The Quest for Vision Part Two

The Operating Conditions

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

I wrote previously about the quest for “vision.” There, I focused on the primordial questions of identity and purpose that animate the vision quest. Here, I will focus on the “operating conditions” that transform our perceptual apparatus so that we become open to seeing as God sees. What are the spiritual practices that support our quest to receive our identity from God and align our life choices accordingly?

In his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, Bishop Steven Charleston explores this question through the lens of Native American practice of the vision quest. Bishop Charleston’s dialogue between Indigenous and Christian traditions provides a helpful framework for our own spiritual practice. He identifies four essential elements of the Native American vision quest: preparation, community, challenge and lament.^[1]

Before exploring these four elements, it is important to emphasize the nature of the vision quest from a Native American perspective. It is not the “hero’s journey” typical of Western European mythology, with its focus on individual self-realization and the struggle of the “alone with the Alone.” Nor is it reserved to a cadre of spiritual elites. Charleston describes the vision quest as follows.

It was a process that most, if not all, young people were expected to undertake. It was an experience that a person could repeat more than once in life. It was a quest that was visionary, but it was also something more. The Native American quest was pragmatic, designed to produce transformation. It was not a private esoteric experience, but a way in which the community prepared, supported and developed functioning members of society. The quest was a tool, a method for seeding back into the community persons who understood both the spiritual nature of life and their role in it.^[2]

This understanding permeates all four of the elements of the vision quest. The first element, preparation, refers to an intentional period of prayer and purification.^[3] It involved ritual purification of the body, mind, and spirit, along with chanting, prayer and meditation. This period of preparation underscores the moral seriousness of the quest and the willingness to be transformed that it requires.

The Native American practice of preparation has resonances with early Christian practices of fasts and vigils, chanting the psalms, prayer, and contemplation. These were understood as means of awakening the “spiritual senses,” the sensory faculties integrated in the heart, understood as an organ of spiritual perception.^[4] These practices fostered an intuitive perception of reality, a shift into unitive consciousness, opening the heart to receiving the gift of divine vision. The catechumenate as a time to prepare for the sacrament of Holy Baptism served a similar function. This carried over into the annual observance of the seasons of Advent and Lent as special times of preparation to enter anew into the mysteries of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion.

The second element of the vision quest is community. The vision quest is not undertaken by one’s self in Native American tradition. Others share with the “questor” in the preparatory practices, and the process is overseen by a wise elder – a medicine woman or man.^[5] It is understood that one cannot undertake the quest for vision without the support and training provided by those who have experienced it themselves. At no point in the process of the vision quest is one left alone. The elder remains nearby to offer prayer, support and protection.

Here again, pre-modern Christian traditions retained a strong communal element. Participation in the liturgical and moral life of the community was foundational, and spiritual companionship and formation were provided by elders in the community. In early monasticism, the guidance of a spiritual abba or amma was essential. It was considered to be quite dangerous to attempt the quest for vision on one’s own.

This communal dimension provided a container, a way of life rooted in a wisdom lineage, in which one could safely approach the divine mysteries. It also underscored that the search for salvation or enlightenment was not a private, personal quest; rather, it was in service to the well-being of the community. In Christian understanding, the quest for divinization – communicating the divine virtues and energies – is in the service of apokatastasis – the healing of the world.

The importance of the community in the process of the vision quest is underscored by the element of challenge intrinsic to the quest. In Native American traditions, the vision quest could last for three of four days, with the participant fasting from food and water in an exposed place in the wilderness (again, with an elder nearby overseeing the experience).^[6] The physical nature of the challenge was retained as part of a holistic understanding of the transformation involved in the quest: body, mind and spirit.

One endured this ordeal as an offering of sacrificial love, letting go of self-centered preoccupations to live in harmony with the Creator, the community, and the creation. From a Christian perspective, the ordeal speaks to the need to die to self – to lose one’s life in order to gain it. Here we recur to the fundamental questions of identity and purpose that motivate the quest for vision. Who is this “I”? What is its purpose in relationship to the whole of reality? Unless the seed falls into the ground and “dies” it cannot give growth and provide sustenance. We find the purpose of our lives in service to that which is greater than ourselves.

