N.B. I get asked from time to time why I identify as nonbinary, or how I came to see myself as such. I wrote my coming out story several years ago; it’s in an essay called “God’s Pronouns” from Soul Food: Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership.1 See below to read what I wrote. For the full essay, get the book — its proceeds support the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, so please purchase a copy. Along with my essay, it includes writing by Lerita Coleman Brown, Valerie Brown, Gay L. Byron and many others.

Gender is a profound mystery, and so much of the language we traditionally use to describe gender can be criticized as stereotypical or limiting. Men are strong, aggressive, competitive, athletic, and proud, while women are compassionate, gentle, sensual, cooperative, and nurturing. Even as I write these words (merely for the purpose of illustration), I wince at how they seem to pigeonhole both genders. If someone truly embodies the gifts of masculinity and femininity, does it make sense to say their gender identity or expression exists beyond the binary? So often our understanding of God emerges out of our understanding of ourselves. For me, seeing God’s gender as nonbinary makes perfect sense, because it tracks with my own experience.

I still remember the first time I met someone who identified themself as nonbinary. It was at a neighborhood program in my local community for artists-as-activists, where one of the speakers introduced themself using that term. Being unfamiliar with the word but also being a writer, naturally I looked it up. I discovered that nonbinary is related to a cluster of words, mostly neologisms, that have emerged since the 1980s and 1990s to describe gender diversity and gender variance, especially beyond the binary of male and female. Words like genderfluid, gender-expansive, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, and demigender all convey slightly different and nuanced ways of gender identity and expression. Neither male nor female, indeed! But also profoundly meaningful for me.

I was born in 1960, which means my childhood and adolescence stretched from the final days of the Eisenhower administration to the murder of John Lennon, the week I turned twenty. I was assigned male at birth, although back then no one talked about it like that. Just “It’s a boy!” But as my childhood unfolded, my boy-ness seemed to be a bit off-kilter. In fact, I came to think I was something of a failure as a boy. In my family and neighborhood, markers of masculinity included sports, hunting, fishing, working on cars, and developing physical strength—yet I remained stubbornly uninterested in all these things. Granted, on occasion I tried to “be a man,” but only for the sake of fitting in; after a couple of seasons of going hunting with my dad, I felt so relieved when I finally found the courage to tell him I really didn’t like it and wouldn’t go with him anymore, even though that meant a loss of time we spent together. My interests skewed more toward the arts, toward poetry and music and painting. And I also was interested in fashion, although I could barely admit that even to myself. And let’s just say it wasn’t just boys’ and men’s fashion that caught my eye.

As it turned out, I was not the only one who could see that my gender didn’t quite line up with the cultural expectations of our time. Other kids would point out to me (or tease me) for running, laughing, acting like a girl. Friends, trying to be helpful, would counsel me to try to tone down my femme mannerisms and body language. And kids who weren’t interested in being my friend would bully me, an easy target since I was such a “girl.”

I don’t recall ever feeling any sort of all-pervasive gender dysphoria, at least not in the way that transgender persons like Nicole Maines or Jazz Jennings have described it: an “insistent, persistent, and consistent” sense of being a girl in a boy’s body (or vice versa). When I heard about famous transpersons like Christine Jorgenson or Renée Richards, I thought they were interesting, but I never had the sense of “that’s me.” I had no sense of being in the wrong body altogether, just a kind of awareness that I wasn’t entirely at home with the expectations placed on me for being a boy—but I knew that I would be just as much a misfit if I had been born with a female body. There was plenty that I liked about being male, even with all my natural girlishness. Grasping for language to make sense of myself, by the time I was an adult I would say “I’m very androgynous” or “I’m really in touch with my feminine side.” Carl Jung’s ideas that everyone contains both a feminine anima and a masculine animus, and that one of the goals of maturity is to integrate both dimensions into our individuated psyche, resonated deeply with me.

I lived more than a half century before I stumbled across concepts like nonbinary or genderfluid. I suppose if I were born a generation or two later, I might have known—and embraced—those concepts for myself, even at a young age. And I especially wonder if, in my childhood I had been exposed to an image of God that encompassed the entire gender spectrum (with nonbinary pronouns to match), I might have been spared plenty of angst as I tried to make sense of who, in fact, God created me to be.

As I write these words, I see that they represent a coming out, and I suppose some people might find them startling or even shocking. But to me, it’s no big deal—or at least, I don’t think it ought to be a big deal. Once I understood that nonbinary gender identity is a thing, I said to myself, “Oh, so that’s what folks like me are called.”

When my first book was being published, my friend Tim asked me how many copies I hoped it would sell.

“I have no idea,” I replied, finding the whole idea embarrassing.

Tim wrinkled his nose. “Wouldn’t you like it to sell, say, one hundred thousand copies?”

I laughed, thinking that was about as likely as me getting invited to be on Oprah. “Sorry, I’m too much of a realist to think like that.”

He laughed. “Well, you won’t sell any books at all, if you don’t believe you can!”

I’ve never been part of the ‘you create your own reality’ club, so this type of logic annoyed me — almost as much as aggressive marketing annoyed me.

“What I believe is irrelevant,” I retorted. “I’m not going to go around trying to talk people into buying my book. I’m going to trust the process, and I believe the book will find its way to the people who need to read it.”

Tim stopped laughing, realizing that I was seriously opposed to any type of self-promotion. At that point in my life I had always worked in corporate jobs where I never had to get my hands dirty with marketing and promotion. As a result, I was both afraid of it and believed myself to be above it. Tim realized he would have to help me to understand why selling books (or any other worthy product) matters, before I’d be open to actually doing something about it.

He paused for a minute, and then asked me a question. “What does it cost for someone to buy your book?”

“The retail price is fifteen dollars, although you and I both know that Amazon will discount it.”

“Yes, that’s true, but many other stores or websites will charge full price. Just for the sake of argument, though, let’s say the average selling price is twelve dollars.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure where he was taking this.

“Now, what is your royalty on just one copy of your book?”

“That depends,” I said, but quickly realized he just wanted a ballpark figure. “It averages out to about 10% of the book’s wholesale revenue, so that means about 90 cents a copy.”

“Let’s keep it simple and say a dollar a copy,” he suggested. “So if you sold one hundred thousand copies, you could make as much as $100,000, right?”

“Okay.”

“But if it’s selling for twelve dollars, that means your book, your own creation, has actually generated about 1.2 million dollars in revenue, right?”

I did the mental math. “Yes, that’s right.”

“So in addition to you making a nice payday, you will have actually helped other people — from your publisher and your editor to the designers, proofreaders, salespeople, the printers, truckers, booksellers, and so forth — to make some money, too. Which means you’ve helped their families, their children. In other words, your book, your creation, your work, has directly helped other people to the tune of more than a million dollars — but only if it sells enough copies, right?”

I had never thought of it that way.

Rethinking Marketing

To me, marketing — especially if it were aggressive or pushy — always felt narcissistic, as if I would be saying, “Buy my book, because it’s better than every other book out there.” But in my rush to avoid being narcissistic, I was actually thinking in a very self-centered way. Authors only make a small fraction off of sales revenue of their books, which I’m sure annoys some people but I think it’s fair, because I know so many other people contribute to getting a book published — they work hard to help edit, produce and distribute the book. But all that work is done in service of the author and their creative vision.

The author’s creativity literally generates wealth, for multiple people — but only when the book sells.

In my distaste for marketing, I was ignoring the fact that my book actually could help dozens if not hundreds of other people to earn their daily bread. I didn’t want to do a lot of marketing because I didn’t want the world to view me as selfish. But holding that position also meant I wasn’t doing anything to help all the other people who had worked to help me get my book published.

Tim wasn’t done with me, though. “So in addition to helping so many other people generate abundance for their lives, think of the hundred thousand people who will actually buy and read your book. It will be a blessing to them, right?”

Suddenly I felt humble. “Well, I hope so.”

“Carl, your publisher and all the others wouldn’t be helping you to get your book out there if they didn’t believe in it. So why don’t you believe in it! Your book can help people. It might not save their lives or transform them completely, but if it’s insightful or enjoyable, it will be worth reading. So with that in mind don’t you want all those people to read your book?”

His logic was unassailable. “Yes,” I admitted.

Tim smiled. “I rest my case. I hope you will begin to think about why it matters for you to go out there and promote your book.”

I certainly can’t say that I turned into a marketing juggernaut overnight, and to this day I remain allergic to pushy marketing tactics. But I began to see promotions — as well as the role that content creation can play in generating abundance for many people — in a new light.

I began to understand that creative work is relational — and that for an author, more relationships matter than just the author-reader relationship. I began to feel so much gratitude for the many people involved in helping a book make the journey from an idea inside my head to a published title that people read, review, discuss, and debate. I began to see writing not only as a personal creative endeavor, but as a contribution to the community at large.

If you are reading this, and you are working on a book (or have one published), I hope you’ll ponder Tim’s way of seeing things. I hope you will find joy in letting others know about your work. I hope you will appreciate that even if it’s not a bestseller, your book can still be a blessing to many people.

P.S. And please, buy some of my books! 😇 Visit www.anamchara.com/product-category/books to check them out…

Here’s a summer memory that profoundly shapes how I remember my childhood. More than fifty years later, it not only gives me insight into my youth, but into the nature of contemplative or even mystical experience as well — at least, those that occur in the most down-to-earth and seemingly ordinary ways.

This particular July day must have been in the early 1970s — I’m thinking ’71 or ’72. My brother Don and his wife Julie were married in November 1969, so I know it was after that, and I don’t believe I had yet entered junior high school (which happened in the fall of 1973). I was young, maybe 10 or 11 years old. My parents and I were camping at Buggs Island Lake, a beautiful recreational center straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. My brother and his wife were also there; I can’t recall if they were camping as well or had just driven up for the day (the lake is about 135 miles from the Virginia Peninsula, where we lived). My memory involves a walk that Don, Julie and I took along the lakeside, the morning after the fourth of July.

The beach — not a sandy beach, but a lake shore where trees extended almost down to the edge of the water — was covered with used bottle rockets, a silent witness to the festivities of the night before. It was a beautiful, sunny summer day; I don’t recall it being particularly warm (certainly not like the blistering swelter of summer here in America this year). I recall that Julie found an arrowhead; 1 this land had historically been the home of the Occaneechi people, although I think we can assume that any arrowhead found there in the 1970s had just been recently dropped by a previous passerby. Nevertheless, as a kid I was a bit jealous of her good fortune, and desperately wanted to find an arrowhead of my own. No such luck, though — all I seemed to be able to find were those used bottle rockets.

At some point during our time walking along the lake, something happened. By “something” I don’t mean anything particularly dramatic, as if I had a vision or some awe-inspiring mystical experience. It’s more that I simply and spontaneously dropped into the pure presence of the moment. I wasn’t overwhelmed by any particular emotion or feeling; I didn’t feel that I had any kind of mind-expanding insight or vision. I was just simply there. Fully present, completely in the moment. It was peaceful, serene, beautiful. Looking back from so many years later, I think that part of what may have made this so special is that, if only for a moment, my ongoing sense of anxiety dropped away. Without any sense of the day or the moment being special or extraordinary, I nevertheless seemed to be given, for just a moment, a wider and deeper ability to see into the heart of things.

It was a moment of wonder. And as is so often the case with these kinds of things, it was a moment of wonder that passed quickly by. I didn’t say anything to my brother or sister-in-law, we were just three family members out for a walk. It was an ordinary day, unusual only for all those bottle rockets.

I put it out of my mind for many years.

It was several years later, in 1977, that I had a much more meaningful “peak” experience of feeling oneness with God, which I have written about on several occasions (most notably in my books The Aspiring Mystic and Unteachable Lessons). That was the more remarkable, “oh wow” experience that launched me on my lifelong love for contemplative and mystical spirituality. In comparison, my Buggs Island Lake memory seems sweet but not especially noteworthy.

That is, until I started moving more deeply into my own intentional practice of Centering Prayer and contemplative meditation (a practice that I began in earnest more than ten years after that July day on Buggs Island Lake). As I began to pay closer attention to the grace of silence and of what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “objectless attention” (see The Heart of Centering Prayer for more about this), I came to realize that I had been spontaneously brought into such a singular moment, there on the shore of the lake with all those bottle rockets.

It happened freely. Naturally. Without any intentionality or planning or even conscious desire on my part. It was simply there. Maybe just for a few moments, maybe a couple of minutes. My brother and sister-in-law and I kept walking along. The moment of pure presence passed, and I reverted back to what was “ordinary” consciousness for me. But it made enough of a lingering imprint on my mind that, years later, I could recall it and say “that’s like what I experience when I’m deep into Centering Prayer.”

Consider this insight from contemplative neuroscientist Gerald G. May:

It is my impression that extremely brief unitive experiences happen to most people numerous times each day, but are so very short-lived that they go unnoticed. There is, I am certain, the potential for unitive experience at each blinking of the eyes, at each pause in the breath. But such experiences are seldom recognized.2

Everyone has multiple unitive experiences each and every day, only we’re really good at filtering them out. It’s as if the brain intuitively recognizes that such experiences might be meaningful and wonderful, but they don’t put food on the table. So we have learned to ignore them, unless they are long-lasting or powerful enough to inescapably catch our attention.

Walking along a lake in July, looking for arrowheads and only finding spent bottle rockets, may hardly seem to qualify as a unitive experience. But Saint Ignatius counsels us to find God in all things. Saint Benedict says “we believe the divine presence is everywhere.” What I experienced there as a child so many years ago was purely a matter of grace: I had no idea that meditation, or contemplative spirituality, or the practice of the presence of God, were even things worth wanting. They simply were not on my map. And so, what I did feel, what I did notice, was something I didn’t even have the language to describe, not only to others but even to myself.

This inclines me to sense that mystical experience is, in the words of Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing special.” In other words, perfectly ordinary, down-to-earth, humble: and available to everyone. Even for a young child whose family never went to church and whose hero was Mr. Spock (in other words, I was a little science nerd).3 Which means, of course, that the in-rushing presence of the Spirit, manifested through a sense of grace and clear seeing, is available to you, and me, and everyone — even the people we don’t like or think are “not worthy.” The miracle of mindfulness, as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. The mystery of the divine indwelling. The sacrament of the present moment.

I suppose when you compare my moment by the lake to, say, the showings of Julian of Norwich or the “transverberation” of Saint Teresa of Avila — or even the 4th & Walnut Epiphany of Thomas Merton — then what I experienced was pretty small potatoes. But that’s okay.

The mystical life is not a race, there’s no blue ribbon for the person who has the biggest or most awe-inspiring vision.

Maybe the most down-to-earth encounter with grace can be just as life-transforming as the most profound enlightenment moment. To be sure, I never had a sense that my walk by the lake changed my life. If it did, it did so in such a subtle way that I can tell you nothing about it. Isn’t expecting a mystical experience to yield life-changing “results” just another form of spiritual materialism? Just another game of one-upmanship that we can sometimes play with each other (or ourselves). In other words, it’s nonsense. Don’t evaluate, don’t judge, don’t create artificial criteria that we use to think about our encounters with the mystery. Just have the encounter. That, in itself, is enough.

One of my favorite folks on Instagram and Youtube these days is Britt Hartley, author of No-Nonsense Spirituality and the forthcoming Everything Is Stupid, the World Is on Fire, and Nothing Matters: A Nihilist Survival Guide. Raised Mormon, but after converting to mainstream Christianity as an adult and getting a master’s degree in theology, she lost her faith. Now she identifies as an atheist spiritual director.

