What's the measure of a life?  Though this is surely difficult to determine, I wondered about it anew when I came across the obituary of Nicholas Sands.  Sands died last week at the age of 73.

     Who was Nicholas Sands, and why did he merit an obituary in the nation's leading newspapers?  Nicholas Sands was a chemist who manufactured, of all things, LSD.  And he did so in the most remarkable way.  A few years before he died, Sands observed in an interview that he made enough LSD in his lifetime for 140 million individual doses.  140 million doses, 140 million acid trips.  140 million opportunities, as Sands saw it, for enlightenment.  140 million possibilities, as he and his compatriots viewed it, for journeys into the infinite and eternal.
     Much research supports Sands's assertions about LSD's ability to create visions of insight and perception in its users.  Its chemicals, which Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman stumbled upon almost by accident many decades ago, appear to have a unique capacity to convince its users that they are indeed experiencing an alternative reality, a reality just as real to them as this reality is to you and me.
     Having come of age in the American Sixties, I'm not a stranger to LSD.  Yet if eternity is real--and I have every reason to believe it is--it seems that it is more logical to suppose that we can attain it through means centered in our "real" reality, not an alternate state. Would not the creator speak through that which he has directly created?  After all, he did, in Jesus, become flesh and blood in our world.
     Rest well, Nicholas Sands.