A Closed Letter to Father Louis

A dialogue with Thomas Merton about his psychedelic skepticism

Author’s Note: Thomas Merton was a Catholic mystic, Trappist monk, and one of the most influential Christian writers of the 20th century, especially on contemplative practice and interfaith dialogue. Father Louis was Merton’s monastic name, which he used when in his role as a spiritual director. But his books were always signed by the name of his writer’s persona—Thomas Merton.

While this letter is enhanced by a familiarity with Merton, I have written it in such a way that one does not need any prior knowledge of Merton’s work.

Salutation

Dear Father Louis, one of the great pleasures of my life has been getting to know your famous deceased contemporary, Thomas Merton. 

I hope I don’t scare you off when I say that his words created seismic shifts in my theology and discernment of my call to ministry.  Like Paul and the Phillippians, I thank God every time I remember Thomas Merton. But I do not write to you just to espouse my love for him, or you, though I thank you both for your service.

I write you this closed letter, sealed only for your receipt, knowing that an “open letter” format destroys intimacy in favor of polemics and argumentation. I do not wish to destroy trust with you by challenging you to a public debate, which I would undoubtedly lose. I write you, Father, instead of Mr. Merton because I do not seek a writer’s audience. I need to speak to someone entrusted with the care of souls. 

I come to you as someone who, when I was not a Christian, was influenced by Alan Watts’ transmission of DT Suzuki’s Zen. After my reconversion, I found deep resonance with your ability to put Suzuki’s Zen into a Christian framework—thank you. It paved the way for a more robust conversation between Zen and Christianity. 

Today I write you because I believe a similarly robust conversation needs to happen for Christianity and psychedelics, which you just began surface-scratching before your death. 

The Slavery of Illuminism

The world has changed so much since you were here. I won’t bore you with most of the details, but the conversation of psychedelic mysticism has been underground and out of sight of most Americans for 50 years. Yet after these years of dormancy, there is a renewed “fury of drug-mysticism” that had you shaking your head in your journal on November 27th, 1965.¹ Back then, you said you wanted no part of that conversation nor “the Zen traffic.” Of course, you were soon putting yourself firmly in Zen traffic by writing Zen books, and even the chapter “Transcendent Experience” in Zen and the Birds of Appetite serves as a subtle opening gambit on drug-mysticism, so part of me wonders if you would have written a book on psychedelics if you had lived a few more years. Whatever the case may be, I apologize, but I insist on dragging you back into the psychedelic traffic.

Specifically, I want to write to you in response to your words of deep skepticism, caution, and admonishment of “tak[ing] drugs for purely spiritual reasons.”² While you expressed support for medical psychedelic therapy³ (which is gaining serious and capitalist-infused momentum), people who revere you should know that you had many issues with mixing psychedelics and mysticism, summarized in your posthumous work The Inner Experience. There you warned of the danger and temptation of illuminism, the “enthusiasm” which becomes infatuated with spiritual experience and makes it objectified into an idol: 

To live for spiritual experience is slavery, and such slavery makes the contemplative life just as secular (though in a more subtle way) as the service of any other “thing,” no matter how base: money, pleasure, success. Indeed, the ruin of many potential contemplatives has been this avidity for spiritual success…all the more dangerous because the satisfaction we derive from spiritual things is pure and perfect. And all the harder to bring under objective criticism. Hence the danger of attaching an exclusive importance to what we ourselves experience and of believing that every intuition comes to us from God. The worst errors can be taken for truth when a man has forgotten how to criticize the movements that arise in his heart dressed in the light of inspiration.⁴

While you were an outsider to psychedelics, I know your words did not emerge from a vacuum. You had been wrestling with this issue for a decade after correspondence with Aldous Huxley, and your thoughts above came after witnessing the 60’s come to its full chaotic-weird fruition—although you died before the even weirder and far more sinister “War on Drugs,” which I doubt you would have supported. 

