"The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever" by Ashley Lande. A Review

 

There’s a risk when getting into someone else’s life story. To actually commit yourself to listening as they recount the paths they’ve taken, the dark corners in their lives where lurk wild things, the odd reasonings in their heads, and more. The risk happens at different levels. One risk is that if a person really tunes in to the tales of another’s life, as weird or dark or grief-filled as it may be, there’s a lot of commonality. ‘This person is very much like me, and I find myself thinking the same way they did.’ If you really listen, it can be eye-opening. Ashley Lande, author and writer in rural Kansas, takes a bold step by inviting you into her life story in her award-winning autobiographical narrative, “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, & Jesus Christ”. It’s in both paperback and Logos Digital formats. And it is a page-turning journey through a life looking for the thing that would make everything okay forever. Simply because of who I am, I found myself praying for the author, chapter after chapter.

 

Lande takes readers on a trek through her kaleidoscopic existence where, as she admits, “I had ruined myself, almost on purpose, because I believed I could find something far better than God, whom I had never really known or bothered to seek” (22). The voyage includes sailing through many of her years on the chemical seas of mushrooms (psilocybin), acid, and LSD. It includes her youthful renunciation of God, diving into atheism, then moving over to an Americanized form of Buddhism and Hinduism all wrapped up in yoga, dietary rules and more. Along the way she introduces us to rocky relationships, marriage, motherhood, and death, to name a few. Inside every episode comes forth the author’s internal dialog and rationale, all of which seemed rock solid and sound at the moment, but later exposed itself as the self-delusion it was all along.

 

And there is a raw honesty that fuels her life story. Such as, when she turned to her “pugilistic atheism” it was to prove to herself and everyone that there was no God, and then she observes that this is “a far easier absolution to make in youth, when life has been fairly charmed and everyone you love is still alive and your hubris can fill in the nicks and concavities where you’ve been humbled” (35). Or later in her young life, confronted by grace, she came to realize “I’d lived by rules. Rules were my god, Dietary rules, in particular, had held me captive during my pregnancy…I had found grace unacceptable…I clung to the ideas that all my efforts still conferred upon me at least some degree of superiority to the pedestrian folks…who’d never gone spelunking in the deepest caverns of the cosmos, who’d never luxuriated in obliterative light, like a flotsam on a sea of oceanic bliss…My hubris knew no bounds…” (184-185). And then, before a new day dawned in her life, she saw clearly that “Psychedelics (mushrooms, acid, LSD) made me believe I could have it all. Glory without submission. Transcendence without descent. Knowledge without trauma. Freedom without discipline. New life without death. It was all a lie” (263). As I mentioned earlier, I found myself praying for the author with each chapter.

 

Lande’s life takes an unexpected turn; a slow, long-arched turn that finally brought her to find “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever,” but I’ll leave it for the readers to find out what, when, how, and who. Here is a work where one gets to sit and listen and walk with Lande down the paths she’s taken, around into the dark corners in her life where lurk wild things, and get drawn up into the odd reasonings and self-made mirages of the author’s fancies. If you are on a similar journey yourself, I recommend this book to you. Love it or not, if you’re honest, it will speak to you and grab your attention. But I also highly recommend this work to pastors and Christians of every stripe. It will be enlightening, frightening, encouraging, and enfolding.

 

Thanks to Lexham Press for sending me the copy I requested and used in this evaluation. No demands were made. Thus, my review is freely made and freely given.