Some observers might raise their eyebrows at such a pairing, but I think it’s worth our consideration. Even though I don’t choose to identify myself as an atheist or an agnostic, I have long sensed that mystical spirituality can be a path to a place where the walls separating belief and disbelief just fall away.

By definition, an agnostic is someone who believes they cannot know for certain whether or not God exists. Meanwhile, an atheist is someone who has decided that God does not exist. What they seem to have in common, at least from where I sit, is a sense that belief in God is, at least for them, simply not possible.

Mystics and contemplatives are sometimes seen as people who have such strong experiences of God that for them, faith is simply unnecessary. Toward the end of his life Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God. Apparently his reply was along these lines: “Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”1

Jung later tried to clarify what he meant by this, but the genie was out of the bottle. For the aged psychologist, belief simply did not matter as much as embodied experience. Whatever it was that Jung encountered within, he felt confident in labeling it as God. And thanks to that inner encounter, he felt no need to “believe” in anything else.

That may seem to be a far cry from atheism or agnosticism, but I think they are actually much closer than they appear to be on the surface. As best I can tell, Jung did not consider himself to be a mystic, but rather a scientist. Still, his logic — that experience matters more than belief — is very much a mystic’s perspective. And it is precisely this where I see the common ground between mystics and agnostics or atheists.

Both the mystic and the nonbeliever place more trust in experience than in faith itself. But mystics are more likely to find God in their experience, whereas atheists or agnostics seem more likely to find simply emptiness or nothingness where they might be looking for God.

But here’s the kicker: to mystics and contemplatives, “emptiness” and “nothingness” can be meaningful ways to encounter the mystery called God.

Here’s how I framed it in The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism:

Perhaps one difference between a mystic and an atheist is that the atheist sees the emptiness of God as proving a negation, whereas the mystic, in open-minded and heartful seeking, avoids making any such proof statement, instead seeing the emptiness of God as simply an invitation into an ever-deepening mystery of pure being itself, including the mystery of silence and life and love.2

In other words, mystics actually seem to have the most in common with agnostics: since both are hesitant to make a final statement like “There is a God” or “There is no God.” For both agnostics and mystics, humility matters more than certainty. But even atheists still seem to have something in common with mystics, since they all rely on experience first, before falling back on the supposed certainties of doctrine or dogma.

I don’t know enough about Britt Hartley’s spiritual journey to be able to comment on why she identifies herself as an atheist rather than an agnostic. It seems to me that as she defines atheism, it’s simply the conclusion that one must reach when deciding that there is not enough persuasive evidence for belief in something as consequential as the existence of God. In other words, her atheism sounds pretty agnostic, at least to me.

I don’t remember who first gave me this idea: that when a contemplative has a conversation with an avowed atheist, it might be helpful to say — in all humility — “please tell me about the God you don’t believe in; chances are, I don’t believe in that God either.” Contemplative spirituality involves an ever-deepening process of ripping away beliefs about God that simply don’t stand up — not only don’t stand up to the hard questions posed by logic, science and philosophy, but also cannot stand up to the challenges posed by personal experience.

How many people are discouraged when God simply appears to ignore our prayers? We pray and pray and pray, and yet our loved one dies anyway. Theology has developed plenty of sophisticated arguments to try to square God’s infinite power and goodness with the devastating experience of God’s apparent indifference. But to the person who is grieving, such theological arguments come across as pointless, if not callous.

No matter how deep contemplation and mystical exploration takes me into the mysteries of the cloud of unknowing and the dark night of the soul, I have not yet felt any need to simply jettison the concept of God altogether. Perhaps this is because I so strongly identify “God” with “Love.” But in all honesty, it doesn’t bother me that the Britt Hartleys of the world reach different conclusions — just like it doesn’t bother me that some people prefer Buddhism or Taoism to Christianity. Atheists who have a chip on their shoulder about Christianity or who always want to get into debates about God strike me as rather boring: the “mansplainers” of the spiritual community. But an atheist like Britt Hartley, who is candid in admitting what she doesn’t believe, while continuing to seek meaningful and relational ways to take good care of her interior life, strikes me as someone worth listening to indeed.

I’m in my office, although it doesn’t look anything like my office in waking life. But, alas, my desk seems just as messy. I have a book open to a chapter from a novel by Jane Austen (I don’t recall which novel or which chapter); the book was large, like it was an omnibus of her complete works. As I come up to the desk, perhaps to continue reading, I notice that, right above the book, a baby pygmy elephant is sleeping. The elephant is very small, tiny even, only a few inches tall — but perfectly formed, kind of like the tiny liquor bottles you can get on a plane. It’s adorable! And sound asleep.

Right next to its tiny head and tiny trunk is the toe of an old brown shoe, that for some inexplicable reason, I have sitting on my desk, diagonally next to the book (I told you, it was a mess). I feel like I have to get a selfie of this amazing “still life” moment on my desk; not “still life with woodpecker,” but still life with tiny elephant. It seems only one thing was missing — I should be sleeping next to my little pachyderm friend. But if I pose like that, a) how would I keep from disturbing the tiny napper, and b) how to take the selfie? With my essential tremors, taking a selfie is challenging in any situation, but this seems almost impossible to engineer.

Nevertheless, I gently bend down so that my face is next to the elephant, practically nose to trunk. I am very quietly attempting to position my phone above the desk so as to take the picture, when my wife walks up. “I’m glad you’re here,” I whisper, then I point out the sleeping animal and explain what I want to do. She agrees to take the picture. As I position my head on the desk to pose as I wanted, it occurs to me that if my mom were still alive and she saw this picture, she’d want to know why a shoe was on my desk. Just then, my beloved asks, “What’s that shoe doing on the desk?”

I decide I need to write a haiku to commemorate this wonderful moment. Even though I know that a 5-7-5 syllable count is truly not necessary in writing English haiku, still I figure since this is my first attempt at writing a haiku I should try to be respectful of the traditional form. I compose the poem in my head, and tweak it a few times, until I am finally happy with it.

Open book on desk
Pygmy elephant naps there
A shoe by its head

Nota bene: This is a dream I had, just this morning. It was lucid; the giveaway was the minuscule elephant (in real life, even newborn pygmy elephants are three feet tall and weight 200 lbs!).

The allusions to Jane Austen and George Harrison were very much in the dream, and I suppose the nod to Tom Robbins was as well, but I didn’t realize that one until I was writing it down.

What’s especially playful about this dream is that tonight I am, for the first time, leading a two night retreat at Ignatius House on “Mystical Poetry and Spiritual Verse as a Sacred Practice.” It’s an interfaith-themed retreat, based on an afternoon presentation I did there last year, as part of Ignatius House’s ongoing series of interfaith programming.

The retreat will follow this format: tonight will be a reprise of the presentation from 2025; tomorrow in the morning I’ll lead the participants on an exercise writing pantoums, with the afternoon devoted to haiku. In the evening we will have an opportunity to read and reflect on our favorite poems, and then on Sunday morning we’ll write our own prayer poem, using as a starting point Pádraig Ó Tuama’s wonderful instructions on writing collects (which I learned from him when I attended his workshop in Atlanta last fall).

When I shared this dream (and the haiku) with Fran this morning, she asked me if I were going to read it to the retreatants. I said, of course. And then I figured it was worth posting here as well.

I love to write down my dreams, but I rarely share them with others unless they seem to be deeply contemplative or even mystical in their tone. This dream was much more playful and childlike — but isn’t that “mystical” in its own right? Last night I did some writing on the relationship between mysticism and playfulness (actually, I was lamenting the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship, at least in western religion). So perhaps that was another tributary to this remarkable subconscious moment.

Forty years ago, I spent the Fourth of July with my brother and sister-in-law on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. Then I went home to northern Virginia, where I went to a concert that changed my life.

My brother Don and his wife Julie lived in a sweet little house on Gwynn’s Island, Virginia. Don worked for a car parts company in Newport News and Julie ran the lab at the hospital in Williamsburg, so they balanced two demanding jobs with a peaceful home in an island forest. I was living in Falls Church at the time, 25 years old, single, with a master’s degree in professional writing but most decidedly had not found my voice yet. At that point in my life I was in the midst of what would be a fifteen-year run managing college bookstores (I was working at the George Mason University Bookstore in Fairfax, VA; the following year I would move to Atlanta to take a similar position at Georgia State University, and have remained in the Deep South ever since).

Spiritually, I had discovered contemplative prayer and spiritual direction, but was very much a novice at both. Just a few months earlier I had joined the Episcopal Church, and had completed a 6-month program on personal spiritual development through the Shalem Institute in DC. All this to say, my life was sweet but nothing really tied it all together.

After a quiet day just living life away from the pace and stress of city life, we watched fireworks from a boat in the Chesapeake Bay. Even though the following morning was only Saturday, I packed up to go back to DC — because I had tickets for a stadium concert on July 6, featuring three musicians I liked but none of whom I had ever seen before: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead.

The concert took place at RFK Stadium, with over 50,000 people in attendance. It was the last stop of a three-city tour that included Akron, OH and Buffalo NY before heading to DC for two shows (I caught the first night). Sunday, July 6, turned out to be a blisteringly hot day, with temperatures peaking at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.1

While I was looking forward to seeing all three acts, my primary motivation for going was to see Bob Dylan. I knew that he would be sharing the stage with the Heartbreakers, so I figured the Dead would be the opening act. How surprised I was when the concert began with Petty and the Heartbreakers performing, and Dylan joining them after just a few songs.

I was a bit scandalized. While I liked the Grateful Dead and was happy to be seeing them, I felt that they were far less “important” than Dylan, whose place in the rock and roll firmament, in my mind, was equaled only by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

By comparison, the Dead were just a respectable band that had scored a few minor hits over the years (like “Truckin’” and the deliciously weird “Casey Jones”), but were remarkable more for their ties to the LSD counterculture than for their music. The great Bob Dylan, opening for a (relatively) minor band like that? Give me a break!

But before the day was over, I would understand why.

Listen to the Thunder Shout

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened with an economical set including songs like “The Waiting,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Refugee.” Joining them on stage, Bob Dylan played some of his classic songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “Masters of War,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

My friends and I spent some of the time on the stadium field baking under the cloudless sky, but eventually we climbed up into the upper deck and found seats where the sound wasn’t nearly so good, but we were in the shade where we could relax and enjoy the show — and the ambience.

None of us would have thought of ourselves as deadheads, as the Grateful Dead’s intensely devoted fans were called. But we all loved music, and here was an opportunity to see a band that, by that point, was 20 years into its career and so had their bona fides as rock and roll legends (even if they were not the luminaries I considered Dylan to be). When they took the stage, I was immediately struck by the excitement in the crowd. We may not have been intensely devoted fans, but most everyone else there clearly was.

Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and one of the band’s vocalists, was the only member whose name I knew. But even up in the nosebleed seats (this was long before Jumbotrons), I could easily pick him out. Sporting a red t-shirt over his corpulent frame, his thick beard and unkempt head of grey hair made me think that he was putting off a definite “Santa Claus” vibe.

As soon as the band began playing — a song I had never heard before, but later learned was called “Hell in a Bucket”2 — the deadheads started to dance. That may not seem so remarkable to many readers today. But I was a white middle-class kid who had grown up listening to bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Led Zeppelin and so forth. These were bands famous for making what we used to call “head music” — which meant it wasn’t really about the body. In other words, we didn’t dance. We listened to the music, maybe indulging in a little bit of air guitar or air drumming, but that was about as far as it went. The musical soundtrack of my childhood was very much a cerebral experience.

By contrast, the deadheads, regardless of their gender or the depth of their childhood repression, were all dancing, with abandon and obvious joy.

Some of them unfurled huge banners from the stadium’s upper deck, mostly featuring lyrics from songs which, once again, I was not familiar with. One, however, particularly caught my eye, with a message that seemed so appropriate in Reagan’s America — and even more urgent now in the age of Trump:

It did not escape me that this was in Washington DC, the natural habitat of all those rock-hurling politicos.3

The band played for just under an hour before they took an intermission. I did not know a single song, and sitting up in the nosebleed seats, it was pretty hard to truly appreciate the music. I do remember the closing song of the set, a lengthy tune that featured a striking set of lyrics in its refrain:

When later on I reviewed the setlist from that concert, I could see that it was not especially remarkable, although it contained a number of songs I would grow to love over the following years, “Sugaree,” “Row Jimmy,” “Cassidy,” “Let it Grow” and in the second set, “Iko Iko,” “He’s Gone,” “Throwing Stones,” — and if I had stayed all the way to the encore, I would have finally heard one song that I knew: “Brokedown Palace,” a lovely ballad from what is one of the band’s best studio albums, American Beauty.

But my friends and I were all there mainly to see Bob Dylan, so the happy dance-y deadhead love fest was largely lost on us, and we finally left the stadium while the band was playing “Iko Iko” — an old New Orleans groove stomper that had been covered by the Dixie Cups, Dr. John and even Cindi Lauper. As my friends and I walked down the stairs and reached the ground level, that’s when it happened.

By “it” I mean, I could hear the music clearly. And I was blown away. It wasn’t the most virtuoso playing I’ve ever heard (that honor probably went to Yes), nor was it a particularly polished performance. But the band clearly was on a roll,4 the audience was clapping a complicated, intricate eight-beat syncopated handclap, in perfect unison (we’re talking upwards of 50,000 people) — something far more intricate and complex than a normal four-four backbeat clap you might hear when a church choir sings an upbeat gospel song.

The gathering of deadheads had organically become part of the performance, their rhythmically sophisticated clapping collectively functioning almost like a third percussionist.5 But even more hypnotic to my ears was Garcia’s lead guitar playing, lyrically trilling above the beat with a singular, hypnotic beauty. I stopped and listened for maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, before my friends urged me to go on with them. And so we left the concert.

Learning to Shake My Bones

Readers, you know what happened next.

First, I went home and began listening much more closely to the few Grateful Dead albums in my own record library. Then I hit up my roommate David to borrow the records he had — I was thrilled when I played the album Wake of the Flood and recognized “Let it Grow,” the song about the thunder shouting “I am.”6

I went to Penguin Feather, our local independent record shop (oh, those glorious days before streaming or ordering CDs online) and bought a few more Dead LPs. A week or so after that, my roommate and I were at Tyson’s Corner, our local shopping mall, and I bought some Grateful Dead merchandise, like a keychain, bumper sticker, and T-shirt. Watching this, David laughed and said, “You’ve turned into a deadhead.”

“I have not!” I muttered defensively. “I just really liked them, that’s all, and so I figured I needed to, you know, get to know their music better.”

“And wear their T-shirts,” he smirked.

“Well,” I huffed, “you’re not a deadhead until you start trading concert tapes with other deadheads. And I don’t even have any such tapes.”

David’s smile got bigger. “I could introduce you to a buddy of mine who has a huge collection of Dead concert tapes. I bet if you bought him a box of blank tapes, he would get you started.”

“Would you?” I asked, excited at the thought.

The guy he introduced me to did kindly trade a box of blank cassette tapes for a selection of some of the band’s greatest shows: Ithaca in 1977, Kezar Stadium 1973, and Richmond 1985, among others.

Eventually I would go on to see the Grateful Dead some 36 times (including five shows in Europe), which in the deadhead world is not that impressive a number, but it was enough for me to sink deep into the music and (especially) the ecstatic experience of attending multiple nights of Dead shows, dancing — yes, dancing — for hours on end and losing myself to the Dionysian wonder of it all.