Such a challenge is perhaps the most difficult element of the vision quest to reclaim. Contemporary Christianity does not ask much of its adherents in is modern Western form. The fragility and self-preoccupation of so many adults in our culture results from the loss of community, and a shared ordeal to initiate one into mature responsibility for the life of the community. It is possible that suffering or contemplation may launch one into the quest for vision, but this is hardly dependable. If we are unwilling to provide pathways to mature adulthood, the faux ordeals of addiction, violence, nihilism and fanaticism will replace healthy spirituality.

The final element of the vision quest that Bishop Charleston identifies is lament. He observes that in some Native American languages the vision quest is named “the time of crying.”^[7] The quest is fundamentally an act of intercession, an offering of the needs of the people and planet to the Creator for healing and guidance. It is an act of humility, in which vision is sought so that the supplicant may receive good medicine to share with the community for its healing. What is sought is a proper understanding of one’s role in maintaining the harmonious balance of creation.

The Native American emphasis on the vision quest as lament echoes the experience of another indigenous community – the Hebrew people – for whom lament plays a crucial role in their covenant with God. The Bible is full of lament: from the Hebrew people crying out to God for deliverance from slavery in Egypt, to the many psalms crying out both to and against God (continuing a line of arguing with God exemplified by Abraham, Moses, and Job), to Jesus weeping over the violence of his own time. Both praise and lament seem to be required by biblical faith.^[8]

Both Native American and Biblical lament are profoundly shaped by the experiences of empire, colonization, and exile. No wonder the vision quest is in the service of healing, restoration, and renewal for the whole people and the whole creation. I think this is a common thread linking both Indigenous and Biblical faith. In both traditions, lament seeks to give “suffering the dignity of language” and to speak our way into freedom. We name our suffering as a protest against it, and as an affirmation that we matter and that we are loved by God.^[9] There is no hope without lament.

Rabbi Shai Held argues that

Judaism asks us to love the world so acutely that we are prepared to fight for it; it beckons us to love human beings so deeply that we are primed to side with them in the face of oppression and injustice . . . Judaism summons us to love God so profoundly that God’s desire for a just society becomes our desire as well.^[10]

This what the vision quest offers us: a transformation of consciousness, an opening of the heart, so profound that we come to see as God sees, and desire as God desires. Bishop Charleston invites us to see Jesus through the lens of the vision quest, as God’s vision quest with us and on our behalf. He writes,

The New Testament is a vision quest story, an invitation to us to step into the vision quest of God. This quest is transformative. It is not the transcendent myth of a shaman far removed from human experience, doing things we could never hope to do, flying away from us into an ethereal realm reserved only for the few; instead, it is an earth-bound story of a flesh and blood seeker who lives in the midst of the mundane, using what is at hand to turn the common into the extraordinary. The quest is not an escape, but a rooting into reality: a celebration of the everyday, the physical, the sensual, the experiential.^[11]

The quest for vision is, finally, a manifestation of profound love for the world in spite of its brokenness.

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^[1] Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2016), p. 4-22.

^[2] Charleston, p. 13.

^[3] Ibid, p. 11.

^[4] Sarah Coakley, “The Resurrection and the ‘Spiritual Senses’: On Wittgenstein, Epistemology, and the Risen Christ,” in Powers and Submissions, p. 136-138.

^[5] Charleston, op. cit., p. 12.

^[6] Ibid, p. 12.

^[7] Ibid, p. 13.

^[8] For a powerful reflection on the biblical foundations of protest and lament in Jewish faith, see Rabbi Shai Held, Judaism Is About Love (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), p. 52-69. For Jesus’ lament over the fate of Jerusalem in his own day, see Matthew 23:37-39, Luke 19:41-44.

^[9] Ibid, p. 70.

^[10] Ibid, p. 74.

^[11] Charleston, op. cit., p. 21.