What Is Your Quest?
Are you ready to look within yourself and find the story that only you can tell?
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any extended period of time, you know that my framework for understanding a writing practice frequently draws upon the language and metaphors of spirituality, sometimes more explicitly than others. This is going to be one of the explicit times, just by virtue of the source material.
As always, my goal isn’t to win you over to whatever form of spirituality is providing the metaphor. I understand that you came to this newsletter hoping to learn about developing a successful writing practice, not to hear about my spirituality (which may or may not even be the spirituality under discussion). So I hope you’ll find the metaphors that follow useful as metaphors with some application to your writing.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Steven Charleston’s The Four Vision Quests of Jesus.
I learned about The Four Vision Quests of Jesus a few months ago, as part of an online book club where we’re looking at Christianity as understood by anybody other than white men. The book club has been eye-opening in many ways, and Steven Charleston’s perspective as a Native American of Christian faith was illuminating on that spiritual level, but Charleston himself spoke to the universality of the vision quest in a way that got me thinking about writing.
I want to be careful here not to write about this metaphor in a way that simply appropriates the vision quest from Native spirituality so I can use it to my own ends, and I’m hoping that Charleston’s own inclination towards a universal approach clears the way for my attempt. (If you feel I’ve gotten it wrong, or overstepped my bounds, let me know in the comments.)
Basically, Charleston would like us to understand the moments in the gospels when Jesus wanders off on his own for extended periods of prayer—most notably the forty days in the desert after his baptism, the interlude in which he rejected temptation three times and came back ready to deliver the good news—as vision quests in the Native tradition. Such a quest is not a finite vacation from reality, he writes:
“…it is very much a part of everyday life. The voice of God speaks about the good medicine that will heal people in their everyday lives and that will keep on healing them for generations to come. The vision of God shows us how to make our lives better, how to bring the sacred down to earth, how to transform our reality, not escape it.”
For Charleston, then, the vision quest is about bringing back something you can use, something that you can share with the community… and that’s what got me thinking about our writing practices. I’ve written many times about my belief that in the course of our writing practices, we should discover what it is that matters most to us, the stories that we are keenest to share with the world—and that an ongoing writing practice not only helps us understand those things, but gradually enables us to become the people capable of telling those stories.
Most of us will probably undertake our writing practices close to home, rather than going out into the wilderness. You can go out into the wilderness, of course, if you want, and for some of us perhaps it could be a way to jumpstart the process, creating a sense of urgency, even a sense of purpose. (Although it’s probably best if you don’t frame that trip as a “vision quest,” unless you are already an active participant in a Native spiritual practice. Because that would be cultural appropriation.)
Charleston is careful to point out, though, that although there are places in the world that are regarded as sacred, “the key to the seeker’s quest is not in finding just the right piece of holy real estate on which to stand, but rather in so preparing his or her awareness that any space he or she occupies can become thin through faith.” (Thin places, for those unfamiliar with the term, are those places where the barrier between this world and others is especially permeable.)
Are you ready to look within yourself and find the story that only you can tell? If you aren’t ready to do that work, it won’t matter where in the world you go; you won’t be able to accomplish anything substantial. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that, even if you embrace the work wholeheartedly, you’ll emerge with a perfectly formed nugget of wisdom. Where writing is concerned, you will have to go back and keep doing the work, over and over again, and there will be days when you’ll be convinced you haven’t found anything, days when what you seek seems just out of reach, and, thankfully, days when you do come back with a piece of the story.
Over time, ideally, you become increasingly capable of creating that last kind of day for yourself. Charleston describes this outcome as a “transformation,” rather than a “transcendence.” You aren’t transported to a higher realm of existence; you become better equipped to live in this reality. Personal transformation, he explains, “is not designed to reveal something hidden, but to alert us to something in plain sight. It does not give us a secret wisdom, but makes us reconsider what we have always known.”
Looking at a writing practice this way might be especially helpful if you’re dealing with memoir or personal essays, in which looking back at your life experiences and setting them down in words actually does bring you to a new understanding of your life and your world. But I believe the process holds true for fiction, poetry, and other forms of creative writing as well. We start with a kernel of a story, or a group of images we intuitively know are related to one another though we don’t know how, and we apply ourselves to the writing until the story unfolds before us, and then we work at making what’s on the page the best possible reflection of what we’ve imagined.
I believe that approaching writing with this sense of purpose is one of the most empowering things we can do for ourselves and for others. It enables us to imagine new ways of living—new ways of understanding our lives and our experiences, new ways of understanding our relationship to this world, new ways of reshaping our relationship to this world—individually and as a society. Even when you choose to share a dystopian story (as many of us are these days), that story is grounded in an understanding that the world should not be this way and that a better world is possible.
I want to share just one more Steven Charleston quote with you, one that helped convince me that it was proper to adapt his themes to my own project:
“My intent in this book is not only to convey a Native American approach to the study of Jesus, but to invite my readers into an insurrection. I seek to solicit each of you into the subversion of spiritual silence. I want you to join me in honoring the vision that has helped to shape your life. I encourage you to be bold in claiming these visions and, more than that, in finding ways to share them with others. I do so because I believe the more we can open the dialogue of visionary experience, the more we can discover the deep bonds of our common humanity.”
Yes, “insurrection” hits rather differently in February 2021 than when The Four Vision Quests of Jesus was published six years ago. And so it goes, as Vonnegut used to say. Maybe “revolution” would suit us better in this moment. Other than that, though, I find myself unable to make any plainer a mission statement than in those final lines.
If you’re interested in Jesus, Charleston takes stories you may be used to seeing one way and invites you to see them in another way—but, more importantly, he explains how it’s not only possible for us to live out our search for clarity and purpose as Jesus lived out his, it’s practically imperative for us to do so. “You and I are ordinary people with no special claim to God’s grace or insight,” he says, "but “we have also been given the opportunity to make our lament, to go crying for the vision that will shape our lives, and perhaps help to shape the lives of many others.”
If you’re not interested in Jesus, or not even in this particular vision of God, well, it’s still a powerful opportunity—and I hope you’ve been encouraged to dive (back) into it.
If you liked this essay, and you know someone who might find it helpful in their own writing practice, I hope you’ll pass it on to them.
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P.S.: The online book club I mentioned at the beginning of this essay is curated by Sarah Bessey. The latest book we’re reading is an anthology she’s edited, A Rhythm of Prayer, which brings together several women who are redefining what it is to be a progressive faith leader at this particular moment. I’m also a huge fan of her memoir Miracles and Other Reasonable Things.