Church was dealing a form of Gnosticism called Docetism a group who believed Jesus did not have a physical body and instead was a sort of “phantasm”2. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110) wrote of Christ in his letter to the Ephesians, “there is only one Physician, having both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God become man, true life in death, from Mary and from God, first passible and then impassible – Jesus Christ our Lord”3. strongly affirming the divinity and flesh of Christ.
Referring back to Pagels’s statement, she is correct that everyone can experience God directly, however that experience should be through the Sacraments as instituted by Christ and not through the risky nature of psychedelics. The Sacraments (Baptism, confirmation, communion, and reconciliation) are a source of God’s grace within us and within our lives, which when received by us willfully and desirously, can transform ourselves and those we touch. As shown in this review, psychedelics may actually give some accurate information, however it is injecting massive amounts of information into someone who may not be ready, resulting in them not knowing what to do with it, such as Ahmed who “found herself drifting away from prayers and rituals”. This is also why two of the participants left jobs in religious institutions to establish formal psychedelic organizations. The researchers also found a high percentage of the participants have “decided to make psychedelics a real interest beyond the study.”
Additionally, private revelation can be available to everyone without the use of drugs. The Catholic Church has had many great people with private revelation such as Saint Gertrude (d. 1302), Venerable Mary of Agreda (d. 1665), Blessed Anne Catherine Emerich (d. 1824), and Saint Faustina (d. 1938). None of these individuals were under the influence of psychedelics or other drugs and instead had developed such a close relationship with Jesus Christ by following the teachings of His Church that they were blessed with these experiences. The private revelations of these women and others have been approved by the Catholic Church for devotion and spiritual development but it is not considered canonized like the Scriptures in the Bible. These private revelations underwent extensive review before being approved for use, because, as Pagels notes “You can’t have people going around saying, ‘God told me to do this or that, because you can really go off the rails.”
The consolation one receives from private revelation and spiritual experiences should not be what one has in mind when pursuing religion because that is something God does not fulfill if someone is being selfish in their desires. The individuals who experienced such revelations often felt burdened by the yoke God blessed them with, however for love of God, they embraced it.
Returning to the article,
“In the New World, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and the seeds of the ololiuqui—a type of morning glory—have had sacramental uses for millennia. In the early aughts, scientists dated two specimens of peyote, found in a cave near the Rio Grande, at more than five thousand years old. After Spanish colonizers arrived, the Catholic Church banned the use of mushrooms in Aztec rituals; the Nahuatl word for them—teonanácatl—translates roughly as ‘flesh of the gods’. The practice continued underground, however, and similar customs persist today.”
Speaking honestly, citing the Aztecs as having used psychedelics highlights the questionable nature of their use, particularly for spiritual practices. The Aztecs are infamous for their human sacrifice. While there may or may not be a direct connection between their use of psychedelics and the rituals of human sacrifice, the correlation can be considered.
Discernment of spirits is very important. As noted, we in Catholicism believe in God and His angels as well as the fallen angels. God and His angels are good and the fallen angels are evil and spiteful towards God. The angels fell because they sinned against God, a habit shown by Lucifer when he tempted Adam and Eve.
Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened (Genesis 3:1-7)
Adam and Eve ate the fruit and committed the first sin by disobeying God who instructed they “may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden” but “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden.” They distrusted God in His warning that “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17), And instead listened to the serpent who said “You will not die.” The serpent gave them more inspiration to eat when he said “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” In listening to the serpent, Adam and Eve desired to “be like God” but without God and instead choosing to eat the fruit so they may know good and evil, rather than inquiring of God and trusting in Him.
This is the same behavior advocated for with the use of psychedelics for spiritual experiences. In the article, a rabbi noted “that lasting religious experiences come from years of ‘striving for understanding and wrestling with God.’” and “We Americans are always looking for a shortcut.” God has given us the Sacraments within the Catholic Church to grow spiritually in accordance with His will for us. Regardless if we have a transcendent and visual spiritual experience during this mortal life, if we follow His will, we will be blessed with the most transcendent experience we can imagine after this life ends. We need to trust in Him and not make ourselves vulnerable to spirits trying to guide us away from Him.
To conclude, we will return to my original assumption going into this, “that one can have true genuine spiritual experiences while under the influence of psychedelics, with a caveat that the user may not know who or what exactly is interacting with them” and “that the users most likely encounter one of these fallen angels to mislead them, and the user is easy to mislead because they are not grounded in the Faith to help them discern spirits.” As I have noted, many of the recorded experiences that surprised the participants are of no surprise to myself or my priest who I conferred with regarding this article.
Ultimately, we do not know for certain if these people encountered God Himself or if it was a distortion from the fallen angels. On one hand, God comes to us where we are at spiritually, however He is not like the pagan gods that can be brought to our level through magick and other means. On the other hand, the fallen angels know that Jesus is the Son of God and also know much more about God than we ever will here on earth, so perhaps they used this knowledge and played the heart strings of the participants to help them understand God without knowing that it was not actually God, just as the serpent was deceptive toward Adam and Eve. The latter could be the case based on the two participants who left their work to focus on psychedelics as well as the high percentage of participants who continued to study psychedelics, rather than relying on the Sacraments instituted by Christ.
One possibility to consider is this was not at all a spiritual experience and simply a psychedelic trip. Personally, I do believe there was a spiritual experience present in a number of the cases, primarily because they were so amazed by the results that it is unlikely to have been a manifestation of acquired knowledge hidden deep within themselves. Being redundant, it is hard to say if these experiences came from God Himself or someone trying to distort the truth to these participants. Regardless, I myself am content with the spiritual development I have been blessed with and I have no desire to experience psychedelics myself.
I don’t think psychedelics have a place in worship and relationship with God. These individuals were lacking in spirituality and found themselves seeking more. Some of them had not accepted Jesus Christ such as Ahmed and the rabbis. Others who had accepted Christ were lacking something, a trait can be seen among other Christians seeking more. There is a misunderstanding that worship is boring and not transcendental, however worship is not intended to be entertaining and transcending. It is about loving God, the God who has revealed Himself and given us the means necessary to build a relationship with Him. It is up to us to build that relationship outside of the time we devote to worshipping Him. We must continue to learn about Him and His Kingdom. By cultivating our knowledge, we develop a deeper understanding of Him as well as the place He has given us in this world.
References
1Staff, Catolic Answers. n.d. “What’s Gnosticism?” Catholic Answers. Accessed June 24, 2025. https://www.catholic.com/qa/whats-gnosticism.
2Gambero, Luigi. 1999. Mary and the Church Fathers. San Francisco: Iganatius Press. page 26
3Gambero, Luigi. 1999. Mary and the Church Fathers. San Francisco: Iganatius Press. page 31
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