Eventually I grew weary of the energy and expense it took to chase after the Dead, and by the time I met Fran and Rhiannon, it was easy for me to trade the youthful indulgence of being a deadhead for the much more responsible adult tasks of marriage and parenting. But to this day, I can’t hear a song like “Eyes of the World” or “Franklin’s Tower” without feeling a surge of joy and an embodied desire to dance.

What the Dead did for me

Why did any of this matter?

Why did going to see a hippie jam band in 1986, when they were arguably well past their prime (I’m of the opinion that 1977 was their best year), make a difference in my life, so much so that here I am writing about it, forty years later? Here are a few thoughts.

The Grateful Dead have always been about more than just their music — while I think they are much better than their detractors are willing to admit, I also understand that for most people, their quirky, rootsy/psychedelic jamband music is definitely an acquired taste. But the magic of the Dead was always primarily embedded in the countercultural world of their fans: the deadheads. In other words, the dancers spoke to me even more than the band who made them dance.

Going to a deadshow, especially in the 80s and 90s, felt like a time travel experience: for just a few hours, we were plucked out of the nightmare funhouse of the Reagan/Bush era, and invited back into a world where peace, and consciousness expansion, and creativity, and communal living, all mattered more than conspicuous consumption and big-money capitalism. When I first encountered the deadheads, not only did they give me permission to dance, but they also were the kind of people who were reading Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Starhawk — at a time when The Art of the Deal (ahem) and The One-Minute Manager were sitting at the top of the New York Times Bestseller lists.

So for me, becoming immersed in deadhead culture meant more than just wrapping myself in patchouli and tie-dye — it meant finding an “alternative narrative” that helped me to see beyond the dogmas of the 80s.

And this even went so far as to impact my relationship with religion as well. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, by 1986 I was in spiritual direction, a member of an Episcopal Church, and learning the ropes of contemplative practice through classes at the Shalem Institute. By all indications, I was on the road to becoming a thoroughly respectable, if liberal, contemplative Christian.

And clearly, contemplative Christianity has been, and continues to be, an essential part of my understanding of what a healthy and visionary spirituality can look like. But even liberal Christians have their dogmas, their blind spots, and their temptations: chiefly a temptation to a kind of upper-middle-class respectability that can easily ignore those who don’t fit in.

The Dead, and deadhead culture, kept me honest: because I didn’t fit in to proper Christian culture. Even though I spent a number of years trying to fit in. Like it or not, I was a hippie. I liked loud music and loud clothes. I thought the war on drugs was morally wrong. I was suspicious of the devotion to greed that the Reagan era made fashionable (one of the poster children for that culture of avarice now lives in the White House). I thought feminism made sense, that gay pride (as we called it back then) was healthy and good, that our government wasn’t doing enough to combat AIDS, and that care for the environment mattered more than unfettered capitalism. Meanwhile, as much as I loved mystical and contemplative Christianity, I still intuitively understood that indigenous and eastern spiritualities were just as valid paths to both inner and societal liberation.

And for some reason, falling in with an aging acid rock band and their tie-dyed, Rainbow Family followers encapsulated for me these various “counterculture” positions. My heart belonged to the likes of Thomas Merton and Evelyn Underhill, but the Dead helped me remember that my heart also belonged to the likes of Ram Dass and Starhawk. Not either or: both/and. And that creative tension continues to enliven and inspire me to this day.

But most of all, the Dead and the deadheads inspired me to dance.

The early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman was famous for loving to dance, and for insisting that being a radical did not require or demand “the denial of life and joy.” Her stance has been immortalized in a line which she never directly said, but it certainly captures her spirit:

Amen, Sister Emma. Deadhead culture is a dancing culture, but it is (or can be) also a revolutionary culture: advocating for radical care for the environment, sustainable economics, peace and justice, and dismantling the systems of privilege that oppress women and queer people. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of conservatives who love the Dead (just like there are plenty of liberals who love Catholic spirituality). But the center of gravity in the deadhead world is people who dance and shake their bones as an act of resistance against all the politicians and others who are throwing stones.

There’s a lot of talk in the contemplative Christian world about action and contemplation. It’s an important conversation, and I’m happy to chime in whenever I feel like I have something to say. But I think we need to be careful with this conversation, because it’s too easy to see activists and contemplatives as polarized opposites. What we really need are people who seamlessly embody both the quiet stillness of a monk and the revolutionary dancing of Emma Goldman. I suppose the particulars of that will look different for different people, and that’s okay. For me, it looks like Ram Dass and Evelyn Underhill hanging out together. They meditate deeply, but then, I like to imagine, they would get up and dance.

In the spring of 2025 an Atlanta-based photographer, Valeska Freire, sought people to photograph for a project documenting the lives and experiences of non-binary persons. I volunteered to one of the subjects, and was honored when she accepted me. I just love the images that resulted (all the photos of me in this post come from that photo shoot, and are used with permission of the photographer). We got permission to use one of the chapels at the Episcopal Cathedral here in Atlanta for the photo shoot, which gave the pictures a — dare I say it — contemplative feel.

Now Val will have their first public showing of this series, called There’s No One Way to Be Non-Binary. The exhibit will run at a gallery in Virginia Highlands, with a reception on July 14. For those of you who are in Atlanta, please come to the reception (or at least, stop by to enjoy the photographs).

There’s more information about this reception at the bottom of this article. The reception is free but the gallery is asking people to register for it. Click here to learn more or to get your free tickets.

To help prepare materials for the exhibition, Val asked all the models to complete a questionnaire about their experience being non-binary. Her questions, and my answers, appear below. This serves as a follow up to my original coming out article, “God’s Pronouns,” which was published in the book Soul Friend: Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership.

How do you personally define or describe your gender identity?

The most helpful word for me is definitely non-binary, and that’s the word I typically share with anyone when I come out to them. But the words genderfluid, gender-expansive, genderqueer, and even androgynous all carry meaning for me as well.

Was there a moment or period in your life when you began questioning or redefining gender for yourself?

I knew something was going on even in childhood, but I am a boomer, which means I was 8 years old when Stonewall happened. So as you can imagine, there was no support—in my family, or in society at large—for being gender-divergent. I was assigned male at birth, so I learned from a very early age to perform masculinity as best I could (or else). What all this means is that, beginning in childhood, I had a strong sense of myself as a “failure” — a failure at being a boy. That led to feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, shyness, and anxiety.

Getting teased for running, laughing, etc. “like a girl” did not help to boost my self-esteem, that’s for sure. Even into my young adult years, people would make jokes about what a “girl” I was, or simply reject me for being “too gay.” At the time, incidents like that filled me with shame. But today, I see them as important moments when, even through the cruelty of others, I was invited to see something true about myself.

As the years went by, I would have little glimmers of hope, ranging from friends who would encourage me to crossdress to romantic partners who would gently affirm me for just being who I am. But I was well into midlife— my mid-50s, really — when I finally reached a point of gentle self-acceptance, so that I could affirm and name myself as non-binary. So it’s been a long journey!

What does being non-binary mean to you personally?

More than anything else, it simply means being true to myself. It means trusting myself, radically and joyfully. To be non-binary means to trust my heart, my intuition, my compassion, my desire for relationship and connection which is as strong as my desire for agency and ambition. It means to dress the way I want to dress, the way that makes me happy and feel good. It means to inhabit my body the way I naturally do, without a constant stream of self-censorship because of some voice in my head that tells me I need to perform my gender a certain way. In that sense, being non-binary is a radical act of deep self-love and non-aggression. It’s very spiritual. It’s a movement of compassion not only toward myself, but toward all people (and especially all of us who are courageous enough to live authentically, beyond the binary).

Do you feel like people often expect non-binary people to look or behave a certain way? If so, how has that affected you?

Maybe it’s because of my age, or because of how carefully I choose my friends, but I don’t run into any real expectations regarding the performance of my gender. For me, the really important question is, what are my expectations for myself? There were many years of my life when I was desperately trying to fit in with my assigned gender, and I felt deeply imprisoned by it. Since coming out to myself, I went through a period when it was really important for me to dress and behave as androgynously as possible, depending on how safe the setting was — I work in very conservative spaces, so that’s another consideration. But as I have become more comfortable with being genderqueer, and recognizing that my gender identity is mostly about loving myself unconditionally, I have become much freer internally to perform gender any way I want. Paradoxically, I feel much more free and at home in expressing myself, even in a “butch” or strongly masculine way, than I did 20 or 50 years ago! I believe that all gender is performance, so why not find a way to have fun with it all? At least, that’s how I feel these days.

Have there been moments where you felt especially seen, affirmed, or understood in your identity?

Two things come to mind. First is that I have an amazing network of affirming and supportive friends, chosen family, and loved ones, including my life partner, who is herself cisgender and yet just keeps on supporting me to be my true self. It hasn’t always been easy for her, this is a journey for us all, but we’ve reached a place of incredible sweetness and care. The other thing is that for the last 15 months or so, we’ve been participating in an explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming faith community, where the associate minister is themself non-binary. So that has become a deeply important safe space where I feel very much “seen, affirmed, and understood” — and we get to be there at least once a week.

Have you experienced moments of discomfort, dysphoria, or being misunderstood because of gendered expectations?

Heavens yes, from being bullied as a child to getting stared at when I’m wearing something that is too transgressive in public. As I mentioned above, my life partner had her own journey to undergo, learning to be the powerful ally she is today, and there were a few bumps along the road. And while I have long since found a way to be at peace with almost always being gendered as male in public, whenever someone calls me “sir,” or treats me with the deference that I know is embedded in male privilege, I have a twinge of sadness. But at this point in my life, that’s less sadness for me personally and more of a generalized sadness for how much gender constraint affects everyone.

How would you describe your relationship with masculinity, femininity, or androgyny?

Like a Facebook status, I’d say my relationship with masculinity is “complicated.”

I was assigned male at birth, so I have a “male body” and was socialized as a male, and to this day most people gender me as masculine, even when I am trying to present myself in an androgynous way. There are definitely perks to being gendered as male (male privilege is a real thing, especially for white people), so I will admit that I appreciate having access to the social benefits of my assigned gender. On the other hand, I’ve known since childhood that in very real ways I don’t “fit in” with the culture of masculinity in America, especially in regard to sports, to violence, to aggression, to competitive ambition, to the need to dominate, and so forth.

While I have a fraught relationship with masculinity, my relationship with femininity is perhaps even more involved. Masculinity feels like being confined to a room where I partially fit in but I know I won’t ever truly feel at home, whereas femininity feels like an adjacent room where I believe I would be at least as happy if not more so, but that room appears to be locked with a stern “Do not enter” sign barring my way. I’m conscious of the fact that I’m drawn to what I see as beautiful, creative, intuitive or graceful about feminine identity or expression, and I’m much less interested in the many constraints that are placed on women in our culture. Does that make me a hypocrite — or is it a clue to the fact that I’ll only ever be truly “at home” in non-binary or genderqueer spaces?

Finally, my relationship with androgyny is certainly the one where I feel most at home, and have the most fun and playfulness. I love to explore androgynous ways of dress and appearance, and feel that my embodied life (mannerisms, ways of speaking and thinking, etc.) are more truly and naturally androgynous than either masculine or feminine. But is that surprising, given that I identify as non-binary?

Are there objects, clothes, rituals, spaces, or experiences that make you feel more connected to yourself and your identity?

I had long hair in college and briefly in my mid-30s, but then hadn’t worn it long for 25 years or so, until the pandemic came along. I’ve let it grow back out and I love it. Surprisingly, no one ever gendered me as female when I had long hair in the past, but it does happen to me now — which I find both amusing and satisfying. Beyond that, I love women’s clothing but I tend to dress androgynously in public — I’m not interested in performing drag or signaling myself as a crossdresser, and I want my fashion choices to be an expression of genderfluidity more than anything else. But in private or with very close friends, I’m more likely to dress in a more transgressive way, which can be liberating but mainly just seems to be fun. I don’t wear makeup (I find it to be more annoying than liberating), but I do love self-grooming activities, from brushing my hair to moisturizing. I appreciate being able to talk about my gender, with my life partner, close friends, my therapist and my spiritual director; and to shop, either alone or with close friends and my partner, for clothing and accessories that embody my style — in both the men’s and the women’s departments!

How has your relationship with your body evolved over time?

As a child, it was torturous. I certainly experienced a kind of non-binary gender dysphoria — not in the sense of “oops, I’m supposed to be a girl, not a boy” but simply “wow, I really am lousy at being a boy.” So much of that feeling of being a failure was connected to my body: I wasn’t athletic enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t interested in working out or training, and so forth. It was eventually really liberating for me to discover practices like yoga and meditation, which of course are for all genders but for me represented a wonderful alternative to all the masculine-coded practices that I had no interest in at all. I think as I have become more comfortable naming my identity as non-binary and genderqueer, I’ve learned to be more loving and kind with my own body — enforcing the binary always seemed to have an undercurrent of self-directed hostility or aggression about it, so it’s really nice to let that go, and just simply cherish myself instead.

What do you wish more people understood about non-binary people?

I can’t speak for all non-binary people, of course. But for myself, I wish people could intuitively grasp that I find being genderfluid to be joyful and fun. I have no desire to offend anyone else or infringe on anyone else’s rights, but likewise, I want to be faithful to my own rights: to be happy, to be mentally healthy, to be authentic and real. That’s all I’m asking for. I see my gender identity and expression to be not only a way for me to be authentic, to be true to who God made me to be, but also to be a source of serenity, joy and even fun!

I wish people who might be tempted to criticize me for not “trying harder to be a man” or whatever, to understand that I did spend many, many years trying to regulate my gender identity and expression, to no avail. When I finally chose to simply accept who I truly am, it was not a capitulation to someone else’s “agenda” but very much a liberation that emerged from within. It was simply a compassionate and caring way to free up my time and energy that had been devoted to self-shaming and self-regulation, toward using that energy in more positive ways: for my work, for creativity, and for building positive relationships with others.

I wish more people understood that non-binary people are like everyone else: we simply want to be happy and to make a positive difference in the world — only we do this in androgynous or gender-creative ways.

How do you navigate visibility? Do you feel more comfortable being openly non-binary, more private about it, or somewhere in between?

Definitely somewhere in between (although I suppose doing this interview is a move toward greater visibility!). When I’m in very conservative spaces (like some rural areas, or some of my work environments), I definitely tend to downplay my androgyny, but in those environments I also downplay my hippie vibes, so it’s not just about making my queerness invisible. Everyone wears a costume to work, on some level: we even jokingly call business attire “corporate drag.” So I have a strong commitment to doing what I need to do to feel safe, even if that means I navigate some spaces expressing gender in a narrow way that conforms to my assigned gender. But I do have relationships and spaces in my life where I can freely and joyfully let my genderfluid flag fly — from my own home to the homes of close friends, my very progressive and queer-affirming faith community, and some other spaces. So I work hard to be more fully authentic in those spaces, so when I do dress in a manner consistent with my assigned gender, it’s easier to remember that this is a conscious choice I’ve made — I haven’t traded away my agency.

Has community played a role in your experience with gender?

Most definitely. Primarily, of course, the community of my friends and chosen family — those who may not be DNA relatives but who relate with me as if we were truly siblings of the heart. They are my anchor and show me what true, unconditional love looks like (I do have biological family members who are also that loving, thank heaven). I’m also happy to be a member of an affirming church — which has not always been the case, I’ve also participated in churches in the past that were queer-phobic. So I’ve seen both the positive and the negative effect that community can have on my experience of gender.