As the word “mysticism” continues to be invoked with flippancy towards its origins and studies of practice, I share some of your “uneasiness [about] the falsification and corruption of mystical religion that might arise from the abuse of these dangerous methods.”⁵ As you predicted, we are “run[ing] the risk of organized and large-scale illuminism,” where “an easily available spiritual experience would be sought for its own sake.”⁶ And it is ironic that St. John of the Cross is among the mystics invoked for the validity of ecstatic experiences in Christianity, when in fact he said we should avoid these experiences because even when they appear to us to come from God, they run a tremendous risk of self-deception. And thus it is your intervention that gives me the most pause around this whole psychedelic endeavor.

There is, however, a complicating factor in play for me.

I must witness to you as a Christian who not only has taken psychedelics, but reconverted to Christianity because of his experiences with a psychedelic plant medicine known as Ayahuasca. It would be more convenient to me to not report this to my Christian contemporaries, however, I must be a journalist of my spiritual journey and disclose what happened as I understood it. I will share more on that later, but the tension I feel between your wisdom and my experience—however foolish my interpretation of it may be—is too great to not explore this issue with you.

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Interpretive Delusion, Spiritual Ambition, and False Transcendence

I can see that your long-held admiration for Mr. Huxley did not persuade you to his position, and his influence on ‘60s psychedelic spirituality likely only hardened your resolve and led to your convictions in The Inner Experience. But in retaining due respect to Mr. Huxley, I believe you do not reject psychedelics in and of themselves as much as you reject sloppy applications of perennialism. I suspect that part of the disconnect is that Mr. Huxley could not experientially understand the devotional, “I-Thou” relational nature of your contemplative practice. Huxley’s engagement with religion at arm’s length, something merely useful for our consciousness but absent the stakes of surrender and service, contributed to a psychedelic culture whose relationship to religion has been, at times, mutually hostile. The result is a spiritual movement that resists being a religious movement and insists on trying to be a scientific movement. Mysticism is often the baby caught in a custody battle between these factions, with no Solomon to order it chopped.

As such, I’m afraid many of your diagnoses on the spiritual traps of psychedelic use have come to pass. While you lack personal experience with psychedelics, I do not think your thoughts lack charity; as you noted to Mr. Huxley, these experiences may well lead to the sort of synthesizing sense of Oneness, “Like the intuition of a person who has participated deeply in a liturgical act.”⁷ I know you would not say that we should avoid liturgy, but we must discern the liturgical rhythms that lead to a life in Christ. It seems your primary issue here is what constitutes “genuine,” true, authentic mystical experience. I’m afraid a line of inquiry into “genuine mysticism” can be as elusive, gatekeeping, and navel-gazing as debating the genuine olfactory experience of flatulence, but I will inquire nevertheless.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but your crux about unitive experiences seems to be this: as valuable as intuitive feelings of Oneness may be, this Oneness is inherently limited to the natural and aesthetic domain, while “real [supernatural] mystical experience would be more or less incompatible with the consistent use of a drug.”⁸ If I were to summarize your reasoning, an authentic mystical experience is not a direct encounter with Oneness, but a meeting with the Person of God, “I AM,” the ground of existence that is beyond sensing Oneness, the freedom underneath Oneness. You say that a true mystical experience is beyond anything that can be procured, that it depends on our receptivity to the “presence of [God] and depends on the liberty of that Person. And lacking the element of a free gift, a free act of love on the part of Him Who Comes, the experience would lose its specifically mystical quality.”⁹ Because God is Freedom, and anything we can elicit or procure is inherently not free, drug experience is not an experience of true Freedom. If we use a material substance to procure an experience of God, we innately remove the freedom of grace that makes it grace in the first place.

