Spiritual vision is for everyone
an Indigenous antidote against authoritarianism—and against resignation
“Part of the egalitarian nature of traditional Native American cultures is this recognition that spiritual vision is accessible to all people, not only to a few…The beginning of our spiritual self-confidence is that we have direct access to a power far beyond the limitations of our own perceptions. There is a higher power that wants us to participate, wants us to let go of resignation, and will show us how.”
-Steven Charleston, in We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope
Remember when I spent a year writing about authority issues over on Patheos?
(I’m guessing the answer is no, so here’s a summary of that year’s worth of writing, with links to all the articles in case you’re interested in any of them. You’re welcome!)
This feels like a long time ago. It was a long time ago, even though it was also only about two years ago. A different era, really. But I stand by most of my reflections from that era on authority and authoritarianism, religious and otherwise (and both together, because it’s all connected).
I think about this now…for obvious reasons. And I think about it in particular as I keep reading about and exploring how we grow into kinship together.
One of the many things I appreciated from Choctaw elder and retired Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston’s book We Survived the End of the World was Charleston’s invitation for all of us to develop “spiritual self-confidence.”
I wonder if spiritual self-confidence serves as a sort of antidote to spiritual authoritarianism.
Divinity is accessible to everyone. Everyone has access to the Divine. We were never meant to follow a few (usually male) spiritual leaders who tell us they have all the answers, and we must obey them rather than reasoning for ourselves and following our own consciences.
Charleston elaborates:
“While the [European] Americans came from a culture where receiving visions from heaven was reserved for only a select few and most of those historical figures from the distant past, among Native American communities, seeking a personal vision from a higher power was a common expectation. Men and women regularly made a retreat into the natural world to seek divine guidance. After a period of preparation, such as prayer and purification, they would go to an isolated place to fast and wait for a vision. These visions were taken very seriously, because they were thought to show people their true path in life.”
It may sound odd or perhaps naive to speak of vision quests in the woods, in a time of crisis as acute as the one we’re currently experiencing. But maybe spiritual vision—and spiritual vision that attends to and connects us with our natural world—is exactly what we need.
In these last couple months (has it really been less than three months, still?), sometimes I feel like I keep looking around for someone to save us. But no one is coming.
I know this is not quite fully true. Judges and teachers and lawmakers and so many other ordinary people are resisting in all the ways we know how. And every bit matters.
Yet I wonder if many of us still feel a kind of helplessness. We are tempted, perhaps, toward resignation.
I’m intrigued by Charleston’s idea that “the beginning of resignation is the idea that our perception of reality is flawed—for example, that we are not smart enough, important enough, or holy enough to understand the apocalypse, much less deal with it.”
Do you feel this? I don’t know if I would have put it in these terms exactly, but I certainly do feel…ordinary. More powerless to change things than I would like to be. Not important enough to make a difference.
So much is collapsing around us, and we might feel like we can’t keep it from collapsing. And yet.
Our perception of reality is not flawed. And while we might not have the power to fix all the things we’d like to fix and heal all the things we’d like to heal and restore all the things we’d like to restore—we are not completely powerless, either. And we are invited to use whatever power we do have for good.
Spiritual self-confidence, for Charleston, is the opposite of resignation. In a dominant US (and Christian) culture that tends to idolize a few superhuman-seeming people, looking toward them to save us rather than looking around to see what power we ordinary folks might have together—I hear so much encouragement in Charleston’s reminder that we all have direct access to the Divine.
We can seek Divine Love for a vision of who we are invited to become and what we’re invited to do during this time. We can follow our intuition and engage with our communities about what this vision entails. We can share our visions and pursue them together.
This might not change everything we want to see changed. But it definitely won’t do nothing.
I came across the powerful idea of being “leaderful” in a quote from Puerto Rican attorney and climate justice leader Elizabeth Yeampierre, included in the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.
We don’t need a few strong authority figures to pull us all together and tell us what to do. We do need as many leaders as we can get, all leading in our own wonderful ways, whether up front or behind the scenes or any other place that fits who we are and lets us bring the best of what we have to offer to the table.
Yeampierre puts it this way:
“Leaderful means there is enough room for all of us. Seeing everyone roll in together is much more powerful than having one or two people speak for everyone. Being intergenerationally leaderful also generates the best ideas and solutions . . . . We need to do this together, and we can do it lovingly.”
Isn’t this beautiful? We roll in together, and there is power in this.
We seek guidance from Divine Love, individually and together. We trust that this Love lives in each one of us. And we certainly generate the best ideas together.
In this with you.
I love this idea of a plurality of spiritual visions, so often it feels like we get derailed by deifying heroes instead of tuning in to divine inspiration