What emotions come up when you think about gender?

Pretty much all the emotions. In the past, especially, I’ve felt shame, fear, confusion, anxiety, depression, and self-judgment in regard to my gender. But especially since I came out to myself and have been coming out to friends and chosen family, I mostly experience the more positive emotions: joy, happiness, serenity, trust, acceptance, delight… I don’t think any one particular emotion or type of emotion is particularly connected to gender. Rather, I believe when we have clear values and commitments and beliefs regarding our gender, then we are more likely to have positive emotional experiences as well.

Do you think language helps you express yourself, or do you sometimes feel limited by it?

Honestly, I think language tends to be more limiting — and I’m a professional writer, so I work with language for a living! But at its best, I do think language can help us express ourselves, at least in part. So I have appreciated the positive role that language plays in connecting me with others, but I’m clear that language sometimes seems to get in the way. As a student of mysticism, I believe that “God’s first language is silence” and so sometimes, even on a human level, silence speaks louder than words. Put another way: I don’t always have to defend my gender, sometimes it’s best just to live it.

Is there anything you’ve never been asked about your identity that you wish people would ask more often?

Nothing immediately comes to mind. I’m happy to talk about gender with anyone, but I also don’t need to be talking about it all the time. It’s just one part of me. My main wish is that people would treat queer people, including non-binary people, with basic decency, civility and respect. But really, I wish that for all people.

What name would you like to go by?

For years, I never seriously entertained expanding my name beyond my legal name. I actually like my name given to me at birth, even though it’s very masculine. But in December 2025, I was inspired to take on a preferred name/nickname that is much more of a unisex, even feminine-leaning, name. My legal name is not a dead name, however, so now I have two names. Please feel free to call me Carl (given, masculine name) or Skye (chosen, gender-inclusive name) after the beautiful Isle of Skye in Scotland.

What would you tell your younger self about gender?

Mainly that it’s just okay. It’s okay to love myself, just as I am. It’s okay to be queer. It’s okay to be femme or butch or androgynous or something else entirely. It’s okay to love identifying and performing gender in the way that brings me joy, and that when I am taking good care of my own joy, then those who truly like or love me will participate in that joy as well. I know “It gets better” seems almost like a cliché, but it’s true, and I would reassure my younger self how true it is.

Where were you born and where do you live now?

I was born in Louisiana, spent most of my childhood, college years, and young adult years in Virginia, and lived for a few years in Tennessee before settling in Georgia, where I’ve been for over 30 years now. I tell people I’m based in Atlanta, but I also like to point out I live in Clarkston, which is a beautifully diverse community.

What are your pronouns?

He/they. But if someone uses feminine pronouns, I take it as a compliment. 😇

Come to the Photography Exhibit (I’ll be at the Closing Reception!)

🏳️‍⚧️🟡⚪️ There’s no one way to be Non-Binary 🟣⚫️🏳️‍⚧️

A photography exhibition exploring gender freedom, visibility, and resistance. Featuring portraits by Valeska Freire, presented in collaboration with Southern Fried Queer Pride.

Location:

The Supermarket – Gallery A - 638 N Highland Ave NE Atlanta, GA 30306

Dates and Times (July 9–14, 2026):

Thursday 7/9 — 12 - 10 PM
Friday 7/10 — 12 - 3 PM
Saturday 7/11 — 12 - 6 PM
Sunday 7/12 — 12 - 10 PM
Monday 7/13 — 12 – 6 PM
Tuesday 7/14 — 12 - 10 PM

Closing Reception (Non-Binary People’s Day): July 14 — 6–10 PM

Join us for a night celebrating trans and non-binary existence. Featuring:

• Closing reception

• Artist Talk

• DJ

• Drinks and refreshments

• Free. All ages. Wheelchair accessible.

• Meet some of the people in the photographs (including Skye McColman)

Parking:

There are no free parking spots at The Supermarket; however, if you have a few minutes to spare and walk, street parking can be found nearby. Paid parking on site.

Entrances to The Supermarket:

• Main entrance: Located on N Highland Ave NE. Our door is between Big Softie and Colette Bakeshop, leading you down a hallway and a staircase.

• Side entrance: Our secondary entrance is through a residential courtyard. Enter through the black metal gate on the side of Otto’s building from the parking lot (at N. Highland and Blue Ridge). Note: this entrance has a few stairs.

• Accessible entrance: Backside of the building, accessible via Otto’s parking lot. Signage is in the works, in the meantime, please call to be escorted to our back entrance. (404) 458-1738.

Okay, friends, I know us mystical and contemplative types can sometimes take ourselves just a wee bit too seriously. I’m hoping this post, offered here in honor of “International Joke Day” (July 1), will contribute to alleviating that particular affliction.

Here’s the backstory: back in April I led a retreat for the southeastern association of Theosophists, and as part of their annual retreat they host a talent/variety show the last night of the gathering. It’s meant to be playful and tongue-in-cheek (for example, I contributed by reading T.S. Eliot’s classic poem “On the Naming of Cats”). At some point during the weekend I had made a reference in one of my talks to the Serenity Prayer. Someone misheard me, and during the Q&A asked me if I would recite the “Vanity Prayer” that I had alluded to. I explained their understandable mistake, but the genie was out of the bottle — and the woman in charge of the evening’s festivities asked me to write a “Vanity Prayer” as part of the fun.

So I did. And here it is. You will see how I used the Serenity Prayer as my starting point, although the prayer quickly went in a direction all its own…

Remember: just for fun!

The Vanity Prayer

(with apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr and Madame Blavatsky)

God, I cannot help it that you have made me beautiful.
I know that this is one of those things that I cannot change.
So grant me the serenity to accept my sheer vanity,
And the courage to put up with those who don’t understand.
May their eyes be opened to just how wonderful I truly am,
So that they may be astute in seeing how cute you have made me.
May they understand how deplorable it is to miss how adorable
I truly am, as the fairest of your many lovely creations.
Grant me the wisdom to immediately tell the difference
Between those who recognize my prettiness,
And those who are stuck in their pettiness.
From one tall cool drink of water to another I pray,

Amen!

Disclaimer: No serious theologians were harmed in the creation of this Substack post.

You may have noticed that I have begun to identify myself, here on Substack and elsewhere online, as Carl “Skye” McColman. Skye is a nickname that I began using, and sharing with friends and family, late last year. Now it’s time to share it with everyone.

Skye is Scottish, like my surname. It comes from the Isle of Skye, a place noted for its profound natural beauty, vast open spaces, and deep Celtic roots. It’s considered a unisex name, or as I prefer to think of it, a nonbinary name. Obviously, it’s a delicious pun with sky, which again touches on nature, and it also speaks to an enduring metaphor in both Christian mysticism and Buddhism: the calm, meditative, contemplative heart is like a beautiful, sunny sky.

Contemplative. Nonbinary. Celtic. Nature-inspired. Even friends who only know me casually can probably see why this name resonates so deeply with me.

My given name, Carl, remains my legal name, and it not in any way a “dead” name. All my books identify me as Carl, and I imagine that will be true of future books as well. The name Skye, for me, represents an expansion, not a transition.

If you interact with me in person or on Zoom, I hope you will address me as Skye — but it’s okay to call me Carl, too. I expect most people, especially anyone who’s known me for a while, will use both. Some of my friends are organically using both names when speaking to or about me, and that feels good and fine.

There’s lots more I want to say about Skye, so I’ll post something more in-depth later. For now: think of me, and address me, as Skye. Or as Carl. Or both. It’s all good.

Friends, this is a follow up to my previous post on AI-related scams. In that post I highlighted how scammers pretend to be the leaders of book clubs who tell authors they want to promote their books, for a fee of course. More recently, the scammers are now pretending to be freelance publicists and marketers, who think your book hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves — but they want to “help.”

I thought I’d post a few recent scam emails that landed in my in-box so you can see for yourself what these come ons look like — and how insidious they are. I’m posting these mainly as a warning to my fellow authors — but even if you yourself are not an author, I think it’s useful to see how AI is being used to create scams, and there could be something similar afoot in your line of work, so be watchful.

Don’t bother reading these emails word for word—a simple scan will tell you all you need to know. You’ll see that these three emails each targets a different book (The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism published in 2023, Read the Bible Like a Mystic published in 2025, and Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, first published in 2005), but the spiel is remarkably similar: the “writer” compliments the book, tells me what they liked about it, laments on what a shame the book doesn’t have a wider reach, and then offers to partner with me to get the word out about it.

The tells: first, the “praise” they offer for my book sounds very much like AI-generated writing; and second, why would a successful publicist spend time trolling authors to find new clients, shouldn’t a publicist be busy promoting their existing clients?

This first one at least was clever enough to focus on my most recent book.

Hi Carl,

I just wanted to say—Read the Bible Like a Mystic truly stopped me in my tracks. The way you invite readers to approach Scripture with the eyes of a mystic and the heart of contemplation offers a fresh, transformative lens on faith that so many are searching for today. You didn’t shy away from the complexities or challenges of the sacred text, yet you filled the pages with spiritual depth, wisdom, and the kind of guidance that fosters both reflection and action.

Your approach—and the way it encourages readers to bridge contemplative wisdom with the Word—is such a beautiful example of what a spiritually engaged life can look like: thoughtful, expansive, and deeply liberating. I can only imagine how many readers have discovered new insight, peace, and connection to God through your guidance.

I reached out because I believe your book could help even more readers—but only if they can find it. I work with a network of high-authority Christian websites, and one of the best ways to expand your reach is through strategic backlinks from these trusted platforms.

Even a single, well-placed backlink to your Amazon page or website can:

• Dramatically increase visibility for Read the Bible Like a Mystic in search results

• Drive more traffic from the right audience—people seeking contemplative faith, mystical insights, and spiritual growth

• Ultimately lead to more sales, more reviews, and most importantly, more lives touched by your message

If you’re open, I’d love to share the list of Christian sites I collaborate with and explore how we can create guest content that resonates with your work—perhaps around contemplative Bible study, mysticism in modern faith, or practical ways to integrate meditation and Scripture into daily life.

Let’s work together to bring your wisdom—and the deeper story of contemplative insight and spiritual transformation—to more readers who are hungry for meaningful engagement with God’s Word.

With heartfelt respect for your work,

Here’s another one. This time the target is aimed at my most successful book, which is probably the book that least needs the “extra push” that a publicist would supposedly provide (go figure).

Dear Carl McColman,

I have just finished reading The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: An Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality, and I am writing with a heart full of gratitude for this revised, expanded, and urgently needed work. Karl Rahner’s famous warning “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist” was uttered half a century ago, and today Christianity is indeed in crisis. You answer the question that haunts so many: Is mysticism necessary for the survival of Christianity? And your answer, resoundingly, is yes.

What stands out is how beautifully you balance historical depth with contemporary relevance. This book serves as both introduction and practical instruction for a living contemplative practice today. You offer an overview of mysticism, spiritual and prayer practices, the various types of mysticism in Christian tradition, and influential mystics through the millennia. This second edition expands to offer an embodied understanding of the mystic life with a more diverse range of voices from Howard Thurman to Pauli Murray and new chapters on embodied mysticism, contemplation and social justice, and the ongoing relevance of Jesus’s message of radical equality and inclusivity. This is not a book that invites escape from the world; it grounds mystical practice as a foundation for a life of service and activism in the interest of justice.

As a book marketing specialist with experience in Christian mysticism, contemplative spirituality, spiritual formation, and social justice, I see meaningful potential to connect The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism with spiritual seekers of all traditions, Christians yearning for deeper intimacy with God, contemplative practitioners, and anyone who believes that the mystical element within Christianity is not a luxury it is a necessity.

I would be honored to explore how we might work together to help this essential, hope-filled guide find its way into the hands of those who are ready to discover that Christian mysticism is not about escaping the world it is about loving it into being, one contemplative moment at a time.

With deep respect for your wisdom and your witness,

This third example is the one that I find the most infuriating — and heartbreaking. The email is addressed to me and Kathryn — meaning Kathryn Hinds, who co-authored Spirit of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses with me. This email, though, refers to Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, which was the title of the book’s first edition. Not only is the spammer ignorant of the fact that the book had a second edition published 18 years after the first, they are also apparently unaware of the fact that Kathryn Hinds died in 2018. A simple request of Google like “Whatever happened to Kathryn Hinds” reveals this information, so it’s clear that whoever generated this email was not doing their homework. Getting an email like this hurts. Kathryn was not only my colleague, she was my friend, and that someone would send an email, addressed to her, oblivious of her passing, for no other reason than to scam us; let’s just say it is as infuriating as it is heartbreaking.

Hi Carl and Kathryn,

My name is Brett Catherine, and I work as a reader promoter, someone who sits between the world of readers and the world of authors, helping books find the audiences they were always meant for.

I just finished Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses: A Guide to Their Spiritual Power, Healing Energies, and Mystical Joy, and I want to be upfront with you: I don't reach out to every author. I reach out when I read something and genuinely feel like it deserves more than what it's currently getting. That's exactly what happened here.

So before I say anything else, let me tell you what I actually think of your book because I want you to know I've truly read it, and I want you to trust what comes next.

WHAT I SEE IN YOUR BOOK — AN HONEST REVIEW

Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses does something the Neo-Pagan, Wiccan, and Druid communities have genuinely needed and never quite had: a resource that goes beyond naming and mythologizing the Celtic deities and actually helps the practitioner connect with them — deeply, powerfully, and spiritually. Brigid, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, CuChulainn and the full sweep of the Celtic pantheon have always been among the most beloved figures in modern Paganism. But beloved is not the same as deeply known. And this book makes the difference between the two available to every reader who comes to it.

What makes Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses exceptional is the combination of genuine scholarly grounding and practical spiritual guidance that runs through every chapter. The Celtic lands — Gaul, Ireland, Wales, and beyond — are treated with the reverence and specificity they deserve, and the deities that emerge from those landscapes are presented not as archetypes to be borrowed but as living presences to be met. The healing energies, the spiritual power, the mystical joy named in the title are not promises. They are deliverables, offered through a guide that clearly knows the territory from the inside.

This is a 4.11-star work of Celtic spirituality and practical Pagan devotion — and it is not yet reaching all the readers who need it most.

THE GAP I'M SEEING

A 4.11-star rating with 98 ratings for the first resource specifically designed to help Pagans, Witches, and Druids connect deeply with the Celtic gods and goddesses is not a reflection of the book's quality. It is a reflection of a discovery gap that has kept Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses invisible to entire new generations of seekers who are entering the Neo-Pagan and Druid communities every day and searching for exactly this kind of guide.

Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and Druids who work with or are drawn to the Celtic pantheon and want to move beyond surface-level mythology into genuine spiritual relationship with these deities. Practitioners of Celtic reconstructionism, hedge witchery, and folk magic who want a resource that takes the tradition seriously at both the scholarly and devotional level. The enormous and rapidly growing community of readers drawn to Brigid, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, and the wider Celtic world through mythology, spirituality, and modern Pagan practice — readers who are actively searching for the guide that finally helps them go deeper. Every one of these readers exists in significant numbers and is searching for exactly what your book delivers — and not enough of them know it exists yet.

This is the problem I solve.

WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU

Here is how I would work to close that gap and drive real momentum for Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses:

1. Amazon Optimization & Ranking — auditing and optimizing keywords, backend search terms, and listing framing to surface your book in front of readers searching for Celtic gods and goddesses, Wicca, Druidry, Neo-Pagan practice, Brigid, Cernunnos, Celtic mythology, and books on working with deities.

