Reporting Live from the Darkness: Catholicism, Psychedelics & Good Friday
I’ve always been confused by the nomenclature of “Good” Friday. When I first learned about it as a kid, it seemed to be one of the scariest and least good days in the entire Catholic calendar. For those unfamiliar, Good Friday refers to the day of Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, death, and burial. Not exactly light and celebratory. It’s the somber lead-up to Easter Sunday, when Jesus is said to rise from the dead. The themes of death and rebirth immediately bring to mind the idea of ego dissolution in psychedelics, but as a psychedelic therapist, I often have ego death on the brain.
I am what you would call “culturally Catholic.” This means I carry a subtle, ever-present sense of guilt, a fear of disappointing some vaguely vengeful higher power. My parents will be livid if my future children don’t have a big communion party one day, preferably littered with Jordan almonds. While I don’t actively practice Catholicism, I grew up in a community where religious rituals and symbols shaped much of my life. I still love little gold statues, the jewelry of rosary beads, cross earrings, gold plating and big gemstones, and the mystery of faith. Emphasis on the mystery part.
The central tenet of Catholicism is faith - believing in the unseen. It is considered a mystical religion for that reason. During communion, the bread symbolizes the body of Christ - not literally, but symbolically, and through ritual. Rituals and symbols are mystical because they point to ideas and realities beyond the physical realm. They create wordless connections to spirit and invite contemplation of things that cannot be proven, only felt. In that way, Catholic theology embraces paradox, like death and resurrection, and the holy trinity. God the father, Jesus the son, and the holy ghost are all technically one entity, if you can wrap your mind around that one. This invites parishioners to sit with those contradictions, to find meaning in mystery.
Oddly enough, therapy isn’t all that different.
Therapy is a faith-based practice. Week after week, patients show up and place their trust in the guidance of a relative stranger. They engage in a process they hope - have faith- will lead to relief or insight. Progress is never linear. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Both therapist and client have to trust in the unfolding.
Much like religion (Catholic paradox, Buddhist koans), therapy asks us to hold paradoxes and grapple with impossible questions:
Is avoiding your pain causing more pain?
Can you feel lost, but still be on the right path?
Is your inner critic a loving force trying to protect you?
Can you practice self acceptance while striving for change?
In the 1960’s, a group of researchers at Harvard, including Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert - who later became Ram Dass - and Walter Pahnke, gave psilocybin to seminary students during a Good Friday service. Their question: Can psychedelics reliably induce mystical experience - like something out of Rumi, or the Old Testament, or Buddhist jhana states?
Set, setting, and intention were key - just as they are today. The student participants were already in a sacred space, open to spiritual reflection, and guided through a ritual. The result? A powerful, transcendent experience that deeply influenced many participants. Across religions, symbols and rituals are often used the same way - to open the senses and reach a state that’s transpersonal, or even psychedelic, depending on how liberally you define a synonym.
This matters because psychedelic experiences often feel mystical, even in secular settings. And that feeling is increasingly being studied as a protective factor for mental health.
In my work as a secular mental health counselor, I know that the mystical experience and some form of “spirituality” is one of the strongest defenses against mental health symptomatology. Research has shown that individuals who highly value spirituality have thicker brain matter, especially in parts of the parietal, occipital, and frontal lobes. These regions are responsible for regulating emotions, decision making, self-awareness, and connecting body and mind, as shown in “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Religiosity and Spirituality: A Study in Adults at High and Low Familial Risk for Depression” by Miller, Bansal, Wickramaratne, et al.. This suggests a strong link between mental resilience and spirituality. The mystical experience as part of spirituality, and spirituality as part of our defenses against mental health symptoms, is a 21st century way of framing something religious mystics (Catholics, Kabbalist, Sufis, etc) have known for hundreds of years.
When we add a psychedelic layer to therapy, we invite the mystical into these discussions in a more direct way. Psychedelic entheogens can reliably produce a mystic experience, so what does this mean to someone outside of a religious context? What are the implications for the therapy room? You do not need to be religious to have a mystical experience. In psychedelic therapy, people often feel a deep sense of connection to humanity, to nature, to themselves. They experience profound insight, emotional release, or a shift in perspective that can be life-altering.
Stripped of religious language, the psychedelic experience helps us feel connected to others through heightened senses, allowing the emotional release or a shift in perspective we may need to feel better and healthier. More whole, or connected. Without spiritual labels, we are still given a reliable pathway toward the experience that makes us feel less alone. This is about as powerful as healing can get in a secular context.
This is, in many ways, modern mysticism.
The power of ritual and symbolism is well known in spirituality and within secular psychedelic use, but what about ritual in science, psychiatry, and psychology? If we’re sticking to liberal and contemplative use of the synonym, what is the scientific method if not systemic ritual? And could we call it a sacred ritual if one reveres the pursuit of knowledge? The same can be said for putting faith in an earthly representative of the idea that one day you will lessen or even escape psychical distress or torment? For example, we are all observing a rose by another name - whether it be a scientist, therapist, priest, what have you. Patient or psychonaut.
Good Friday is ultimately “good” not because of the suffering and misery it recounts - but because of what comes after: the resurrection, or “a miracle.” The miracle that most did not see with their own eyes, but the promise and possibility upon thousands of years of faith and culture have been built. The idea that something can rise from the ashes, that pain has meaning, and that healing is possible.
Like this rebirth, a psychedelic journey goes to our darkest, shadowiest places only lead us to relief on the other side. It invites us into the shadow - the fear, the grief, the inner critic - and helps us emerge with a new perspective. Something softer. Something more connected. Something…reborn.
Our “faith” is religion, in the therapeutic process, in exploration of our own consciousness, in ourselves, leads to what the Catholics could call Easter, but you can call whatever you want.
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And despite or possibly in spite of everything, it can be good.