Vision Quests of Jesus
The closest thing I can relate to a vision quest was and is the process of discerning my entry into ministry. In my experience, the only people who have had visions or continue to do so are the prophets. I learned in Sunday school of the prophets of the Old Testament receiving and interpreting messages from the divine on behalf of Israel. The people could not do this work on their own, they (primarily leaders and socially elite) relied upon the prophets to listen for the Divine to speak. This created a monopoly for the prophet as the prophet is the only one who could perform this work. The Apostles were able to hear, see, and feel the teachings directly from our Great Teacher. Through their witness, we today hear, see, and feel the divine message. But visioning, on the level of a vision quest, escapes me.
I spent the better part of five years discerning a call into ministry. There were no whispers of God’s voice telling me what to do. There were not visions made available to me by God. I did not feel God’s Spirit moving or pushing me in a particular direction. I prayed. I fasted. I waited. Nothing. I had no vision. Now, I did not isolate myself for four days and fast, but I did the things my spiritual leaders told me to do. Black Elk did what the medicine man told him and he got results.
The trend I noticed from my reflections above is the use of the word “I”. “I prayed. I fasted. I waited." I did this or I did that when the reality of what I was looking for what something similar to the what the prophets of the Old Testament or John received: a vision from God. The Divine Creator is the agent in these visions, for Christians and Native Americans alike. Steven Charleston put this way, “Visions are messages. They are messages transmitted through the medium of our senses. We see things, hear things, even feel or smell things that we accept as real…We do not generate or control them. We cannot fix them into a particular time or space.”
The preparations required for the discernment, vision, I needed from God had only partially been completed. Charleston lays out the four parts of the vision quest: preparation to receive the call to a quest, seeking support, discipline, and lament. I had done the first three steps as guided by my spiritual mentors but the last, lament, was not suggested to me nor had I considered it. The ancient prophets did this as they described what Israel longed for in the midst of exile or occupation. Black Elk did the same on his quest as he was guided through the process. What was I longing for in discernment? What I looking for clarification or affirmation on something God had already revealed to me years earlier and I had simply missed it? Was I hoping an obvious answer would drop from the sky, in a revelation even the prophets of the Old Testament did not receive?
Part of the vision quest is being open to receive a message delivered through any of the senses. These are messages we (humans) do not and should not expect to control. The divine will work in divine time, spanning millennia and generations, which does not match with the timetables we create for ourselves and subsequently for the divine. God had revealed the vision I was seeking, but not at the time I was trying to squeeze the revelation into. Unlike the control Charleston gives to the divine, I tried to control the vision I was seeking.
Discernment or vision quest is a part of every human's experience of life. Whether it is a big picture vision – where or what is the big vision for my life – or a smaller, seasonal discernment – beginning a family or a change in vocation – in each instance, it is the divine who is in control of revelation. We can prayerfully prepare and place ourselves in a posture to receive what the divine will reveal, but we cannot control it. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the vision quest, knowing that after all of the preparations are made on our part, we have to wait for someone or something else to work. But this is the beauty of the vision quest, placing ourselves between the world around us and divine revelation, hoping for a glimpse of purpose to be revealed.