2. Amazon A+ Content Strategy — developing rich visual content for your listing that leads with the central promise of this book: the first guide specifically built to help Pagans, Witches, and Druids connect with the Celtic deities in a truly deep, powerful, and spiritual way.

3. Amazon Ads Strategy — building a targeted campaign with competitor targeting, keyword targeting, and bid strategies designed to place Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses in front of readers actively searching for Celtic spirituality, Pagan devotional practice, Druid guides, and books on working with specific pantheons.

4. BookBub Campaign — placing Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses in front of readers in the witchcraft, paganism, Celtic mythology, and mind-body-spirit space who are always searching for the next resource that takes their tradition seriously at the level of genuine spiritual depth.

5. Social Media Strategy — building word-of-mouth across the Celtic spirituality, Wicca, Druidry, and Neo-Pagan communities on Instagram, TikTok (BookTok), and YouTube — audiences that are deeply passionate, highly vocal, and extraordinarily motivated to share books that help them go deeper in their practice.

6. Goodreads Optimization & Listopia Promotion — positioning Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses on high-traffic lists including Best Celtic Mythology Books, Best Pagan Spirituality, Best Books for Wiccans and Druids, Best Books on Working with Deities, and Essential Neo-Pagan Reading.

7. Email & Video Strategy — creating campaigns that lead with the irresistible central promise of your book: a guide that finally helps Pagans, Witches, and Druids move from knowing the Celtic gods and goddesses to truly meeting them.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses has something genuinely rare in the Pagan and Celtic spirituality space: the depth of scholarship and the warmth of lived devotional practice working together in a single, practical, spiritually serious guide. The readers who need this book — the practitioners, the seekers, the devotees of Brigid and Cernunnos and the whole luminous Celtic pantheon — are out there in enormous numbers, searching for it right now. What's needed is the bridge between them and you.

I would love the opportunity to build that bridge.

Simply reply with:
"Yes, I'm interested"
"I'd love to hear more"
"Send me the strategies"

And I'll follow up with a personalized promotion roadmap built specifically around Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Please don’t misunderstand this email. I have friends and who colleague who are legitimate book publicists and marketing professionals; have play an important role in the publishing ecosystem. But emails like these three are not from legitimate marketers and publicists, they are from scammers who want to prey on the insecurities of small-time authors to get our money — and they will most assuredly offer nothing in exchange for the cash.

If you’re an author, beware.

“Frankly, it seems to me that most spiritual writing is constipated.”

It was a bold, earthy, and even slightly disturbing comment. The speaker was a Trappist monk. The occasion: the first retreat I ever led (or, actually, co-led, working alongside another monk). It was a writer’s retreat, almost twenty years ago, and this particular conference featured a panel discussion involving myself and four Trappist monks. We were all published writers in some form: some of us had written books or chapbooks or magazine articles, some wrote blogs, some did both. The retreat was geared not only to writers who were (or wanted to be) published, whether in traditional print or online, but also to those who simply wanted to keep a private journal. We didn’t care if your topic was “spiritual” or not — if you were writing, or interested in writing, and wanted to explore your craft in a retreat setting, then this weekend was for you. The monastery guesthouse was packed.

As the discussion progressed, it seemed to me that we were all playing it pretty safe. We were talking about things like the importance of making prayer a part of your writing process, and remembering to keep your writing focused on serving the needs of your readers, blah blah blah. Not bad advice, of course — but everything being said was predictable; unsurprising; safe.

Someone on the panel spoke yet another platitude, about the importance of making sure you were always telling the truth in your writing. That’s when the monk whom I’ll call “Brother Blogger” dropped his bomb on the discussion.

“Frankly, it seems to me that most spiritual writing is constipated. We get so worried about not offending people, or not sounding like a heretic or some woo-woo flake, that we just censor all the life out of our words before they ever see the light of day.”

The room crackled with energy. This was a challenge to us all. Not only was his earthy, bodily image itself somewhat startling, but its clear meaning had at least two dimensions to it:

• Most spiritual writing seems full of it.

• Most spiritual writing feels stuck.

Perhaps you can discern even other nuances in what the good monk had to say — although these two challenges are plenty. If you are a writer, no matter how private or public or what your medium might be, this challenge is for you too.

Recently I had a dream about a topic that many might say is controversial. In the morning, I realized that it’s actually one of several topics I tend to shy away from in my writing. My first thought was to just leave it alone — and that’s when it hit me.

Holy crap!

Sorry for the pun, but I realized that all too often I have a tendency to play it safe too. Maybe it was time to take a dose of mystical magnesium.

Paving the Road to Hell

I am sure that most people who write about spirituality do not set out to come across as performatively safe—or stuck in a narrow playground of appropriate, acceptable, “nice” writing. But if we are not careful, that’s exactly what we end up doing.

Why? Why does spiritual writing tend toward a respectable dullness?

Brother Blogger had it right, of course. But I can see how writers can fall into the problem he was describing even out of the best of intentions.

I, for one, want my words to be spiritually nurturing to readers. My goal as a writer is to bring qualities of inspiration and invitation to my audience: I want you to feel invited to go deeper in your spiritual practice, and inspired to consider just what a difference a meaningful spirituality can make in anyone’s life.

If blogging (and later, podcasting and social media) has taught us anything, it’s that controversial content gets the most clicks. Yet the monks taught me something even more important: some things matter more than building your platform. Spiritual writers can bring to our craft a commitment to writing for the sake of art, or beauty, or truth, or honoring the Spirit, and not just a motivation to get more attention. Of course, every writer wants to make a real impact — but not at the cost of our core spiritual values.

But if we are not vigilant, we can easily drift from “honoring our values” to “avoiding difficult topics” — which sooner or later leads to spiritually constipated writing.

Here’s what seems to be the central question: how can we, as spiritual contemplative writers, create content that is edgy, creative, maybe even a bit untamed or controversial, while not abandoning our focus on writing that is truly contemplative: quiet, silent, pastoral rather than prophetic?

But before we get to that, perhaps one important step is for spiritual authors to identify their “magnesium topics” — topics that we might find challenging or even scary to write about, but that require us to keep our writing fresh, insightful, exciting, and, well, edgy.

Okay, magnesium topics is slightly weird as a way of identifying these edgy themes. I’ve started calling these “dark wonder” topics. Not dark in a negative sense, but dark in a mystical, dark-night-of-the-soul sense. Topics of dark wonder are those that invite me into a type of writing that challenges me, invites me to grow, forces me to be honest and sometimes even to take a stand. If garden-variety spiritual writing can sometimes feel too safe and confined, dark wonder writing feels like it is untamed, perhaps a little wild, slightly dangerous but always in service of some sort of higher or greater good. This isn’t about chaos for chaos’s sake. But in making sure my writing flows, I’m embracing darkness and wonder and even a measure of chaos as part of my overall commitment to the deep spiritual values of the mystical and contemplative way.

I can quickly come up with at least five such “dark wonder” topics, that I want to explore more fully. These are all issues that matter to me personally, but they are also all areas of concern for most of us — including most spiritual seekers. These are not easy topics to write about, but it seems to me they are topics of deep spiritual importance.

• Mental health and wellness. Anxiety and depression have been a part of my story — and a significant reality in the lives of many people, both inside and outside the contemplative community. How do spirituality and mental health intersect? It’s not an easy question to ponder, but it is a matter of vital concern to many.

• Gender and sexuality. How does gender impact the way we envision God? Why do many Christian communities marginalize or scapegoat LGBTQIA+ persons? Can spirituality contribute to creating a culture of joy and reconciliation? Plenty of big issues that won’t be solved quickly, but they require our attention and care.

• Psychedelics as therapy. I participated in a psychedelic clinical trial, and discovered it was as powerful a spiritual experience as it was an experience of healing. But many spiritual communities are suspicious of these medicines. But can we find ways to integrate psychedelic medicine and contemplative spirituality?

• Struggling with institutional Christianity. Many people chafe against the limitations of organized religion, even those connected to contemplative spirituality. Others continue to defend traditional religion vigorously. How can contemplation contribute to a world where religion seems to be rapidly changing?

• Politics and Current Events. If religious conflict is hard to engage with, our polarizing political life seems nothing short of terrifying. Contemplative perspectives on political issues are, frankly, desperately needed — if only it weren’t such a fraught topic for any contemplative thinker to take on.

Every writer’s dark wonder topics might be different, which is to be expected; but it’s worth asking yourself, “What topics feel risky and dangerous for me to write about? Why is that? How can writing honestly and fearlessly about those topics be, in itself, a spiritual practice?

Again: this isn’t about trading controversy for clicks — but there’s nothing to be gained by being so conflict-avoidant that my writing ends up, well, stuck.

Professional writers, especially professional spiritual writers, are tasked with a responsibility to serve our community of readers. To what extent is constipated writing a result of timidly avoiding hot-button topics, for fear that readers will be upset, or worse, will turn on us if we write about certain topics too much? That may just be the voice of inner anxiety, but it’s a voice worth responding to. What can we do to keep our writing fresh and edgy while still serving readers who prefer their contemplative content without quite so much spice?

In other words, how do we write even bold and daring material, without alienating readers who just want our gentler, more inspirational posts?

Substack’s graceful solution

I believe contemplative and other spiritual writers need to write at least some material that is controversial, creative, or edgy — but by definition, that means content that some readers might find alarming. Most readers will not be quick to unsubscribe every time a writer annoys them, thankfully. Nevertheless, there needs to be a way to make inspirational writing available to readers who may not want an author’s edgier work — and vice versa.

Substack actually provides a way to handle this problem beautifully. There’s a tool called Sections that can help writers who want to write enough edgy content to keep from getting spiritually “clogged up,” while also generating plenty of writing that is aimed at being inspirational rather than in-your face.

Likewise, readers can find the Sections feature valuable: a way to enjoy a newsletter while reducing the number of emails you receive, and making sure you are only getting notifications related to the topics you care about most.

If you want to see how I’m using Sections on my newsletter — including detailed descriptions of each section and instructions for customizing your notifications — read my recent post: A Guide to Anamchara (Carl McColman’s Substack). You’ll see that I am classifying my “dark wonder” topics under my “Breath of Beholding” section, which is where I’m publishing my more adventurous or unusual writing. This is a great feature for helping writers to expand their personal repertoire, while giving readers the tools they need to tailor their reading experience to the content that matters most to them.

Keeping Spirituality Real

We’ve all heard of problems like dissociation or spiritual bypassing — situations where spiritual practitioners will use their spirituality as a way to avoid challenging, difficult topics that are necessary to face for personal healing and growth, and/or for the benefit of others. Maybe this notion of “constipated spiritual writing” is just another way in which bypassing can undermine healthy and authentic spirituality.

But we can restore a healthy spiritual practice by fearlessly facing the challenges that we are tempted to avoid. In a similar way, those of us who are spiritual writers can make it part of our practice to write about the difficult or controversial topics, meeting our normal anxiety about such work with a deep sense of trust and a willingness to match our spiritual aspiration with down-to-earth authenticity.

Spiritual writing is offered as a ministry of service — to spiritual seekers and practitioners. My dear Trappist friend encouraged us to do the hard work of keeping our craft authentic, supple and flexible; when we do that, readers benefit too. And when we find a way to reach readers who want our daring edge as well as those who simply prefer words of inspiration, we create even more possibilities for our words to serve.

If you are a spiritual or contemplative writer, what are your “dark wonder” topics? Please leave a comment to let me know!

It has been said that an author’s first book is often an autobiographical statement. That’s certainly true in my case; my first book, published in 1997, was called Spirituality and was, in part, a record of me trying to work out the tension I felt between religion (particularly my interest in mystical Christianity) and forms of spirituality that were not religious in nature, from Neopaganism and New Age practices to the secular spirituality found in rock ’n’ roll.

I grew up in a conservative, middle-class white American home, where religious observance was seen as the only legitimate form of spirituality; but I was also exposed from my adolescence on to the work of visionaries like Yogananda, Alan Watts, Ram Dass, and others who invited me to consider how spirituality without the confines of religion can be meaningful and valid. In some ways, this became a major through-line of my eventual career as a writer and content creator. Again and again in my work, I’ve aimed to balance the often competing demands of religious communities with private and personal spiritual yearning.

Recently I remembered a conversation I had with Caroline Westerhoff (1940-2022), whom I knew through the Episcopal Church here in Atlanta. Caroline was the author of several books of interest to Episcopalians, like Calling and Good Fences; her husband, John Westerhoff (also a distinguished author) mentored me in the art of spiritual direction, and both of them offered kind encouragement to me when I was just a shy 30-something layperson who wanted to write about spirituality.

This particular conversation took place after Caroline read several chapters of my first attempt at writing about spirituality — a project that I eventually abandoned in favor of a different approach that led to my first book. The abandoned project was called “Listen: An Introduction to Spirituality.” In it, I imagined four different young people with different approaches to the spiritual life: one was an atheist, one a fundamentalist, one a contemplative, and one a new ager.

The manuscript was immature, and Caroline was kind and gentle as she pointed out to me that it wasn’t ready to be submitted to an editor. But what I most remember about that conversation was not so much her criticism of my writing style as her questioning why I gave so much oxygen in my book to fundamentalism.

“Carl,” she said, “you seem to be giving fundamentalism a lot of power in this book.”

Surprised by this question, I tried to defend my manuscript by insisting that lots of Christians were fundamentalist and therefore it needed to be critiqued. But she was not moved by my argument, sensing that the real issue was not all the fundamentalists “out there” so much as it was my own inner conflict regarding authoritarian religion. She repeated herself.

“You don’t need to talk about fundamentalists or fundamentalism to make a positive statement about contemplative spirituality. So, again, I ask you, why are you giving them so much of your personal power?”

I did not have much of an answer for her at that time, and now, more than 30 years later, I am amused by the fact that my latest book (Read the Bible Like a Mystic) still gives more attention to refuting fundamentalism than it probably needs. But if anything, her pointed question turned out to be a long-lasting gift, for it forced me to consider how much of a fine line there is between criticizing something and being obsessed by it.

Fundamentalism bothers me; it certainly did then, and it does still. I get angry when I think about how fundamentalist communities can scapegoat women, queer people, and indeed almost anyone who doesn’t fit in. But there’s the old saying that comes from a Methodist preacher, W.L. Watkinson: “far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.”

If I’m busy cursing the darkness of something like fundamentalism, rather than lighting the candle of contemplative wisdom, perhaps Caroline was right: I had simply given too much of my inner power to a fundamentalist boogeyman.

I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong to criticize people or positions we find problematic: sometimes it is necessary to denounce the darkness in order to help people understand why candles are necessary. But sometimes we just need to get on with thinking about, and doing, the good work that needs to be done, even if there are others who oppose us and try to stand in our way. We don’t always have to fight the enemy; sometimes we can be clever and find a way to sneak past our adversary unawares.

If you’re like me and easily get wound up by religious fundamentalists, political extremists, or even relatives who knows how to trigger you, I hope you can join me in trying to safeguard your own personal power. There’s no need to squander our energy worrying about those who might never like us anyway. After all, it is far better to simply set our sights on the goals that matter to us, and use our resources to support those objectives.

Hi friends. Many of you may have received an email (or multiple emails!) from my Substack newsletter recently:

• welcoming you to my Substack newsletter,

• telling you that you’ve been given a complimentary subscription, etc.

