my kind of church
In my last year of college, my housemate met a boy who introduced her to a psychedelic religion called the Santo Daime. She flew to Oregon to visit the boy for Christmas, and came home lit up with a mission: apparently the leaders of the church wanted to organize a Daime retreat in Colorado and needed local support. “Let’s do it Meggie!” she sang as we sat on our porch, drinking our morning ch’ai.
The Santo Daime, my friend explained; was a religion from the Brazilian Amazon, a syncretic blend of Catholicism, indigenous Amazonian spirituality, and the mediumistic worship of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria, centered around the sacramental consumption of ayahuasca. That was all I needed to know. I was a believer in psychedelics— mushrooms and LSD had rescued me from my teenage blues and set my course in life—and I had been curious about ayahuasca ever since a boyfriend in Santa Cruz regaled me with tales of being swallowed by a giant anaconda under its influence. I knew the tea was a psychotropic traditionally used for reasons ranging from divination and healing to hunting and sorcery, and had always intuited that it would come to me at the right time—and though I never imagined I would drink the tea in a room full of Christians, I knew better than to let my aversion to religion get between me and a plant that would lead me to Spirit.
We rallied our most daring friends, rented a retreat center, and met on a clear morning in March, to drive into the mountains. After arriving at our alpine sanctuary, we signed release forms confirming that we were not on contraindicated medications, and were given places in a large room. Our rabble was conspicuous in the haphazard white garb of newcomers, among initiates whose outfits resembled the uniforms of colonizers: women wore blue pleated skirts, button down white blouses and bowties; men were in blue slacks, white dress shirts and blue ties.
The work began with an invocation to the father, son and holy ghost, and rounds of Our Fathers that made me want to bolt. I felt out of place in my religious company and repelled by the patriarchal wording of the prayers, but before I could plot an escape, we were lining up for sacrament. I swallowed the bitter brew and returned to my place. Men and women assembled stiffly on opposite sides of the room, surrounding a table on which a massive wooden cross loomed over a vase of pink and yellow roses, and assorted pictures: a blonde Jesus, a pale Mary, and a swashbuckling Saint Michael battling a dragon. I glared at the handsome armored angel stabbing a shadowy dragon. What was I doing here? I was a Jewish witch, not a Christian. I wanted the dragon to win, not the saint. While I was grumbling to myself, the people in the front were tuning instruments. The room exploded into sudden action: guitars drilled a lively melody, maracas slammed a beat, and people in uniforms marched back and forth, belting out hymns in Portuguese that were indecipherable and strangely thrilling.
I stumbled in the shuffle of the marches and swayed nauseous during the waltzes. I wished I was facing a tree instead of a cross. After trying to be a good student for a few hymns, I snuck outside. Cheek pressed to the rough bark of an old pine, inhaling scents of soil and sap, I felt comforted, but a moment later a woman in uniform marched over, her face a grim portrait of duty. ”You need to come back,” she declared. I followed her inside and regretted it immediately: I couldn’t bear the feeling of being crammed into a crowd while the medicine was opening me in ways I had never been opened before. As soon as I could, I slipped out again and hid in the bushes, until the same guardian roped me back in, and that became our routine for the evening.
Get through the work, I told myself, and you never have to come back. But after awhile my complaints and resistance vanished. I felt as if a force had entered my body, or an inner wisdom had awakened; something was hard at work in the depths of my psyche, opening doors, scrubbing surfaces, shaking shadows, dissolving scars. I couldn’t dwell on the mystery of it all; I was too busy trying not to trip over my feet while staring at my hymnbook, struggling to read finely printed Portuguese hymns that kept flying off the page, and sing along. Now that we were well into the work it was clear that singing was the one thing that would save me, so while strangers in suits hurled into plastic buckets in corners, I concentrated like never before. By the time we were singing the last hymns, I had been placed in the front row. It felt imperative that I get it right, which mean nailing the timing with the maraca—three beats down, one beat up—while singing in a foreign language and mastering steps of unfamiliar dances.
My concentration on the music came at a cost: failing to attend to the messages of my body, I didn’t catch the signs of an impending cleanse. Near the end of the work, the Daime’s purgative effects kicked in, triggered by the swaying of the waltz, and before I had time to duck out of line the ayahuasca cascaded up and out of me, drenching the front of my white dress. My neighbors spooked and crashed into each other, musicians fumbled their notes, and the room wobbled as I stopped dancing and stared at the stain on my dress and the puddle on the floor.
A guardian whisked me to the bathroom and instructed me to shower off. Standing under steaming water in my wide open state was the high point of my evening. I didn’t want to get out, but the guardian urged me to rejoin the others. I dried off, dressed in the jeans and t-shirt I had arrived in, and returned in time for closing prayers. The tedious repetitions and patriarchal jargon didn’t bother me this time—The alchemy of the medicine, music and movement had transported me beyond judgment.