In Zen and the Birds of Appetite, you further developed your thinking. You argued that a Christian mystic should “radically and unconditionally question the ego which appears to be the subject of the transcendent experience,” that we must:

Become detached from our everyday conception of ourselves as potential subjects for special and unique experiences, or as candidates for realization, attainment and fulfillment. … A spiritual guide worth his salt will conduct a ruthless campaign against all forms of delusion arising out of spiritual ambition and self-complacency which aim to establish the ego in spiritual glory. That is why a St. John of the Cross is so hostile to visions, ecstasies and all forms of “special experience.” That is why the Zen Masters say: “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” … As soon as there is “someone there” to have a transcendent experience, “the experience” is falsified and indeed becomes impossible.¹⁰

Now, in my view, there is a tricky matter here around spiritual ambition and self-complacency, for a rigid and rigorous denouncement of a spiritual psychedelic experience could easily be both spiritually ambitious (“I don’t do psychedelics, I’m on the true mystical path”) or complacent (“I’m not missing anything”). But I admit I felt a sting of embarrassed recognition when I first read these words because I know you speak some truth. If I am seeking transcendent experiences for their own sake, however glorious they may be, it is still I, not Christ, who lives in me.

It is true that one of the primary missteps we spiritual seekers make is fooling ourselves into thinking we can control the divine. In this sense, taking psychedelics to achieve “transcendence” is no more spiritually viable than asking God to give you the promotion you so desperately want; coincidental success at either task only bolsters pride. We are better off in the pose of perpetual Advent, actively waiting and preparing for God to enter our midst, ready to respond to the free grace that calls us moment by moment. It seems our impulse, at least in the West, is an “active voice” of spirituality, making ourselves the subject and God the object. In this paradigm, whatever we imagine as self-transcendence is just self-assertion, casting ourselves as stars of the universe’s movie. 

This false transcendence is something that concerns me like it concerns you. As you said, with another uncomfortable ring of truth: “drugs have appeared as a deus ex machina to enable the self-aware Cartesian consciousness to extend its awareness of itself while seemingly getting out of itself. In other words, drugs have provided the self-conscious self with a substitute for metaphysical and mystical self-transcendence.” I am spiritual and religious because I, too, am skeptical of my ego’s ability to transcend itself based on its own rules. When I am the chief authority of my spiritual framework, it is like being an entrepreneur: I cannot ever leave the job I assigned myself; I am always on my own clock. My spiritual buck, then, must not stop at my desk, but God’s (though every day I repeatedly fire and re-hire myself to the job).

Yet we also know that the spiritual “passive voice” that says we are mere objects lacking free will and agency also misses the mark. The English language has lost the grammatical “middle voice” of ancient Greek and other languages, where we are neither fully subjects nor fully objects but exist in a place of mutual participation. If God is the ultimate Subject, then we are woven into his Subjectivity; and so while we cannot control grace, what we do affects how we and others experience it. 

However, since our natural impulse is to place ourselves as ultimate subjects, it follows that we thrive under practices that reduce, rather than enhance, our subjectivity. We must all face facts that neither drugs nor liturgy nor anything else can save us from the challenges of this predicament. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, but no technique can rescue us from being caught in the messy entanglement of addictions, attachments, and fundamental helplessness of our human situation that some of us call “sin.” “I” as a subject am helplessly a sinner, because “I” am always entangled by nature of being “I.” Psychedelic use that centers our human subjectivity, our consciousness, or our “personal growth” may be captivating, but it is a mystic non-starter with a narcissistic price.

Now, having said all this, Father…

I believe a wholesale disqualification of psychedelics from mystic practice limits our understanding of God’s freedom and grace, even God’s standing as ultimate Subject, as well as what preparing to receive this free grace might look like. I believe it is possible to have a psychedelic context that does seek to empty ourselves, that is not inherently fixated on ecstatic experience, that attempts to root us in the ground of all being rather than further into ourselves. To this point, I would suggest that not only does Mr. Huxley underestimate liturgy (as you note), but I believe you might too!

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Confession, Witness, and Kenosis

I feel like I’ve been rude not to introduce myself further, so let me revisit the disclosure that is both confession and witness: I am a Christian today because of God’s work through Ayahuasca.

After growing up as a Presbyterian preacher’s kid, I left Christianity for a decade. For years I believed I had permanently left it behind for much better things, including psychedelic experiences. In truth, I was traveling through the spiritual wasteland of modern urban life as you did in Seven Storey Mountain, building the empire of King Me while also slowly unraveling, failing, becoming increasingly addicted and co-dependent, disillusioned by every fleetingly emerald pasture.