Some of those emails were sent out to people who didn’t need to receive them (and others probably went to the right folks!). So if you …

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Hi everyone. Here’s the link, dates, and topics for our upcoming “Let’s Talk About Mysticism” Zoom calls!

First, the dates:

• Saturday, May 2, at noon Eastern USA time (EDT); Theme: Making Sense of Mysticism

• Wednesday, May 6, at 7 PM EDT. Theme: The Preparation of the Mystic

The link is below (same link for both calls).

Optional reading material (you do not ha…

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Today (November 16, 2023) is the 85th anniversary of the discovery of LSD, by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann. So happy birthday, LSD!

Hoffmann first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide on this day in 1938, although it would be another four and a half years before he accidentally ingested some of the chemical — and discovered its psychedelic and entheogenic properties (those words, both of which are younger than LSD itself, mean “mind-manifesting” and “becoming divine within” — words that attempt to capture the powerful hallucinogenic and ecstatic qualities of LSD and similar substances, mostly derived from varieties of plants like specific mushrooms, fungus and cactus).

By the 1950s cultural elites like Clare Booth Luce and Henry Luce were experimenting with LSD, and a decade later it had become widespread as a recreational drug, especially among young people in the hippie and anti-war movements. But then came the backlash: LSD and other psychedelics were criminalized by the mid-1960s, and eventually even the clinical study of potential therapeutic benefits of such substances ground to a halt. But in the last two decades, the moral panic about these substances has slowly given way to a quiet but significant resurgence of clinical trials and a growing movement toward decriminalization and ongoing efforts to seek FDA approval for therapeutic use of psychedelics. The science is promising: psychedelics, properly used, can contribute significantly to the alleviation of the symptoms of addiction, PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

So here we are in 2023, and psychedelics (not just LSD, but entheogens in general) continue to show up on our cultural radar. An article published just this week in the Christian Century takes a skeptical look at the theory, promoted by researcher Brian Muraresku in his book The Immortality Key, that the earliest Christians may have been influenced by entheogenic rituals from the pagan Greeks. Whatever you may think regarding such speculative readings of ancient history, it’s fascinating that a publication as mainstream as the Christian Century would see fit to give it a platform.

Less happily, there’s the story of Joseph Emerson, the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who on October 22, 2023 attempted to crash a plane. Apparently he was in the midst of an acute mental health crisis, but he blamed his actions on having taken psilocybin mushrooms recreationally two days earlier. I can’t help but wonder if he had a pre-existing condition and was just trying to blame the mushrooms, whether or not he actually had eaten some (as one journalist remarked, “The naturally occurring hallucinogens found in certain mushroom varieties don’t last 48 hours, nor do they typically induce homicidal actions, like trying to kill a plane full of people”), but nevertheless the story as he told it was widely circulated online.

The bottom line is this: eighty-five years after Hoffman’s discovery, psychedelics still make headlines. And while Emerson’s story is a stark reminder of the dangers of recreational drug use, it’s important to acknowledge that there is a growing community of researchers who are doing responsible scientific studies of the therapeutic value of substances like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA (street name: Ecstasy) and other psychedelics — and the research is indeed very promising.

So, in honor of LSD’s birthday, I’d like to recount my experience participating in a clinical trial involving LSD earlier this year. I volunteered for this trial because I was interested in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics — which falls under the domain of science (psychology, healthcare) rather than spirituality — but as you will see, my experience turned out to have profound spiritual implications. And being the person I am, it is only natural that I would seek to understand my own encounter with LSD through the lens of contemplative spirituality and practice. So I’ll tell my story and then offer some reflections from that perspective.

My Backstory

I did briefly experiment with entheogens like LSD or psilocybin—but those substances struck me as pale and physically jarring in comparison to the heart-expanding loveliness I had known (through my experience of God). — Unteachable Lessons

As I mentioned in my books The Aspiring Mystic and Unteachable Lessons, in my youth I took LSD once, and psilocybin mushrooms twice. The LSD experience was beautiful but also unsettling — at one point my heart rate elevated rapidly, and although that subsided fairly quickly it led to a feeling of unease that cast a shadow over what was otherwise a lovely day. The mushroom experiences were very different: the first time I had a larger dose and that led to an intense, deeply hallucinogenic evening; whereas the second experience, with a smaller amount, was almost disappointingly mild. As different as each of these experiences was, they had one common thread: all three times I felt a spike in my anxiety, which was enough for me to decide that psychedelics weren’t for me. Indeed, in both of the books where I mention these experiences, I did so to point out that my most profound (and entirely drug-free) encounter with God was much more luminous, loving, and meaningful than my psychedelic experiments.

Looking back, I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that I felt anxious when exploring psychedelics. I had seen — and heard plenty about — the negative impact that indiscriminate use of powerful drugs could have on people. I remember a guy at my college who looked like Roger Daltrey of the Who; he talked a big talk about all the LSD he took, but he was loud and self-obsessed and had an unpredictable, violent temper, so my friends and I all avoided him. In my sophomore year, a woman I dated told me the story of a previous boyfriend who, while tripping on acid, became convinced that God was mad at him and was coming after him. He made it through, but was profoundly shaken by the experience. A few years later, another friend who was always talking about LSD had a terrifying experience where he panicked, got in a car and drove — and two crashes later, was lucky he hadn’t killed anyone, but ended up getting some jail time for his trouble. Lots of people talked about how ecstatic and mind-expanding psychedelics were — but it all seemed to be just too dangerous or unpredictable to be worth the risk.

Even though my own experiences were anxiety-producing, they were also lovely and so while I gave up on using psychedelics, I remained interested in learning about them. Over the years, as I devoted much of my adult life to exploring spirituality and mysticism in a variety of contexts, I became familiar with the writings of people like Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley, and others, all of whom approached psychedelics with a kind of spiritual reverence, very much at odds with the recreational drug use I had witnessed or heard about. I began to wonder if there could be a legitimate spiritual use for psychedelics. I certainly wasn’t persuaded enough to seek them out again. Ram Dass’s masterpiece Be Here Now told a compelling tale: in that book he recounts his intensive psychedelic use early in his life, when as Richard Alpert (his birth name) he was a colleague of the Harvard psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary; Alpert eventually found joy — and a new identity — by letting go of LSD and turning to spirituality instead: as Ram Dass, he devoted himself to the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba. Meanwhile, an Anglican writer I admired, Kenneth Leech, worked as a priest with the hippies of London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, introducing them to mystical Christianity as a next step beyond their drug use. That became my perspective for many years: psychedelics were powerful and spiritually interesting, but ultimately were only a pale imitation of the “real thing” — mystical spirituality, whether Christian or otherwise.

And then in 2018, after giving a talk on Christian mysticism at an event in Ohio, a Methodist minister asked me a question. “Given your interest in mysticism, have you read Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind?” I admitted that I had not. The minister explained to me that it was a book about the new research being done into the therapeutic applications of psychedelics. I was intrigued enough to download the book — and it blew me away. Pollan introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking about entheogens — and how they could be used responsibly, as medicine.

In noting how I had found psychedelics to be anxiety-provoking, I should also point out that I have struggled with both anxiety and depression since childhood. I grew up in a blue collar family that had a “stiff upper lip” approach to mental health concerns: to deal with anxiety, depression, or any other kind of mental health situation, one simply was expected to “tough it out.” Given my family background, I suppose it’s not surprising that I did not begin working with a therapist until I was in my late twenties (looking back, I’m sad at the amount of anxiety and depression I suffered in my youth, without any recourse to counseling or therapy). But I should also mention that, while I was still in college, I first became interested in meditation because of its reputation as a holistic method for alleviating anxiety. And I’ve persevered with meditation all these years because it has been a great help for me psychologically. Yes, I meditate to pray and to draw closer to God, but truth be told, I also meditate to manage my anxiety and alleviate my depression.

Michael Pollan’s book documented the promising research into psychedelics as an effective medicine not only for people struggling with anxiety or depression, but also PTSD, addiction, OCD, eating disorders, and fear of death. Along the way, he reviewed the history of psychedelics, and gently criticized both the fear-mongering of the establishment and the excesses of Leary and the hippies. He also described his own experiences with entheogens. Surprisingly, I found those sections of the book to be the least satisfying — Pollan is a gifted writer but I suspect even the best writer finds it challenging to describe psychedelic experiences (you’ll see my own faltering attempt later in this essay). Pollan reminded me of my own experiences and I could see how his words were clunky and wooden compared to what I had experienced, even recreationally and even with the anxiety I had felt.

How to Change Your Mind gave me a new insight: while I had come to the conclusion that recreational drug use is irresponsible, and psychedelics are ultimately less satisfying than spontaneous mystical experiences, Pollan invited me to see psychedelics in a more positive light: as a potentially life-changing tool to help people find psychological healing. As someone with my own share of psychological suffering, I found myself wondering: what if I could explore psychedelics in a safe and healing environment, where my anxiety was being managed and I could simply be in the moment with the healing properties of the medicine? It was a compelling question, and by the time I finished How to Change Your Mind, I decided that, if I ever had the opportunity to participate in psychedelic research, I would.

But I lived in Georgia, for heaven’s sake! A few Google searches revealed that, as of 2018, pretty much all the research was happening either in the American northeast or on the west coast. It seemed like a good idea, but probably not available to me. So I put it out of my mind.

“I’m Participating in a Clinical Trial”

Five years later, the situation had changed, not only in America as a whole, but even in Georgia. Psychedelic research had arrived even here.

Back in the spring of this year, I was at a dinner party with one of Fran’s and my dearest friends, someone we have known for years. I met her at the Abbey Bookstore where I used to work; she regularly visited the monastery, so we struck up a friendship that has lasted to this day. Among other things, I knew that she struggles with anxiety, so it was not a surprise to hear her say, just in the course of our dinner conversation, “Guess what? I’m participating in a clinical trial that my therapist referred me to. It’s testing the use of LSD to alleviate the symptoms of anxiety.”

That got my attention. “An LSD study? Here in Atlanta?”

“Yes, right in downtown Decatur. There’s a large research center there, where all sorts of clinical trials take place. Mine is a dosing study, looking at different dosage levels of LSD to determine what the optimal dose should be.”

I told her I would like to volunteer. “Really?” she asked me. “But do you have anxiety?” She was so open and honest about her journey with anxiety, whereas I’m the kind of person who tends to keep my inner struggles hidden.

I admitted I had never been clinically diagnosed or had been prescribed drugs like Xanax or Valium, but that anxiety was an ongoing issue in my life which I had managed with meditation and talk therapy. She gave me the name of her contact at the research center, and said, “You’ll have to be screened, but see if you qualify.”

I emailed the person at the research facility the very next day, and a few days later she interviewed me on the phone. I was candid with her, explaining that I didn’t have a diagnosis but had long worked with therapists and had learned to manage my anxiety with my breath, rather than with pills. She explained that as a volunteer I would be screened, not only for general anxiety disorder but also for conditions that would disqualify me for the study, like high blood pressure, suicidal ideation or a family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder. If I did qualify, I’d have to go through a series of interviews, a complete physical, repeated blood work and urine samples, and then commit to spending an entire day on site for the dosing, even if it became apparent that I had received only a placebo (it was a double blind study, meaning that neither the on-site researchers or I would know the level of dosage, if any, administered to me).

I could receive a placebo, or one of several different amounts of LSD. Whatever I received, I would have to remain at the facility for twelve hours and be monitored closely before the doctor would clear me to leave. I wouldn’t be allowed to drive that day, so Fran would have to pick me up from the dosing center. Then I would need to return to the clinic up to six more times, for more interviews, blood work, and urine samples, all in the interest of providing data to help correlate my experience with that of the other 200 volunteers in this nationwide study. The goal of the study was not to prove that LSD could help with anxiety — that had already been established in earlier trials — but to help identify which dosage level(s) correlated with the best outcomes. Best of all, this study was safe, legal, and I even would get a modest stipend.

I went in, got screened, and was accepted for the study. One of the interesting points about participating in this study was learning an entirely new way of understanding and recognizing anxiety in myself — and others. This post is already too long, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here; let’s just say that having spent most of my life toughing it out in regard to my anxiety, participating in this study gave me a much more nuanced understanding of my own mental health. Even without the psychedelic therapy, that in itself was a tremendous gift to me. But a deeper dive into that topic I’ll save for another day.

My friend who had told me about the study was a couple of weeks ahead of me in the process, so she received her dosing in April and shared with me and Fran that it was a deeply beautiful, transformational experience. As my participation in the study progressed, I felt quite nervous about taking LSD, but everyone at the research center was very kind and reassuring that this would be a safe and carefully controlled experience. As we got closer and closer to my “dosing day,” I found I began to worry not that I would be taking psychedelics, but that I would be stuck with the placebo!

My dosing day was scheduled for the second Thursday in May. A few days earlier, I was taken to the room where the experience would take place. Unlike the clinical feel of much of the research center, the dosing room was beautiful and comfortably decorated. A futon, a couch, and plenty of pillows were available for my comfort, and tasteful art decorated the walls. The colors were muted earth tones, although two small projectors bathed the ceiling in a swath of ever-changing colors. A bathroom was adjacent to the room; for the purpose of safety, I would be asked to surrender my shoes, wallet and keys, and any portable electronic device I had with me (but I was allowed to bring a hard-copy book, in case I got the placebo).

Music would be provided — a playlist of gentle, soothing music, carefully selected for the study. Two people, a therapist and an assistant, would be with me throughout the day, and a doctor would be available at all times and would come examine me before signing me out at the end of the day. My blood pressure would be regularly checked, and my attendants would see to it that I remained hydrated and had a couple of meals — of my choosing, anything that was just an Uber-Eats order away. In the unlikely case I had a bad experience, sedatives and mood-stabilizing medicines were available (“but we’ve never had to use them,” my attendants reassured me); and if absolutely necessary, I would be transferred to Emory Hospital just a few miles away. “The worst case scenario is that we give you something so that you sleep it off — but again, we have not had to do that.”

My biggest concern was simply that I would have a “bad trip,” and when I mentioned this, the therapist suggested that such language was not useful and encouraged me to try to explain in my own words exactly what I was feeling nervous about. Thinking it over, I realized that my fear was simply about that anxiety spike I had experienced when doing recreational drugs; I was afraid of panicking or being terrified. As I articulated that fear, I had to smile at the irony of it — since the entire point of the study was to look at how LSD could help with anxiety. My therapist asked me to consider that I probably would experience at least some anxiety during the dosing. Again, she was gentle and compassionate. “We encourage you, when it arises to lean into it, that’s how the medicine is able to do its work.” That sounded so much like the kinds of instructions I give people who have unsettling experiences during prayer: the point is not to run away from such experiences, but to welcome them and gently set them aside. I began to consider that my years of experience with Centering Prayer and other meditation practices just might make this a totally different experience from what I had undergone years earlier.

Soon Thursday arrived. I was far more excited than frightened; I felt safe and cared-for by the research team. That morning we decided to let Fran sleep in and an Uber picked me up so that I could be at the research center by 8 AM. We had enough time for my urine sample, blood work, a final review of the day, and then settling in to the dosing room. At 9 AM sharp — the time mattered to keep us on schedule for the rest of the day, after all, this was a clinical trial — a nice looking young man with a locked briefcase walked in the room. He handed me eight capsules and a bottle of water and instructed me to take all 8 within sixty seconds. Each capsule could contain a placebo or 25 micrograms of LSD. If all 8 were placebos, I’d have a very quiet day reading my book. If all eight contained the medicine, I’d have a full-blown psychedelic journey. “Here we go,” I muttered to myself, and quickly downed the medicine as everyone watched.

