Faith in Life

(This week’s article is by guest writer Dwayne Schulz. For a brief bio, see below.)

In this article I would like to share a little of my personal story regarding how I came to the ideas of spiritual naturalism. Unlike many spiritual naturalists I was never religiously minded after about the age of nine when I became an atheist despite my parents making me attend Sunday school and get confirmed in the Lutheran Church. As a kid I was interested in things like paleontology and astronomy so the scientific worldview came naturally to me compared to the mythic tales of the Bible.

Although disdaining religion, I have always been fascinated by that transcendent state of mind pursued by poets, musicians, spiritual mystics and psychedelic drug-users alike. I have been fortunate to have had one or two such experiences or something like them anyway. One of the most memorable occurred when standing alone on the slopes of a mountain in Chile about 15 years ago. Whilst looking down a long valley of pine forests and shiny granite hills, flakes of snow began swirling gently down from the grey sky. Having rarely seen snowfall I was entranced. This is not that surprising. But I was surprised when suddenly overcome with emotion at the sublime beauty, not just of my surroundings, but of existence itself. Tears rolled down my cheek as intense feelings of awe and love washed over me. This episode was completely unexpected and lasted a minute at most, but was profoundly meaningful in a way I could barely articulate. It did not make me think of anything like God or nirvana or the unity of all things. Being on my own in such a beautiful place no doubt triggered a flood of pent-up emotions as I had been backpacking around South America after a traumatic marriage breakup. But the experience symbolized something more that I have only been able to frame in a satisfying way more recently.

Although my atheism and scientific worldview never wavered they weren’t that useful for interpreting such experiences because the question as I see it is not so much why they occur as what do they mean? My route to an answer of sorts has been long and circuitous. Since I was young I rankled at authoritarianism whether at school or in society at large. This led naturally from being a punk rocker in my teenage years to political activism in my 20s which made me even more deeply aware of injustices like racism, which in turn led to a career in law representing Aboriginal people fighting for land rights. But one of the side effects of perpetual resentment at the injustices of the world is that you are on the losing side much of the time. Despair, cynicism and full-blown depression thus always threaten. I have had too many brushes with such things over the years. My reading and philosophical endeavours therefore never arose from idle curiosity but from a passionate, even desperate need to understand this crazy, cruel world and to find some deeper meaning to it all. I read everything from political theory, economics and history to metaphysics, even completing an MA in philosophy at the age of 50. It still felt as if something was missing though. Whether I was conscious of it or not I was yearning after a kind of spirituality that could inspire courage and a faith in life by pointing to the beauty and profound mysteries of existence whilst remaining atheistic and true to the facts of science.

I did not turn my mind to specifically spiritual issues however until later in life, eventually arriving at a position I called ‘poetic pragmatism’, ‘naturalist divinology’ or ‘sacred naturalism’. I soon after discovered that philosophers like Donald Cosby, Loyal Rue and others had reached similar conclusions decades earlier. I also discovered the SNS and the work of kindred spirits like DT Strain, Thomas Schenk and NJ Jay Forest. It felt like I had finally found a home after years ‘wandering in the wilderness’.

I would now call what happened that day in Chile an experience of the sacred. Traditional religion conceives of the sacred as something external, i.e. as a singular thing or being existing out there in reality, whether God, Gaia or Ganesha. For Spiritual naturalism however the sacred is about how we orient ourselves to the world. Things are not sacred in themselves but are made sacred by us. At one level this is a rather banal fact. After all, there have been thousands of religions holding different deities and things to be sacred. The important lesson for naturalists however is that we can experience the sacred in the absence of belief in God or spirits at all, or indeed being fixated on any one particular object whatsoever. A tree can be sacred today but not tomorrow, as can a valley, a person, the earth, the cosmos, nothingness … whatever — or as John Lennon once put it “Whatever gets you thru the night”. The French surrealist writer and mystic George Bataille once experienced the sacred whilst laughing uncontrollably inside a closed umbrella as he stood in the middle of a street in Paris. In his book Inner Experience he talks of a ‘religion without an object’ and says the sacred:

… subsists in us [as] a silent, elusive, ungraspable part. In the region of words, of discourse, this part is neglected. Thus it usually escapes us. We can only attain it or have it at our disposal on certain terms. They are the vague inner movements, which depend on no object and have no intent — states which … are not warranted by anything definable …

Regardless of whatever object or situation we find to be sacred, it ought to elicit a greater devotion to, and love of this life. The sacred should reinforce all that is best in us, helping us to remain true to our deepest values whilst turning away from all that is peurile, base and petty. To paraphrase William James, in the final analysis, the purpose of spirituality must be “a larger, richer, more satisfying life”.

The perspective of spiritual naturalism has been of immense value to me personally. This has been brought home to me in a very profound way since January 2023 when I was diagnosed with cancer. After numerous rounds of chemo and surgery that year I was given the all-clear in 2024. Later that year however the cancer metastasized. My surgeon told me I likely had  6-12 months. I remember we cried on the way home, grieving for the life I was about to forego and the loss my beautiful partner Michelle would have to endure. After further treatments though my oncologist now says I seem to be in the lucky 20% of my cohort who make it through long-term. I hope he’s right. In any case  spiritual naturalism has helped affirm my faith in life at times when there seemed no light at the end of the tunnel, deepened my appreciation for the beauty of existence and enabled me to interpret experiences like the one I had that day on a mountainside in Chile.

If you will indulge me a little further I would like to share some poems written over the last few years, some in the afterhaze of chemotherapy or surgery, some when I just felt glad to still be alive.

Cosmic Morn – 16 Nov 2023

This morning after a night of light rain
I am sitting listening.
An Eastern Koel is cooing down the way
A Wattlebird cackles up the hill
The wind gently sways.
My thoughts are of the Earth turning, day to night
Cycling in graceful ellipses year after year
They are all pulsing together
In some strange synchrony
Harmonies upon harmonies
Barely discernible
Mysterious
Beautiful.

Moonlight – 26 May 2024

Last evening the moon hung low
It’s top half smudged with darkened cloud
In the distance frogs croaked
Their sounds like porridge on the boil

By midnight the land illumined
In crisp blue shades of light
Revealing an otherworld
Mysterious and dreamlike 

Tonight the moon has gone
The stars they coldly gleam
The Southern Cross austere
Through the galactic veil I see

I peer up in wonderment
The sky becalms my soul
A speck amongst the firmament
Exalting in the whole

Creation – 25 February 2025

Impossible to describe these colors, suffusing sky and land
But my heart seems to swell
Indrawing the whole of creation
If but briefly,
Fleetingly.

Inside Outside – 21 April 2025

Inside reading all morning –
I step outside
And suddenly
I am become expansive
Breathe in surrounding sky and trees
The feeling of grass underfoot
Aliveness.
Lungs taste the air, cool and sweet.
Praising existence

Raindrops – 14th May 2025

Raindrops in the night
Drubbing on hardwood and tin
Everything in that moment

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SNS strives to include diverse voices within the spectrum of naturalistic spirituality. Authors will vary in their opinions, terms, and outlook. The views of no single author therefore necessarily reflect those of all Spiritual Naturalists or of SNS.
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Bio: Dwayne Schulz lives in Queensland, Australia, working as a lawyer in the field of Aboriginal land rights. He completed a thesis in 2016 on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead for a Master of Arts in Philosophy at Monash University. His interests include philosophies of life, civilization, indigeneity and environmentalism.