Task 4: Seek Your Vision

You've probably worked hard and long going through the first three tasks of your vision quest. Hopefully, you've learned some new things and reflected on old things deep within you. Now it's time to see how it all comes together.

• Choose a day when you can spend a few hours in thought/meditation/prayer. If at all possible, spend the time outdoors, alone. All the things you have done on this project are in your mind, in your spirit. Go in a spirit of openness. 

• It's been our experience that when you do this, a vision will come to you, but possibly not until sometime later. It may not be in a bolt of lightning. And it probably will not be Earth-shaking because it will be something you can actually do. It may be simply to keep on doing what you are doing. But it will be a vision tempered by the experience and reflection you have put into your quest. We believe it will be a vision of wisdom.

• You should not expect a definite and clear answer. Remember that Bishop Charleston said "The focus of the quest is mystery; the process of the quest is mystery; the outcome of the quest is mystery." You will find that your calling/passion unfolds as you go along until it becomes something quite different from where it started. It is a mystery how that happens and where it will go. 

Jim's comment: My experience has been that if I'm doing what I was called to do, being careful to stay in the flow of processes, things unfold in surprising ways.

In No Matter What: Crisis and the Spirit of Planetary Possibility, Catherine Keller wrote:

This non-controlling power does not intervene, rescue, fix. It gives no guarantee but stirs something like what the eco-activist Rebecca Solnit calls “hope in the dark.”  It is an affect that lets us, maybe even requires us, to face the danger. To face some facet, some echo, of apocalypse. As the great African American author and activist James Baldwin put it decades ago: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In other words we may not escape great challenges, some of them collectively traumatic. But we might together bear them, bear with them. In spirit. In community. And we do so in apocalyptic mindfulness of our planetary intersections.

We believe (and think) that discernment flows from wisdom -- using knowledge, awareness, and understanding to make decisions that can help build a wiser world.

We agree with Bishop Charleston that a vision is a mystery, but so is all of life. We think it is our responsibility to use discernment about what we try to do with our lives. We need to find a way forward.

Describe your vision in your journal. How might you try to put that vision into action? How would you like it to turn out? What will be your first step to try to make this happen? And your next step if the first one works, or if it doesn't? Hey, you're writing an action plan! Keep going until you see a way forward.

It is inevitable that surprises will arise as you implement your plan. Some of those surprises will be flaws and some will be unexpected possibilities. You can minimize, but not eliminate, surprises by using a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Learn about SWOT analysis here. 

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Write your SWOT analysis in your journal. Analyze it to determine if you can emphasize your strengths. Can your weaknesses and threats be turned into opportunities? Describe the changes you might make in your plan as a result of the SWOT analysis.This will be useful as you put your plan into action because the same issues may arise later and need to be dealt with in other ways.

You've finished your initial vision quest. 

Now Bishop Charleston challenges us to an on-going quest.

In his book We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope Bishop  Charleston wrote:

There is a sense of urgency about what I am inviting you to be. I am asking you to intentionally assume the role of a prophet to underscore that urgency. The life of a prophet is not easy. Urging others to confront reality, work together, and make sacrifices for the sake of change is never popular. Sharing authority in community, welcoming the stranger, negotiating differences is always a challenge. But we must do all these things and more if we are to transform the apocalypse of our time.

Living now in an apocalyptic process of our own, we can each choose to carry the light of a Prophetstown within us. We can embody the city on the hill that shows us a better alternative is possible. We can be brought together into community, even though we think of ourselves as strangers. We can find our place in the House of the Stranger, a meeting place for us to learn from one another and grow together in a shared faith. We can begin to see change because we believe in change. 

I know this is true because, in a very small way, I was able to live into Tenskwatawa’s vision. I did it in the unlikeliest of places and in a way Tenskwatawa could never have imagined. But I believe my experience illustrates a new way to see an old vision. 

In 2011 I began writing small daily messages on a giant social media platform that has millions of subscribers. My messages were spiritual in nature, but open to people of any faith tradition, or even of no particular faith at all. When I began writing these little meditations, only a few sentences each, I had a readership of four people. As I write these words today, there are tens of thousands of people in my community, and it is still growing, all from a wide variety of cultures.

My location was not beside a river in Ohio but beside a global information river online. My message was like the Prophet’s teachings: a call for peace, love, and justice. Like the Prophet, my goal was to unite people of many backgrounds. Like Tenskwatawa, I welcomed people to follow the traditions of their ancestors but to do so in community with others from all walks of life. I set up my meeting house on the high hill of the internet, where everyone could see it, and I invited others to join me in a new community where we could live in peace and with integrity.

We can plant communities of hope all around the world. We can do it through the use of a technology that the two Shawnee brothers would have been delighted to use if it had existed in their apocalyptic time. All of us, wherever we live, can begin building our own version of Prophetstown: communities open to all without exception, communities based on diversity and respect, communities believing enough together to begin seeing together.