When I was invited into an Ayahuasca ceremony as a spiritual seeker, I came with a broken relationship with my parents, a disconnected and disenchanted ruthless careerist, addicted to alcohol and sex, accumulating tremendous grief stored and stuck in my body. In retrospect, I really had no idea how much grieving I needed to do.

I do not have the time or ability to tell you everything about Ayahuasca. It was first a plant medicine tea used by indigenous tribes in South America, but Westerners have discovered it in recent decades. While having similar aesthetic effects to other psychedelics, Ayahuasca works so uniquely that many do not wish to put it in the same category, just as all categories like “drugs” flatten their unique properties and the unique ways and reasons people use them. Like anything else, not everyone has the same reaction, or even a wholly positive one. There are so many unique ceremonial traditions with different theologies and experiences that I cannot pretend to speak for anyone besides myself. 

For myself, Ayahuasca is a far more deeply embodied experience than any other psychedelic, centered on its cyclical purging of the physical, mental, and spiritual bodies. There is no telling how much purging will happen in a ceremony until you are in it, but it is a kenotic process on multiple mutually-supporting dimensions (famously, this often includes a bit of vomit). In this emptying process, an Ayahuasca “sitter” may experience intense, sacred grieving. This grieving releases trauma, an outflowing of pain, sometimes pain that we didn’t know we could possibly release, sometimes pain we didn’t even know we had, because our civilization has so taught us not to process, breathe into, or move our grief, but to make do with it. The multiplanar purge moves my consciousness through layers of mind, allowing me to be more in tune with my body, the natural world, and then into an unfathomable expanse. There are still parts of me subjectively experiencing this expanse, and as such, it is not intrinsically “mystical.” But it is in the space created by this cyclical kenosis that I have witnessed something that is at least close to the Void described in your Zen writings; pure spaciousness, groundlessness.

The miracle of my time with Ayahuasca is that what emerges from this Nothing, this Void, this Sunyata, is a phenomenological Love, over and over, mercies begetting mercies. Sometimes this Love takes on animistic, archetypal, and geometric qualties alongside other patterns of form, which disappear almost as quickly as they came back into Nothing, back into the cycle. As you wrote:

Supernatural Kerygma and the metaphysical intuition of the ground of being are far from being incompatible. One may be said to prepare the way for the other. They can well complement each other, and for this reason, Zen is perfectly compatible with Christian belief and indeed with Christian mysticism (if we understand Zen in its pure state, as metaphysical intuition).¹¹

It is only when Ayahuasca clears my canvas that I am ready to receive the paint of grace in all its miraculous weirdness. This process of emptiness and fullness, moving into one another, may or may not count as a “genuine” mystical experience to the extent that “I” have it. But I find it undeniably holy.

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The Liturgy of the Tea Ceremony

While other psychedelics have a wide variety of structured therapeutic and unstructured spiritual, secular, and profane contexts, Ayahuasca is nearly always ingested ceremonially. Granted (and this is often misunderstood), for many tribes and traditions, this ceremonial use is not something all people are meant to partake in, and only those with the chosen role take Ayahuasca on behalf of the community, much like your monastic vocation. Regardless, for those who serve in this role, there is always careful attention, sincere intention, and deliberate ritual of ceremony—there is always liturgy.

I know you are already fond of liturgy, but allow me to preach to your one-man choir. The liturgy is the meeting place for all our containers: physical, mental, theological, relational, and more. It is the manifestation of our spiritual discipline, emerging in this place with these bodies and these minds, supporting each other with Christ’s mediation. It is the site of intentionality transforming potentiality into actuality. It is a complex negotiation of our collective spaces, all aligned in service to God, the container of containers that allows for the freedom of freedoms.