On the Journey

The first thing I noticed, about a half hour or so in, was a spot of nausea — which my attendants assured me was completely normal. As soon as I mentioned it, I was handed a tablet of Zofran, and that cleared it right up. Shortly after that, I was clearly buzzing — I told my companions that we probably could rule the placebo out. Soon, I realized the entire room had a dreamlike quality, and I was simply awash with a feeling of gentle euphoria. I was definitely high — and as the morning progressed, I saw streaks of beautiful color and easily lost myself in the music and, ultimately, in my own inner experience. By 11 AM, my companions encouraged me to take some time for interior exploration: they invited me to lie down on the futon, wear headphones to let the music flow through me, and a blindfold to facilitate going within. After I gave her permission to do so, the therapist anointed my forehead and palms with an aromatic sandalwood/vanilla oil. Then I slipped on the blindfold, and in I went.

The medicine created a space for me to relax inward. In retrospect, I realize why my attendants encouraged me to go within, for I had been chatting rather aimlessly with them, and I realize now that talkativeness was driven by my anxiety. But once I slipped on the blindfold and settled in to the music, I was all alone. And yes, I felt some trepidation, but not a full-throttled panic, just a kind of low-level awareness of feeling some generalized angst. I decided to do a body-scan to figure out where my anxiety was embedded in my body. The first thing I noticed was a tingling in my jaw — where it had been broken in three places in a serious motor vehicle accident I had in 1992, the year I met Fran. Even though it has long been healed, as I lay there, floating in the music, I felt the trauma in my jaw from my accident. But that led to an even more insistent feeling, in my throat. I could feel that I was holding fear in my throat; perhaps in my throat chakra, or simply my esophagus. My maternal grandmother died from esophageal cancer, younger than I am now; she also was a smoker and suffered abuse from my grandfather. I have a condition called Barrett’s Esophagus, meaning that I am at risk for that same cancer, even though I don’t smoke. My throat felt scratchy, and I intuitively recognized that it was an embodiment of my fear, both arising my own health worries but perhaps also an intergenerational memory, inherited from the wounded and abused grandmother whom I never knew, who died before I was born. There I was, afraid of cancer, and that, I could see, meant being afraid of death.

“When you encounter fear, don’t run from it, lean into it.” What would it look like to lean into my fear of cancer and my fear of death? I didn’t want to do it! But that was the invitation, right? So I did — I leaned in, and the feeling was that I was being invited to sink right into my throat, and right into cancer and death. I realized that, despite the anxiety, I also felt very safe — I knew this was happening on an imaginal level, and that in my physical body I was secure, lying on the futon in the dosing room. With colorful music swirling in and through me, I imagined that I could simply dive, or sink, into my throat, into illness, and even into death.

And that’s what I did.

It felt as if the LSD was guiding me. “Come with me, let’s sink into your death, and I will give you a new understanding of your fear.” Not that such words were spoken in any kind of cognitive way, but that was the message, and I knew it as such. So I dove. At this point I felt like I was a bird, diving into — and through — a bank of clouds. It was exhilarating. It did not feel dangerous or threatening at all; on the contrary, it was a thrill, like riding a rollercoaster is a thrill. I dove into the darkness, the “cloud” (only later did I realize that this may have been an inner metaphor for The Cloud of Unknowing) and simply embraced the free-fall. I fell, I dove, I sank, I flew downward.

And then I came out the lower side of the cloud bank, and what greeted me was an infinite burst of beautiful golden light.

As I write these words six months after the fact, I am aware of how odd it must seem. After all, when we fly in an airplane, we have to climb above the clouds to find the luminous brilliance of sunlight. But in my inner journey, the light greeted me from below the clouds — and it wasn’t just sunlight, it was (to borrow Martin Laird’s evocative language) an ocean of light. I was immersed in light, bathed in light, dancing in light, flying in light. The light and I were one. I was the light, the light was me. The light was everything and everywhere. And the feeling was simply, purely, utterly joy.

It was ecstasy, happiness, serenity, bliss. And I realized the light was in me, emanating from in me and within me, and as I enjoyed the light, I saw that all my fear (and all my anger, jealousy, bitterness, sadness/depression, cynicism and other distressing or unloving feelings and choices) were nothing more than games that I would sometimes play with myself. They were simply games of hide and seek, my soul at play with darkness and light so that I could learn more about love by knowing all the various permutations of the ways I accept, allow, but also deny or reject love — love in all its forms: love of self, others, God, all. Almost in a flash I could see all the ways I had chosen fear, or angst, or depression, or sadness, or self-protective cynicism, not because they represented who I truly was, but because they signified different dances in the game, different dimensions of this soul-at-play in hide and seek, ways that I had chosen to resist or reject love (even including choices I feel shame about, like mistakes and choices that I have made that directly resulted in the suffering of others) — and I could also see how, for that matter, how holding on to feelings of shame or guilt or self-contempt is its own form of hide and seek — and, again, how all of these various energy fields of emotion are simply ways in which I judge, and the judging is what really lies at the root of all my anxiety.

Do not judge. — Jesus (Matthew 7:1)

So I moved through fear, and from fear to death, and then through death into the burst of infinite, oceanic light. And there, I saw not only the inner hide and seek that I play on an emotional level, but I also saw a similar dynamic at play in my vocational work — my work as a writer, a speaker (throat chakra), a teacher and spiritual director. In all my work, I see my common calling or vocation as being an advocate for mystical spirituality and contemplation — but for the last 18-20 years, I have done that work in the context of institutional Christianity, and I have long struggled with what I see are toxic qualities embedded within hierarchical religion. There in the midst of my journey through the limitless inner light, I saw the suffering I feel as I struggle with institutional Christianity, but that even that was a game of hide-and-seek.

When I chose to re-enter the church (I had been alienated from Christianity for several years prior to that point), I was making a decision to ground my contemplative practice in one specific tradition, Christianity. In the midst of my psychedelic experience, that decision felt like being a firefighter who enters a burning building, hoping (perhaps) to help save the building if possible, but also to help save/rescue those who are trapped within it (i.e., those who are “trapped” in the worldview of a God who judges and is angry with them). I saw all my spiritual practices — from Centering Prayer, to Zazen, to yoga and long walks in the woods and all the ways I seek to sink ever more deeply into silence — all as ways in which I have simply sought to pour myself into divine union (that is actually already there, but playing hide and seek with me), and that the LSD was not making me one with God/the universe/everything but simply was revealing to me how I already was (and am) one with God/the universe/everything.

And in a flash of clear, blissful insight, I could see that all my spiritual practices were just as effective as the entheogen (although obviously the dosing was a more intensive experience), just as effective at realizing and recognizing that blissful luminous union as always/already present within me. I could see that one of the most persistent ways I play hide and seek with my own oneness-with-the divine arose through my tempestuous relationship with institutional Christianity, with religious dogma and judgmentalism. To enter the burning building felt, to me, like I was going to be consumed by the fires, not of heaven but of hell — which is to say, not the luminous fires of divine love, but the scorching fires of unrelenting judgment. But even the fear of divine wrath and judgment was just another dimension of the hide-and-seek game that I was playing with myself.

I could see that my decision to work within religious spaces was not unlike the commitment of a bodhisattva (someone who chooses compassion for others as more important than their own enlightenment) — so I have “entered the burning building” of institutional religion, less for myself than for my care for others. But still, it’s a game of hide and seek, and in my own soul’s playful commitment to hide-and-seek, I was continually “forgetting” who and what I truly was, forgetting my oneness-with-divinity, forgetting my point vierge, my spark of the soul, my place that “has never consented to sin and never will” — and in the forgetting, I experienced myself (my “ego” or perhaps what has been called the “false self”) as just a network of stories and hide-and-seek games, stories that I used to create a sense of self.

Meanwhile, the medicine (LSD) acted like a cheerful agent of unexpected insights within me, as if it were shining a bright light into the center of my heart, revealing the entire project of my ego/self to be simply this vast network of stories and hide-and-seek games that nevertheless helped me to navigate ordinary consciousness, and therefore was not “wrong” or bad, but simply not always skillful. The LSD, I could see, was not creating this vision I was having of myself; rather it was like a spotlight, bringing illumination into what was already there. In this clear light of infinite joy, I could see that anxiety is not my enemy, not something to be carved away or excised, but was merely an invitation to find a more skillful expression. Perhaps the anxiety could be recalibrated into caution, or prudence, or carefulness, which is to say, into energies that serve me and keep me safe without causing me unnecessary suffering or distress.

In feeling and seeing this invitation to befriend my own fear, I could also see that the purpose behind therapy, or meditation, or spiritual practice, or even creative work like my writing, was that they are all ways to manage or ride the ever-flowing wave of my ego- construct, all for the purpose so that I can facilitate the most possible joy and love in my life — for the joy and love (and bliss of union) are always there, even though I do play hide-and-seek and thus often appear to “forget” who/what I truly am and who/what I am truly capable of being, both for myself and for others.

As I could clearly see all this, the joy and giddiness just overflowed, and then finally it seemed the LSD itself invited me to “Share this!” so I removed the blindfold, and headphones, and got up and tried as best I could to articulate all this to my two companions. They listened warmly and politely as I babbled on about how in my quest to heal my anxiety, I ended up doing some pretty deep contemplative spiritual work, which was entirely unexpected. After sharing all this with them, I asked them how long I had been lying on the futon, thinking it had been at least twenty minutes.

“About an hour and a half,” one of them replied.

At that point I realized I was hungry, so we ordered lunch. I got a salad from my favorite salad shop in Decatur.

After we ate, I decided I wanted to “go in” again, so I got back on to the futon with my headphones and blindfold. By now the peak of the psychedelic journey had passed, so this felt like a less deep experience. Instead of trying to explore any further within myself (in retrospect, I can see that I got plenty of inner insights before lunch), I found myself musing on the Heart Sūtra, one of the core texts of Mahayana Buddhism. I’ve written about the Heart Sūtra both here on this blog and in Eternal Heart — it’s a beautiful text, one of my favorite sacred writings of any tradition. But like the Nicene Creed, it is philosophically challenging. A key line in the Heart Sūtra is “emptiness is form, form is emptiness” — and as I reclined on that futon, I received a powerful insight into the essential truth of these words. The “form” correlates with the ego-construct: the stories and the narratives we tell ourselves to establish or maintain a sense of identity or self. Meanwhile, the “emptiness” is what Buddhist teachers have called “the clear light of bliss” — and that is always, already flowing out of the center of my heart, but sometimes I experience it as ecstatic silence, other times as pedestrian ego, yet these things are not-two. As I write these words, six months after the experience, I am chafing at how poorly they capture what I experienced. Let’s just say that I saw connections that intellectually I already knew were there, but now they seemed more embodied or experiential, and again, the result of this insight was a clear sense of cascading joy.

After the Dosing

The last half of my twelve-hour sojourn is now a blur to me; at the time I think I simply relaxed as the effects of the LSD wore off; I rested, chatted with my attendants, had an impossible burger for dinner (yum), and when the doctor came to check on me at 7 PM — ten hours into the experience — it seemed like the time had flown by. Soon it was 9 PM and my companions for the day escorted me to the street where Fran was waiting. I told her I wanted some ice cream — still feeling like there was an “energetic” scratch in my throat — so we stopped by Sprouts, got the ice cream, went home, and soon I was in bed for a long night’s sleep.

The days following the dosing were rich with my own reflection as I sought to integrate what I had experienced — which included how to integrate this therapeutic experience with my work as a contemplative writer, retreat leader, and spiritual director. If there was one over-riding take-away from this clinical trial, it was feeling that I needed to integrate my experience not only psychologically/therapeutically, but spiritually/mystically as well.

Thanks to Ram Dass and others like him, I knew plenty of books were available on the relationship between psychedelics and Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous spirituality, but was anyone writing about Christianity and psychedelics? I went poking around online and found a book called God on Psychedelics by Don Lattin. I wasn’t familiar with the author, but I respected the book’s publisher, so I downloaded it and read it quickly.

In the very first chapter of that book, I learned about a study that had taken place at Johns Hopkins University a few years before the pandemic; all the participants were clergy and seminary professors from mainline congregations, Christian or Jewish. Volunteers were chosen not on the basis of mental health conditions like anxiety or depression, but simply because they were religious professionals who had never experienced psychedelics before. In the study, the participants were given two experiences with psilocybin, and intentionally were invited to regard these as sacred, spiritually meaningful experiences. While the results of this study have yet to have been published, Lattin interviewed several of the participants for his book. One of them, an Episcopal priest serendipitously named Hunt Priest, had such a profound and moving experience that it led him to create a networking organization for Christian clergy, therapists and spiritual directors who were interested in the interface between psychedelics and spirituality. The organization is called Ligare, and it turned out that Hunt lived in Savannah, just a few hours away from me. I was scheduled to lead a one-day retreat in Savannah in the summer, so I sent Hunt an email and asked if he would be willing to meet with me.

Just a few hours later he replied. It turned out that I was on his radar — mutual friends, including a Trappist monk, had suggested to him that he should reach out to me, and he even had a few of my books sitting on his desk. He mentioned a few folks in Atlanta who were interested in this topic, including an Episcopal priest who was involved in psychedelic research at Emory University Hospital. Her name rang a bell, so I checked my contacts list and email archives — it turns out she had been one of Rhiannon’s chaplains during her many hospital stays in the months before she entered hospice in 2014.

I know that coincidences can just be evidence of the random nature of things — but I am a contemplative, after all, and as a person of faith I believe many coincidences are in fact serendipities — and “serendipity” often is just a code word for “the Holy Spirit is up to something.” It seemed at that point that the chain of events set into motion first by reading Michael Pollan, then having a chance conversation with a friend at a dinner party, led me to that very point where I found that a small but dedicated number of Christians are indeed asking the same questions that I was now asking. When Hunt and I got on zoom, he expressed it so beautifully. “Psychedelics are coming,” he pointed out; “the science behind their therapeutic value is simply too good. So Christians simply need to decide, are we going to be reflexively resistant to this emergent trend, or are we going to look for positive ways that we can support the ongoing spiritual lives of those who are doing psychedelic therapy?”

Ram Dass comes to mind, as does a conversation I had recently with one of my dharma teachers, who (not knowing I was participating in the study) brought up LSD, and said “LSD and other psychedelics are useful in that they give us a glimpse of what enlightenment looks like, but then we have do the ordinary work of preparing ourselves for enlightenment through spiritual practices like meditation.” I couldn’t agree more, and apparently that was how I got on Hunt Priest’s map: having a psychedelically-induced mystical or enlightening experience is one thing, but then comes the question of “Now what?” For many people, the answer to that question might involve ongoing spiritual practice. And contemplative spirituality is precisely the kind of practice that can meet the wonder and mystery of psychedelic experience on its own terms, and show a holistic, sustainable, and daily path forward.

What Are We To Make of All This?

Clearly, there is so much more I could say about this experience, but since this post is already so long, I’ll try to summarize some thoughts I’ve had in response to my encounter with psychedelics through a clinical trial. While I don’t expect psychedelics to become the center-point of my work, it’s a topic that I suspect I will return to again in the future. But for now, here are a few thoughts I’d like to share on this admittedly huge topic:

• It’s time to put the moral panic about hallucinogenic drugs behind us. I don’t believe psychedelics should be freely available as party drugs; they are simply too powerful for that kind of indiscriminate use. But so much of the anti-drug rhetoric of the last 50-60 years is simply not backed up by evidence. We need to dial back the fear-mongering and work for common-sense drug policies that allow for the legitimate therapeutic — and spiritual — applications of psychedelics. Chemotherapy and other powerful/dangerous drugs are controlled but available to those who need them. A reasonable psychedelics policy should in a similar way balance control and accessibility.

