The Quest for Vision Part One:
The Fundamental Questions
Without vision the people become unrestrained, but he who keeps the Torah is fortunate. – Proverbs (Mishlei) 29:18
Now the word of the Lord was withheld in those days; vision had not broken through. – I Samuel (Shmuel I) 3:1
Who am I? What am I supposed to do? These are the fundamental questions we ask ourselves if we are awake. They apply to us as individuals and as communities or organizations. To have a “vision” of ourselves or of our community is to clearly perceive our identity and our purpose. “Vision” is about our capacity to live in alignment with reality, understanding our role in the order of things.
Hebrew scripture teaches that without vision, we become unrestrained. Without a sense of identity and purpose, we are all over the place. Our lives feel discordant and random, lacking a sense of direction; even unmoored from reality. Without vision, things fall apart. Fortunate are those who keep Torah, who know who they are and how they are meant to live.
This is a teaching that we can readily ground-truth in our own experience. Our identity is something that is given to us. We learn who we are through relationships, as we see ourselves reflected in the face of others and learn to differentiate ourselves from them at the same time. This is not an easy needle to thread! We can resist what others seek to show us, or simply internalize their perception of us unquestioningly.
Hebrew scripture also teaches us that vision is sometimes withheld from us – it does not break through. There are plenty of barriers that get in the way of understanding our identity and purpose. Oppression, deprivation, violence and all manner of traumatic experiences get in the way. Sometimes, vision is withheld because we just aren’t ready to receive it yet. It is a gift, and we have to be willing to accept it. It is not something we discover, but rather something that is revealed.
This too is a lesson rooted in our experience. How often have the answers you sought been found when you were not looking? How often has a seemingly innocuous comment or random occurrence opened the way and revealed the path you were meant to walk? It is not our effort but our willingness that is the key. It is not our mastery of the world but our vulnerability to it that that allows vision to break through. How do we become willing and ready to receive it?
This is the gift of Torah, as our Jewish siblings understand it. It provides a lens through which we perceive how to align ourselves with God’s intention for the world. It is the embodiment of the wisdom of God. For Christians, Jesus and, more specifically, the way of Jesus, is the embodiment of God’s wisdom. In either case, vision is connected with a way of life, a spiritual practice. This way of life constitutes the operating conditions for the exercise of vision. It makes the reception of vision possible. It is something discovered as already ours when the conditions for its exercise arise.
This way of life is less like a series of tests we must pass than it is an ever deepening intimacy with God that transforms our perception of reality. It is a kind of falling in love. Rabbi Shai Held describes it well.
We are loved. We are loved, Judaism teaches, because God loves us. Not because of anything we have done or accomplished, but simply because we are created in God’s image. As the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva puts it, “Beloved is the human being, for he was created in the image of God.”
God’s love is not something we earn but rather something we (ought to) strive to live up to. This is a good definition of Judaism’s vision of the spiritual life: the attempt to live up to God’s love.[i]
I would add that this is a good definition of Christianity’s vision of the spiritual life as well. It is God’s love that initiates our desire to respond to it, to engage in the quest for vision. When we fall in love, we want to see ourselves and the world through the eyes of the Beloved. We want to walk in harmony with the Beloved, and become worthy of the love reflected in the Beloved’s face. The vision quest is a pursuit of deeper intimacy with God, and an increasing capacity to see the world through God’s eyes.
So, we are God’s Beloved, created in God’s image. That is the foundation of our identity and the wellspring of our action in the world. It gives rise to the question of purpose. Again, Rabbi Held says it well.
There are two questions we ought to ask about our lives: First, what can I give? And second, what can I give? In other words, when we think about serving – and to live well is necessarily to think long and hard about service – we have the privilege/responsibility to ask not just how we can serve as human beings in general, but also how we can serve as human beings in particular. It is not some generic abstraction called “human” that God calls into action, but concrete, flesh-and-blood people with unique biographical narratives and distinct talents and abilities, passions, and proclivities – and also with particular weaknesses and shortcomings. I am called to serve, in other words, not as a member of a species but as me, an utterly unique and wholly irreplaceable person, created in the image of God.[ii]
This is why the questions of identity and purpose remain live questions for each individual and community. Even as we keep Torah or follow the way of Jesus together, we do so as unique individuals and communities, so the questions of identity and purpose will be answered differently by different people in different contexts. The baseline identify of being Beloved and the baseline purpose of being called to service remains true for all, but how it is lived out will be different for each. Our spiritual practice simply provides the operating conditions in which the particular answers to the questions will be revealed as we become ready to receive them.
[i] Shai Held, Judaism Is About Love, p. 23.
[ii] Held, p. 39.