In your day, few Americans interested in psychedelics had an interest in liturgy. So it makes sense that you wrote to Mr. Huxley, “from the moment that [a mystical] experience can be conceived of as dependent on and inevitably following from the casual use of a material instrument, it loses the quality of spontaneity and freedom and transcendence which makes it truly mystical.” But you were missing something you later learned about Zen tea ceremonies: “[it] is in reality a deeply spiritual, one might be tempted to say ‘liturgical,’ expression of art and faith. In the tea ceremony everything is important, everything is guided by traditional rules, yet within this traditional framework there is also room for originality, spontaneity and spiritual freedom.”¹²

If nothing else, practicing with Ayahuasca is—quite literally—a tea ceremony. And where a tea ceremony allows for originality, spontaneity, and spiritual freedom, we can know that the freedom of God as ultimate Subject is in no danger. The liturgy is there to protect us from our own subjectivity, reinforcing our relationship to the sacred. 

You know far better than I that liturgical rhythm can extend beyond the confines of one ceremony or one Mass to encompass an entire way of life. Monastic life is a grand tea ceremony containing many smaller tea ceremonies, and tiny monastic Ayahuasca communities are no different. In this way, as one teacher told me, an Ayahuasca ceremony is just practice for the ceremony of life.

I hope I do not come off as a “liturgical enthusiast [who] wants to regiment others into their way of thinking.” I merely want to posit that carefully discerned ceremonial, liturgical psychedelic use can be part of one’s training for the liturgy of creation. Ayahuasca has helped me learn what John the Baptist preached: I am not a savior, even to myself; I’m not even qualified to untie Love’s sandals. But liturgy has taught me that we can do something to prepare the way. Perhaps this preparation with Ayahuasca is not a “genuine mystical” experience. Perhaps this doesn’t matter.

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Fresh Ears, Fresh Eyes

What does matter to me is this: in the right container, I truly believe Ayahuasca can facilitate a sacred rhythm of kenosis and revelation. For Christians, this means we empty ourselves as Christ emptied himself, purging ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually so that Christ may re-enter where our false selves once took up space. 

In Ayahuasca, we taste layers of this inner poverty over and over in ways that range from barely perceptible to dramatic. From our inner poverty, we do not reify our subjectivity, and we do not invite back in convenient utopias as echoes of the ecstatic. We do not invite solutions to our problems - though they may very well emerge. We do not invite back being possessed by the typical noise of our false selves, though we love them for their good intentions all the same. 

Instead, we invite Christ back into our lives where our noise has kept him out. We invite Christ’s healing love to transform the parts we can’t. Our inner poverty teaches us how to patiently wait for Christ to emerge on Christ’s time and on his terms. This sort of Christian framework is powerful, then, not because we might experience a unique encounter of Christ in a ceremony—we may not feel Christ at all during the ceremony itself—but because it teaches us that wherever we can get ourselves out of our own way, Christ is ready to enter into the ceremony of our lives at any time. And sometimes, to get out of our own way, we must not use psychedelics.

This approach is not how I first met Ayahuasca. I will have to tell you my whole healing journey and conversion story another time, but I will say this much: while my work with Ayahuasca began as healing my relationship with my parents, the people in my life, and myself, over time I became more and more curious about healing my relationship with my Christian lineage. I was still firmly my own principal spiritual Author, and the last thought in my mind was conversion; I would never again assent to such sentimental, anti-intellectual, abuse-enabling rubbish to call myself a Christian.

Grace had other plans. One night, days before moving for grad school, I was in a ceremony just as word-defying as any of them, finding myself bathed in a peculiar love. I knew I was loved as I was, unconditionally and uniquely, yet this love was simultaneously universal, unfathomably bigger than me. Suddenly, the old phrase “child of God” emerged into my heart as if it was spoken to fresh ears. An expression that had grown stale even when I was a Christian, the profundity of this simple theological statement of our ultimate identity in relationship to God melted my already melted heart. Like Jung, I no longer needed to believe in God, I just knew. And God wanted to have a relationship with me. While still weeping, I thought, “Shit, the Christians were right.” As the ceremony continued on with songs of prayer, it struck me: one name for the incredible energy present with us, the same energy I found in so many places outside of Christianity, was the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit had been with me all along! I looked around with fresh eyes laughed the deepest laugh at this purest joy. Suddenly all those old Christian words no longer felt flaccid but relevant, alive, real. I could no longer deny the power of these texts, these songs, these stories, this long conversation of Christianity that hopelessly tries to transmit the poetic truth of our relationship to this Being we call God. It was then I finally, reluctantly admitted, “Shit… I am a Christian.” 

