One July day in my secular priest year, I went for an early morning run.

A little way along the beach near my home, there was a group of 30 black swans about 50 metres out on the water. The moon was full and the pre-dawn clouds a delicate pink.

It was like a scene from another dimension: silent, stunning, and never to be repeated.

I ran on, until after about 50 metres, I felt a sudden pain in my calf and was forced to turn around. It felt like I’d reached the edge of a magic circle and been pulled back.

A pattern made visible

The day continued with other numerical coincidences and social encounters that seemed aligned, as if I was part of a normally invisible pattern.

While that day was special, I increasingly noticed mysterious alignments, and it was hugely enriching – like moving from a landscape of black and white to one of colour.

Living in the tension

In her book When God Talks Back, the anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann, writes of evangelical Christians in the USA who experience God and Jesus as speaking directly to them, often via signs like those described above.

She describes them as navigating an ‘epistemological double register’ in which they take their experiences as simultaneously real and a kind of play.

Luhrmann cites a pastor from the Vineyard Church she attended as saying:

‘The excruciatingly delightful tension between what is imagined and what is real is where I live. I choose to live in the tension. Not ignore it. Not hide from it. Not dismiss it. I choose to embrace it fully with all of its glorious mystery and pain.’

Faith and the woo-woo label

I realise that some readers will find this woo-woo, but any religious faith can be viewed as woo-woo from the viewpoint of an atheist.

Religions have strange, implausible stories, that assume there is a secret depth that sometimes seeps – or bursts – into ordinary life.

While I never ‘believed’ in my enchanted world, I think secular life is diminished by insisting that ‘the delightful tension between what is real and what is imagined’ is pure fabrication.

While we are moved by theatre, music, art, natural beauty and astonishing coincidences, we are firmly told that evidence and rationality are the foundation of human progress and progress is the name of the game.

Beyond the evidence base

My discipline of psychology is one of the culprits. Scientific methods and evidence-based practice are our gold standard, as if one day we’ll produce the definitive manual on crafting the perfect person.

To me, while scientific research is useful for understanding the human condition, it can divert us from a more pressing truth: that people thrive when they see beauty and meaning in what surrounds them. And that’s a creative process that requires unknowns and surprises.

The Christian texts I read, services I attended and people I got to know, assumed a presence or dimension that is far beyond our ability to understand.

This invites open-ended meaning-making in a world that is more than it seems and, I suggest, enriches our lives together.

• Niki Harré is a psychology professor at the University of Auckland and atheist. In 2021 she spent a year as a self-appointed secular priest. The Calling: A year exploring what the secular world can learn from religion describes her experience. In this, the second of a three-part series, she discusses what the secular world has lost by turning away from institutional religion.