Losing My Faith and Finding It Differently: A Former Evangelical's Account

I grew up in an evangelical church and was genuinely devout until my mid-thirties, when the combination of theological questions I couldn't resolve and the growing distance between the community's stated values and its actual behavior drove me out. I left the faith but not the hunger for whatever the faith had been pointing toward.

I came to psilocybin as an agnostic who missed God — or more precisely, who missed whatever 'God' was the word for. The church had given me community, meaning, and a sense of connection to something larger than myself. Leaving it left those needs unmet.

The session did not make me re-evangelical. What it gave me was an encounter with what the church had been gesturing toward — something that doesn't require the theological apparatus of Christianity to access but that the apparatus had been, at its best, pointing at. Something I can only describe as the presence that precedes all interpretation of it.

I am still a theological agnostic. I don't know if that presence is God, consciousness, the ground of being, or simply my own nervous system doing something remarkable. What I know is that the hunger is fed now in a way it wasn't before. The loss of the church is still a loss. But what I was looking for in the church has been found somewhere else.