The work ended and everyone in the room started hugging each other. I chatted with a Brazilian man named Marcio who told me his family was about to join him in Boulder; he and his wife were starting a Daime point. “You should come!” he said. In the euphoric wake of the work I had trouble remembering my objections. The combination of psychotropics, esoteric teachings, synchronized dancing and powerful music was a crucible that felt like the destination of my life’s search for meaning, community and transformation. Still blissful the following week, my housemate and I invited Marcio and his family to our house to lead a hymn practice. And just like that, our scruffy posse of Naropa students became an ayahuasca drinking congregation.
* * *
My mother was a principal who had been raised by Holocaust survivors; my father was a Norwegian professor of Soviet Studies and a peaceworker. In that atmosphere of intellectual critique and inherited trauma, I had learned to be dismissive of the followers of religions. And yet, now that I had a community that geeked out over hymnbooks and met in psychedelic dimensions inhabited by indigenous chiefs, Oriental princesses, and celestial archangels, I was happy in a way I had never been before. The Daime was not only an international community led by jungle mystics with exceptional musical talent, it was a way out of the dull materialism of my culture. We marched like pistons of a spiritual engine, generating a field of consciousness that rocketed us into intimate epiphanies. I still felt like a fraud muttering prayers to a male God, but once the medicine kicked in, it dissolved my criticism. I had a marvelous community that considered psychedelics a sacrament, like I did, and if Jesus came with them, so be it. When we met in the space of ceremony and sang our hearts out together, I felt like I had finally done what I had wanted to do so badly as a kid, repulsed by my culture, staring with longing at pictures of teepees. I had waltzed into a different narrative than the one that raised me, and everything felt more right in my life.
Our Daime community included a TV producer from LA, who bought a mansion in Conifer and invited us all to live there. Each morning my boyfriend and I tramped through aspen groves, a tape recorder in our backpack, to practice hymns in dewy meadows bright with wildflowers; every dusk, through our open window, we listened to choirs of elk bugling their own ancient music. Every other weekend we held Daime works in the big room that had become our ceremony space, or outside on the great sloping lawn, the entheogens we consumed heightening our appreciation for the dramatic beauty of the Rockies. In the rapture of it all, the boy proposed, I said yes, and we bought rings from a vendor on the Pearl Street Mall. During hymn practices and Portuguese classes, we leaned over books with sharpened pencils, marking accents and practicing conjugation. The Daime was our mystery school, and we were good students.
I decided to become an official initiate, or a “fardada” as Daimistas say. When the leader of the biggest Daime church in Rio brought his crew of musicians to our mountain outpost, he pinned a silver star on my blouse, during a ceremony that lasted twelve hours. By the end of that summer, everyone in our group, still largely composed of Naropa graduates turned psychonauts, wore the star that signaled their commitment to the tradition. It never got easy for me to button myself into my white shirt and pull on my polyester skirt, but I did it, because the Daime was now my home. I even tried saying the prayers, which often got stuck in my throat. The easiest part was drinking ayahuasca; I never had any doubt about that. And the weight of my aversion to religion was invariably lifted by the force of joy I felt, when the magic of the forest vanished reality’s borders.
Since my new path made me so happy, I naively assumed that it would make the people who loved me happy too. But when I visited my family in Norway that summer, my parents were appalled. This was going too far. Following Jerry was one thing; following Jesus was another. It wasn’t the fact that we consumed ayahuasca that bothered my parents the most, it was our allegiance to the holy trinity. I was equally baffled by the fact that I found Christianity, in any form, compelling. But my life had lacked something vital, and my experience in the Daime confirmed that what was missing was spiritual community.
I understood my parents’ concern; in their eyes, it seemed their idealistic tree-hugging kid had been snared by a drug cult. I couldn’t explain that I had been begging to be captured. I was repelled by the religious underpinnings of the Daime, and I would have felt far more comfortable in a coven of Wiccans, but I couldn’t argue with the design that led me to the Amazon. My path was lit by the glow of synchronicity, as if I had been carried by the flow of something bigger than me into the animate world I had been dreaming of all my life.
My ambivalence toward the patriarchal prayers and polyester outfit never went away: it’s been twenty four years since that first work, and I am still untangling the same questions. But I have never felt an iota of hesitation about the tea. All I feel, all I have ever felt, is a most powerful gratitude and astonishment—what luck, that I get to have this medicine in my life! And I have never felt anything but love for the community. I belonged with them and I still do: I belong with these people who sing to plants; calling them medicine, calling them sacred.