An Interview with Ashley Lande
Ashley Lande always knew she was looking for something. But having been raised in a Christian household in suburban Missouri, she knew that whatever she was seeking couldn’t be Jesus Christ. As a young co-ed and visual artist in the Midwest, she found a vehicle that might complete her quest: LSD. Her occasional use of psychedelics gradually became a lifestyle, fueling a desperate tour through Eastern religions and new age counterculture for something that would answer her persistent questions about the world and her place in it: a thing she called “the thing that would make everything okay forever.”
Her harrowing trip down the rabbit hole almost cost her everything. Yet, in an ironic twist, the suffering and confusion that she imposed on herself through her drug use ultimately led her to the very thing she was looking for – but in the last place she had expected. That thing was the salvation given to her through Jesus Christ. Her new book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ (Lexham Press, 2024), offers an honest, vivid, and kaleidoscopic account of her conversion.
Over an email exchange, Lande offered greater insight as to the dynamics of her transformation, her faith, and her contribution to the great literary tradition of Christian conversion narratives.
Let’s start here: in terms of your denomination, how would you describe yourself?
As far as denomination goes, we’ve honestly been all over the map since becoming Christian. I was raised in a Methodist church, and I’m really grateful for that foundation, which provided a very basic scaffolding as I tentatively embarked upon exploring Christianity again in my late 20s and early 30s. It was around that time when I was becoming disenchanted with psychedelics and the new age. I was very “denominationally naive” when my husband and I became Christian. At first, we attended a non-denominational Christian church, which had been involved in the Emergent movement of the 90s and early 00s, and it was a soft place to land for us as we were drifting away from psychedelic culture. In the ensuing years, we attended a tiny Nazarene church, two other Methodist churches, and several house churches. So, I feel a little denominationally uncommitted, but the Baptist church we attend now is a really wonderful community of people who rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that community among believers is absolutely integral to life in Christ.
Early in your book, you explain that you were instinctively attracted to counterculture and that you were certain that belief in God was a refuge for small-minded people. When I was young, I was also strongly drawn to counterculture. But in college, I still retained a bit of Christian faith because I saw that Christianity — especially among young people – was countercultural. The default position of my peers was one of secular agnosticism. Given that, why did you see the “new atheism” as countercultural and edgy at that time? I mean, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris were relentlessly pushed by mainstream culture…
I think you’ve pinpointed a great irony there – Christianity IS far more countercultural than atheism and secular agnosticism. I think perhaps I missed that entirely because I was in some ways a reasonably intelligent teenager, but also phenomenally stupid and set upon rebellion. In suburban Missouri, where I was raised, nominal Christianity was still the default. That was perhaps not true among the university population when I went to college, but I was truly blinded by the spirit of the age. I drew thoughtlessly toward whatever appeared bizarre, transgressive, or even dangerous. I considered artists who created such work to be edgy and longed to be such an artist. Of course, now I’m incredibly bored by gratuitously transgressive art. Even back then, I couldn’t embrace the coarseness of Marilyn Manson or the sociopathy of GG Allin; I craved what was still often very dark and obscure, but which still hinted at some remnant of hope or goodness or beauty. I guess in that way – as I write in the book – the romantic in me, the child, wouldn’t entirely die despite my efforts to quash it.
You write that when your drug use was really driving you to the point of desperation, you saw Satan materialize in your bedroom — when you were sober. After that, a hyperawareness of your own sin set in: “it felt as though a howling chorus of faceless ghosts were swirling around me, hissing accusations, dredging up my every sin, the most trivial of which took on a fearsome gravity and the greater of which tailed me everywhere as unshakeable shadows.” In a strange way, then, The Accuser’s appearance to you was followed by a wave of accusations that stimulated regret — the precondition of faith. In that sense, it seems that Satan was unwittingly doing God’s work, bringing you closer to Christ. Thoughts on that?
Yes, I suppose you could say Satan was unwittingly doing God’s bidding in the sense of Romans 8:28. God weaves great beauty out of what seems devastating in the moment. Another much-beloved verse comes to mind – what Joseph said (though he was speaking about his brothers’ actions, of course) about what you meant for evil, God intended for good. I do think I was in a very perilous mental state at that time – nearly suicidal. But it was a necessary precursor to my conversion to see clearly my sin and the spiritual danger into which I was regularly plunging myself. At the time, I believed there was no “rescuer” or source of salvation beyond my own efforts and perhaps the unreliable, vague “greater power” of “The Universe.” That feeling of utter abandonment and loneliness showed me my need for a Savior.