• For some people, psychedelics are contraindicated, and that needs to be taken seriously. The tragic story of Joseph Emerson illustrates this. I don’t know the man and certainly cannot diagnose him, but based on the news reports of what happened with him, I can’t help but wonder that if he had been working with a responsible therapist, they would have recognized that his underlying mental health concerns meant that he was not a good candidate for psychedelic therapy. People with personal or family history of bipolar disorder, psychoses like schizophrenia, or even suicidal ideation need significant mental health care before even considering psychedelic therapy, which might never be appropriate for some people. A reminder: I am not a therapist, so this is just a writer offering their opinion. If you have any questions about this matter for yourself or someone you love, please consult a qualified mental health professional.

• Set and Setting matter. This goes all the way back to the days of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert doing research at Harvard. The “set” is the intention that a person brings to using psychedelics. Back in May, my “set” was to learn from LSD how I could alleviate and perhaps even heal from my anxiety. I did not expect or ask for the spiritual lessons that the medicine taught me (since such lessons arose anyway, I assume they were necessary for my work in dealing with my anxiety). Meanwhile, the “setting” is the environment in which one experiences psychedelics. My clinical trial took place in a beautiful, calm, comfortable room specifically designed for the comfort and safety of those getting dosed; I was always cared for by qualified attendants who were not under the influence of the drug themselves, and one of whom is a therapist. Having a constructive set/intention and a safe and comfortable setting can make all the difference for having a positive experience.

• There is a lot of bias against psychedelics in the spiritual community; we need to revisit those biases. As a practitioner of meditation and Centering Prayer, for many years I myself had a kind of self-righteous attitude toward entheogens: I saw them as a kind of spiritual bypassing, a chemically-induced spiritual “shortcut” that did not provide a “real” mystical experience. Full disclosure: I have a long-standing personal bias against drugs of all kinds; which is one of the reasons why I never pursued even ordinary pharmaceutical relief for my anxiety and depression. But over the years, I have learned that for many people, psychiatric drugs can be lifesaving, and eventually I replaced my prejudice with a much humbler recognition that sometimes, drugs are really the best path to mental health and wellness. Psychedelics, likewise, can sometimes be the best choice for people struggling with PTSD, addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, or even simply fear of death. All this begs this question: if psychedelics have legitimate therapeutic uses, doesn’t it make sense that they could also have legitimate spiritual uses as well? Again, I’m not suggesting that psychedelics are for everybody, but perhaps for some people, the appropriate use of entheogens can be a profoundly meaningful initiation into (or deepening of) their spiritual life and practice. Certainly my experience, which was intended primarily as a down-to-earth therapy for my anxiety, turned into a profoundly beautiful and moving spiritual experience. I am not alone in that experience, so those of us who love and practice contemplative spirituality need to be thinking about how we can support the ongoing spiritual lives of those who take psychedelics and have meaningful spiritual experiences as a result.

• Indigenous people can inspire us to reclaim the spiritual blessings found through entheogens. I’ve written this blog post as a white American of European descent, working with a psychedelic discovered in twentieth-century Switzerland. But many entheogenic plants have long been respected and used by indigenous peoples in their own sacred ceremonies. Indigenous communities that include peyote, ayahuasca and other plant-based entheogens in their spiritual lives have found wisdom, meaning, healing, and insight through their ceremonial encounters with the sacred plant medicine. This, right away, should point to an understanding that these powerful plant-based medicines (even LSD comes originally from a fungus) carry a profound spiritual potential. There are questions of cultural appropriation and white privilege at play here, so I’m not suggesting that indigenous peoples owe anything to the dominant society, nor should we expect indigenous healers to teach us or give us their ceremonies. But we both need to respect their spiritual use of entheogens, and reflect on how psychedelics might have spiritual blessings even in the mainstream. Incidentally, indigenous religious ceremonies that include the use of entheogens are technically protected by federal law, although I believe indigenous religious groups often have to fight for their rights. I think such freedom-of-religion rights need to be enshrined and protected in our society, in addition to the responsible therapeutic uses for psychedelics.

• As psychedelic therapy is becoming more accepted, we need to be thinking about the spiritual application of psychedelics. Christians and others need to look at how we can provide spiritual support to those who encounter psychedelics as part of their healing journey, regardless of what therapeutic issues they are engaged in. Whether you are healing from PTSD, addiction, anxiety, depression, or some other situation, part of holistic healing is becoming available for a meaningful spiritual awakening and ongoing spiritual practice. This is true regardless of our religious identity or relationship (or lack thereof) with institutional forms of religion. Spirituality is something for everyone who breathes, and psychedelics can call anyone, of any culture or creed, into a deeper and more intentional spiritual life. Will those of us who identify as contemplatives be willing to show up to support people who are doing this kind of deep inner work? I certainly hope so — and intend to do so.

My experience with LSD this year — participating in a clinical trial that promised me a therapeutic experience, but then receiving spiritual as well as therapeutic benefits — illustrates a point that many healers and saints across the world, from Carl G. Jung to Ram Dass to Gerald G. May and so many others, have pointed out: therapy and spirituality exist on a continuum of care. In my ministry as a spiritual director, I need to maintain boundaries both for myself and my directees, so that we all understand my work is contemplative rather than therapeutic in nature: I am not a psychologist or professional counselor. I do not provide mental health solutions but I assist people in their Spirit-directed spiritual growth. Despite this clear and obvious difference, spiritual direction is a form of interactive care, which means it has a certain affinity to talk therapy. While it’s important to keep in mind the differences between therapeutic and spiritual care, it’s also important to acknowledge those affinities. Which begs another question: could it be that psychedelic therapy just might live in the space where therapy and spiritual care intersect? That’s not something to fear, but rather something we all can explore with open minds and hearts.

It seems clear that, with proper set and setting, psychedelics can open powerful doorways for deep spiritual transformation. Are they absolutely necessary for such inner growth and development? Probably not. But can they be of meaningful assistance to those who seek spiritual growth, nondual enlightenment, or mystical union with God? I am convinced that yes, they can.

Organizations like Ligare are emerging to support clergy, spiritual directors, therapists and other healers and caregivers to meet the ongoing care and support needs of those who integrate psychedelics into their mental health and or spiritual care. Since my own initiation into the world of therapeutic psychedelics, I’ve begun to participate in a spiritual directors’ working group sponsored by Ligare that is developing a statement of best practices for spiritual direction with psychedelic users. I believe in the future, spiritual direction formation programs will offer training to help spiritual directors to meet this specific need among those they serve.

To finish, let me repeat the quote from my Buddhist friend: “psychedelics are useful in that they give us a glimpse of what enlightenment looks like, but then we have do the ordinary work of preparing ourselves for enlightenment through spiritual practices.” In other words, psychedelics may shine a light on our inner lives that can be healing, inspiring, or joyous, but they really are not shortcuts, for once the medicine wears off, we are left with the ordinary tasks of making skillful choices in the interest of our own wellness and our ongoing spiritual growth. Organizations like Ligare are doing that kind of ordinary work to help connect the dots between psychedelic therapy and spiritual care. Perhaps spiritual directors and other contemplative leaders will have an important role in helping people using psychedelics, whether for therapeutic or spiritual purposes, to integrate their powerful experiences into a visionary life of ongoing care, compassion, hope and joy.

Epilogue: A Dream

Here is a dream that I had twelve days after my dosing experience. I’ve decided to share it, because I think it hints at how my subconscious was continuing to integrate the experience with the entheogen, almost two weeks after taking LSD. Like so many dreams, by the time I woke up and started to write it down, I had already lost much of it, so this is mainly just a few snippets of images and impressions. But hopefully it’s worth reflecting on.

A few notes: Tommy was a childhood friend who in high school became very involved in psychedelics; I’ve lost touch with him and have often wondered how his life turned out. I think the “vast underground world” is pretty self-explanatory, and “the key to the portal” — could that have been the LSD? Or even simply contemplative practices? The woman resembled what my mom looked like when I was a child, so I’m thinking she could represent a “super-ego” figure, and the child, I assume is what we might call my “inner child” — with a nod to Matthew 18:3, perhaps? (I do not have a son in real life).

In front of Fran’s and my house, in the middle of our road, I could see an access portal to a vast underground world, vast like the Mines of Moria in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This “portal” was made of brick and was about 6’x6’x6’ cube, right there in the middle of the road, with a locked iron gate/door on the side facing the home opposite of ours. It turned out that this cubed structure actually sat beneath the road normally, but there was some way that a person could make it “pop up” in the middle of the road to have access to it. And so now it was above ground and I could indeed have access to it.

I had been loaned a key, presumably from the county government, to visit this subterranean world beneath my house, it seems that it was a reward for a service I had rendered to the county. I stood there with a child, who seemed to be my son, and he and I and my old friend Tommy were examining the structure. We were talking about how the county had built this underground world years ago, and no one hardly ever visited it except for maintenance purposes. I unlocked the gate, and Tommy went down the stairs or ladder to have a look. The child and I waited outside. It looked very deep inside, descending multiple levels, and not exactly scary in a dangerous way, maybe just a little vertigo-inducing or awe-inducing. The kid wanted to explore it, and I promised him we would another time — after all, I had to return the key, even though I was already wondering about how I might be able to access the cube in the future.

As we were standing there waiting for Tommy to return from below, one of my neighbors (a woman I did not recognize, but she looked like someone with a lot of power/authority) drove by — and then stopped her car and called to me. I walked over to speak to her. She asked me how I had access to the portal. I told her I had the key on loan, but would need to return it soon. “It’s too bad that no one in the neighborhood has one of those keys,” she remarked. “There’s no chance you’re going to make a copy of it, is there?” I felt the need to be cautious with her — perhaps she was a representative of the county government and I would get in trouble if I told her that I wanted access in the future; for that matter, I realized that if word got out that I had the key to the portals, everyone would be bugging me for access. So I said, very noncommittally, “It’s not something I would officially do” and just then my alarm went off, ending the dream.

I’m not sure what the difference between “official” and “unofficial” access to the underground world means — but it seems to me that, for anyone who does not currently have access to safe and legal psychedelics, it’s helpful to remember that a sustained and intentional practice of deep meditation and contemplation can be, in its own way, a key to the mysteries deep within us.

In my book Unteachable Lessons I talk about Kenneth Leech, the Anglican priest who wrote a variety of books on topics related to both contemplative spirituality and the struggle for social justice (if you’re not familiar with Ken Leech, check out Prayer and Prophecy, an anthology of his most essential writings).

I only met Ken on a handful of occasions. When I ran the bookstore in Sewanee (the site of an Episcopal seminary), he came in to the store while he was on campus and we chatted for a bit. Several years later, I had a spiritual director who was an old friend of Leech’s, and so whenever Ken was in the USA he would visit Georgia to see his friend; and on several of those occasions I got to spend some time with Ken as well.

Ken taught me a lot. He was very impatient with spiritual writers whom he saw as succumbing to the trappings of celebrity; he himself tended to shy away from the spotlight, preferring the ordinary work of parish ministry in one of London’s most economically-challenged neighborhoods. Like any seasoned Christian contemplative, Ken tended to value humility, earthiness and ordinariness as the marks of a mature spiritual life.

A Thought-Provoking Conversation

One time when Ken was in Georgia I took him out for breakfast, and as we chatted I must have made a comment about wanting to be a mystic. I don’t remember what exactly I said, but even after almost 25 years, his response is seared into my memory.

“Whatever you do, don’t call yourself a mystic,” he said with typical bluntness.

“Why not?” I asked, brow furrowed. After all, here in America we have this idea that if you want something, you go after it — and naming it is an important step on the way to making it real.

“Calling yourself a mystic would be like calling yourself a saint, or a shaman,” he replied. “If you really want to be such a thing, it’s far more important to live it than to just talk about it. If you are really a mystic, other people will see it. Let them call you a mystic; you don’t need to claim that name for yourself.”

I felt a bit stung by this rebuke, even though it was delivered in a gentle and civilized-British way. But his analogy made sense. If anyone went around proclaiming that they were a saint, most people would see them as foolish at best, if not downright prideful and arrogant.

A real saint doesn’t need PR. You simply live a saintly life. The Catholic Church, which is the only organization I know of that’s in the saint-accrediting business, won’t even consider your cause for canonization until after your death. I’m sure there have been countless people who live truly saintly lives that are now lost in the mists of history. But that’s okay: part of true sanctity is a spirit of humility that doesn’t really mind if it ever gets acknowledged publicly.

It’s so important to keep in mind that Ken was not saying “don’t aspire to be a mystic” or “don’t live like a mystic.” In fact, he was encouraging me to do precisely those things! In schooling me on a basic principle of humility — don’t call attention to yourself — he was, paradoxically, encouraging me to do what really mattered in contemplative spirituality: to walk the walk rather than talk the talk.

There’s a song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show that proclaims, “Don’t Dream It; Be It.” In other words, if you have a desire in your heart, don’t just daydream about it: make it real. Applying this to Ken Leech’s comments: don’t just talk about being a mystic when you can more quietly do the unglamorous work of living a contemplative life.

Why We Like to Say We’re Mystics

I think a lot of people might like to call themselves mystics because they want a shorthand way of explaining that they are more interested in an experiential spirituality, as opposed to a religious observance that is defined by believing the approved things and conforming to the social expectations of a church. But is mysticism just something we “experience”? I’ve already written at length about why I think the notion of experience sometimes fails us. Just as there is more to love than just the experience of falling in love, so too there is more to the mystical life than just having experiences of God’s presence in our lives.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with experiencing a sense of God’s presence. I wish everyone could have such experiences! But an experience of God is not the goal of mysticism: if anything, it’s just the entry point.

What, then, is the goal of mysticism? Probably the best one-word definition would be the Greek word theosis or its Latin equivalent deification — the goal of the mystical life is union with God, which means living a God-infused life. It’s not so much about what we feel or experience, as how we conduct our lives: in a manner shaped by love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, mercy, and all the fruit of the Spirit, including joy, peace, patience, gentleness, and so forth.

When I took Ken Leech’s word of caution to heart, here’s what it meant for me: if I’m interested in mysticism (which I was, and still am), what matters the most to me is not “being a mystic” — whether in my eyes, or anyone else’s — but rather living a mystical life. And that, more than anything else, inspired me to begin to take seriously the practices that have for centuries now been associated with mystical and contemplative spirituality: including silent prayer, lectio divina, a regular daily prayer habit, and a focus on cultivating basic virtues such as simplicity, faith, trust, and yes, humility.

Many years have passed since that breakfast with Ken. He passed away a few years back, and I’m sad that he’s gone (he was always gracious enough to answer my letters or emails). Nowadays, from time to time I meet people who describe themselves as mystics. Usually there seems to be more enthusiasm than arrogance in their choice of words, so generally speaking, I let it pass — I figure we all have the right to define ourselves. But at least for myself, I still agree with Ken. If you want to call yourself a mystic, that’s your business — but I tend to be most impressed by people who simply do the work of cultivating a contemplative heart. Do that work, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re a mystic, whether you say so (or feel like it) or not.