This Christian’s journey is, as far as I know, unusual. I know more who have had profound healing through Ayahuasca that they would articulate in non-Christian terms. And I am indebted to the non-Christian communities who have held space for me, sharing God’s love through their tradition’s wisdom, even if they would not share the framing with me and would not share any of the thoughts I have above. There is a Love that works through all spiritual language. And yet for some, Ayahuasca has done very little or even created more challenges in their spirituality. And there are too many abusers who use Ayahuasca to say that Ayahuasca is salvific in and of itself. There is no sola psychedelia, and Ayahuasca has not cured me of my humanity. But I cannot deny that it made me Christian again.

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Final Thoughts and Benediction

I have one last confession to you: I think our earlier discussion of “true mysticism” laughably misses the point. Zen and Christianity each teach in their own way that we are idol-making machines, and while Ayahuasca can undoubtedly be made into an idol, so can seeking “pure” contemplative practice towards a “genuine” mystical experience (as if all our experiences were not already mediated by chemistry and human subjectivity). I also believe this form of idolatry is in danger of contemplative elitism. And even if Ayahuasca does not produce a “genuine mysticism,” does it not still have the capacity to facilitate God’s healing of our wounded souls? I must answer that it does.

Indeed, psychedelics do not give us any more grace than already exists. But for some of us, psychedelics allow us to experience grace more than anything else we’ve found. Subjective experience may be trivial to the mystic, but it is not trivial to the God who loves us and wants us to know this love. 

However, where I suspect you are most deeply right is that God does not want us to be satisfied by chasing these spiritual experiences for their own sake. Jesus healed people in their brokenness, at times using spiritual experiences. But he also challenged us all on this: our religion and spirituality are useless when they do not become transformed into gifts beyond ourselves. When our psychedelic experiences do not lead us to acts of sacrificial love but merely more psychedelics, when we do not take up our cross of self-denial but justify self-indulgent spiritual extravagance, we should be deeply suspicious of our integration, and indeed, our whole psychedelic approach.

Nevertheless, if my understanding of my path is at all accurate, psychedelics do offer great potential in a world starving for meaning. There is an old joke—so old you may have heard it—where a man trapped on his roof in a flood keeps waiting for God to intercede on his behalf, shooing away boats and helicopters because he is waiting for God’s intercession: “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.” When he dies, he asks God why He didn’t help. The punchline, of course, is God’s reply: “I sent you two boats and a helicopter. What more did you expect?”

Some of us are drowning in a flood of nihilism, Father. We are drowning in our addictions, in our trauma, and everything else in this world that keeps us from remembering God’s love. We are trapped on the rooftops of digital, socially distant bubbles, trapped in our emotional constipation, living in fragmented, polarized communities while alienated from the natural world. For some of us, psychedelics have been a helicopter—or, more precisely, something that helps us clear the ground for the rescue. We must constantly remember that it is not we who control the rescue operation or can guarantee a safe passage. But if God calls us to this work through careful discernment, discarding away our superficial reasons and egoic inflations, I believe we must not be so spiritually ambitious as to avoid it for the sake of an idol of ascetic purity. 

That is all (and it is a lot!) I can say for now. Peace be unto your soul and its union with the divinity of God that lies beyond all spiritual experience. I pray that my words may be found to clarify from humility rather than impose pride, and are met as an invitation to continue the conversation. Through reading your words, I will continue to listen for what you might say in response. Thank you, Father. And please thank Mr. Merton for me, too.

With love and gratitude,

Joe Welker

1. The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, edited by Hart and Montaldo, p.263

2. The Inner Experience, p.108

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid, p.106.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, edited by William H. Shannon, p.436-8

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p.77

11. Ibid, p.47

12. Ibid, p.91

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