In the book, you clearly explain many times that you saw LSD as a vehicle towards something that you couldn’t really identify. Sometimes you describe that thing as an experience, sometimes you seem to describe it as a wisdom or a knowledge, and sometimes as a condition or a way of being. Looking back, which of those descriptors seems most apt to you?
I think a kind of electrifying combination of them all would be the best answer. Perhaps experience (and specifically extreme experiences) would have been most prevalent, and what I imagined was the secret, privileged knowledge that accompanied such experience or followed in its wake. But what I usually got was greater confusion.
At this point in your life, how would you characterize your belief (or disbelief) in mysticism, the supernatural, the esoteric?
I very much believe in the supernatural, and perhaps my experiences on acid contributed to that, though often in a negative way that scared me into believing as much. Now I believe it because the word of God affirms that there is a spiritual realm which moves about us and through our world, and through which powers and principalities are at work, and my experiences then and now have certainly confirmed it. Since I’ve become a Christian, though, I’ve at times struggled to be appropriately aware of that without succumbing to a kind of obsessive fascination with it.
It can be very seductive and perhaps spiritually unhealthy to live in a world where everything is spiritualized. But the belief that sometimes resides in both very liberal and very conservative churches, where virtually nothing is spiritualized (the former being hyper-focused on the earthly realm and the latter being prohibitively skeptical of Charismatic practices) is, I would argue, disenchanting and a little soul-deadening.
Stripped to its essence, your book is an example of a 2,000-year-old literary tradition: the conversion narrative. Especially in the last third of the book, I see some indebtedness to Augustine’s Confessions. Are there other conversion narratives that were an influence as you wrote?
I’m certainly indebted to Confessions. I read it for the first time only a couple of years ago – it was so accessible, timeless, and relatable. I’ve heard it said that the deeper you go into the particularities of your story, the more universal it becomes, whereas if you strain to write a memoir in a way you think will have points of access for everyone, you will fail.
One memoir that has heavily influenced me is Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. I really value how she conveyed that she loved and hated alcohol, and how even as she loved it, she knew it was destroying her very humanity. She becomes sober at the end, though sadly did not reach any religious conclusions except in the most vague Alcoholics Anonymous sense of “a higher power.” She is a brilliant writer, though.
There’s also a short story by Denis Johnson called “The Starlight on Idaho” that I think about all the time and read often. It’s fiction, but as conversion narratives go, it’s as raw and real (and by turns, comic and touching) as they get.
Some people have a sudden, momentary conversion (like Saul on the Road to Damascus), and others, like Augustine, have a long, drawn-out, incremental conversion. Which was yours?
Both models were at play in my conversion. There was a certain Damascene moment in time when I realized the Gospel story was truer than true, but there was much that led up to that moment. Like Paul, however, I was rigidly resistant to all that God was up to in my life. I think a lot about Paul holding the coats of those who were stoning Stephen – how he didn’t seem to have any hesitation (at least none that the scriptures reveal). He must’ve watched with steely eyes and a stony heart, but also truly believing that justice was being executed.
I never had such surety except perhaps at the peak of my acid use before I met my husband – the drugs were making me delusional, of course, but my increasing isolation was also compounding the effects of my own personal echo chamber. As time went on, I became less and less sure of the acid-influenced new age beliefs I’d adopted. Yet for so long, I couldn’t believe that Christianity could be true. Some of it was pride: I thought I’d already examined Christianity and found it lacking, but eventually I came to see I hadn’t really looked at it at all. Maybe I was scared – “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Beholding Christ in all his glory and in all the shame he bore on the cross is to behold our own shame, our own desperate need, our seemingly incurable sin. I write in the book about being unable to look away from Jesus, unable to simply dismiss him outright, although God knows I tried! He simply wouldn’t be absorbed into my self-centered grab bag of religious notions, and in a way, he wouldn’t leave me alone – Thank God!
Ashley Lande’s book, The Thing that Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, is available at a variety of booksellers online.
Adam Ellwanger’s book, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self (Penn State University Press, 2020), is also available online.
