Placebo Eucharist

For a long time I was a Christian. Growing up in a protestant family I was indoctrinated from the beginning of my life into the church. Likewise it has taken me a very long time to recover. I am now on the recoil and all things Christian are bad (for me). When I did attend church what I liked best was its ritual aspects, in particular the communion (referred to by the high church as the eucharist). I liked that somehow the whole meaning of the universe could reside in this funny piece of bread (or stale wafer) and this thimble full of grape-juice (or wine). It worked best on cold winter Sundays when the church was laden with cozy drowsiness and (maybe) some incense hazing the far architecture. I always attempted to tune in, to try to feel something; I was trying to have a mystical experience. Sometimes, depending on how much caffeine I had, or if the songs were good, or how much I liked my fellow communicants, I did feel something. Many years pass; I become an apostate (the technical meaning of this funny word is that I renunciate Jesus Christ lol); meanwhile, now a sinner, I do drugs. But not just any drug. I had read Michael Pollen’s book How To Change Your Mind and very much wanting to change my mind I decided that magic mushrooms were the drug that I would sin with (in the forest, cavorting with the devil). Long story short, my mind changed (only afterwards) and it became immediately clear to me that the mystical experience that I had been looking for, everything that I wanted the eucharist to be, was all along inside this mushroom.