I was like baby Moana responding to the ocean (of mushrooms).

Part 17 in, "My Mushroom Journey to Healed Trauma, Less Shame, and More Love"

“God doesn’t exist, God insists.”

The first time someone said that sentence to me, quoting John Caputo, I had to actively work to keep my eyes from rolling. The esoteric silliness of it all was heightened by the fact that my friend said it with such a straight face.

You know how sometimes something can become so overly soaked in the world of academia, and then so hung out to dry on the lines of philosophy, that by time you bring it back in the house it has essentially lost all practical purposes?

That’s what it felt like. A fatuous phrase intended only to make the hearer sound simple and the speaker sound deep.

Fast forward seven years from that moment and one morning I’m working on a draft of chapter 4 from my book, The Shift, about how we might think about, talk about, and feel about God as we shift away from conservative Christianity and toward something more open/expansive/progressive. On page 62 I wrote these words:

You could also think of God as Event, which, bizarre though it may sound, best describes how I most often conceptualize God. To think of God as Event is to speak of that which calls us, summons us, and invites us forth. Thought of this way, God doesn’t exist; God insists… [for] God is not a separate object, a being to whom one can relate in a subject/object manner… God [is perhaps] like an insist-ing force that calls people in to action.

Ah the gift of eating crow. How often do we reject ideas so viciously at one stage in our life, only to then embrace them as our own later on down the road?

As I continue sharing about the first stage of my mushroom Journey I want to suggest that whatever the psilocybin was doing in and through me, it was a kind of “insist-ing” like force calling to me. As previously mentioned I call this first (of three) stage in my Journey “Invitation,” which I’d now like to say a bit more about.

To do that, consider Moana.

In one of the opening scenes we watch as toddler-Moana wobbles to the shore where the sea seems to beckon her.

Moana chooses to accept the invitation as the waves invite her deeper and deeper, enticing (rewarding?) her with beautiful shells along the way.

Until she’s fully immersed in the ocean itself.

What I’m saying is, I was baby Moana to psilocybin’s Ocean.