The Four Vision Quests of Jesus Quotes

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide Show respect to all people and when it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“When we are unsure about what we believe, we truly stand naked before God, stripped of those dogmas that we wear like denominational clothing to give us a sense of security.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“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.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“Unlike the interpretation of the crucifixion in Christian theologies that believe Jesus had to die as a blood sacrifice of atonement, the Native American Christian view is that he had to live in a new way in order to heal the whole circle of humanity. He had to become the “we” to the farthest limit of that definition. In order to call back every person from exile, he had to go where they are, on the very margins of society, cut off and alone, rejected and abused. He had to feel what homosexual people feel when they are rejected; what people of color feel when they are demeaned; what people with physical challenges feel when they are ignored; what any human being who has ever been abused feels like to the core of their being. The death of Jesus, therefore, was not required by God to stave off divine retribution against a fatally flawed humanity that deserves eternal punishment, but an act of self-sacrifice and love so profound that it brought enough Good Medicine in the world to heal the broken hoop of the nation for every person on earth.11 The fourth vision quest restored the most essential aspect of creation: kinship.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“The individual Native person, therefore, carries a strong sense of being a child of God in covenant connection to all of the others in the nation. Jesus, as a “Son of the People,” walks behind the Spirit into the Wilderness, not as a single mystic going out for a private audience with God, but as the representative of the whole nation going out to speak to their parent God. It is crucial to remember these many layers of relationship in the Native tradition embodied by Jesus in order to fully appreciate the impact of what God shows him.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“The koshares are far different from a Western clown in a red nose and big shoes. With the koshares there is a shock value to the spirit embodied by the clown. There is an intentional effort to draw attention through behavior that creates a disorienting presence as unsettling as it is humorous. Koshares appear around adult themes of fertility and sexuality. They exhibit our mixed attitudes toward subjects that can make us both aroused and embarrassed at the same time. They are ambivalence personified; they are also raw energy and life.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“Like a koshare, John the Baptist stands out in the crowd. He is memorable by both his costume and his behavior. He stays in the mind of all who see him. His presence breaks the normal pattern. His unsettling actions toward the religious hierarchy is shocking. In this way, John, as a sacred clown, introduces an element of chaos into order. This is precisely the theological task of the koshare. John invites people to participate in a solemn ceremony, baptism, designed to bring them life. At the same time, he reminds them of imminent death and destruction. The ambivalence, the tension makes us want to shudder in fear and sigh in relief. John mixes our emotions in the same way a koshare scrambles reality.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“My family has lived in America for thirty thousand years. 1 They farmed the land. They built towns and raised families. They worshipped God. Year after year, generation after generation, they lived in this land and they called it home. And, yet, I am a second generation American. When my father was born in 1923 he was not an American citizen. American Indians were not allowed to be citizens until 1924. When they thought we were all but extinct, the federal government gave us citizenship. They had done everything they could to erase our thirty thousand year history. In the end, before we disappeared forever, they wanted us to be able to be called what they called themselves: Americans. The irony of their own actions escaped them.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“The pathos of the Garden vision quest is not that Jesus is going to his death. It is that Jesus is going into exile. Isolation is what Jesus faces as the Native Messiah, a fate far worse than death for any Native person. The fearful thought of permanent exile is the cup from which Jesus is asked to drink. As we will see in the next chapter, Jesus will become an exile to include every life in his dance. To reach beyond the margins of creation, however, means being cut off from creation. The courage of Jesus is not in facing death, but in facing what it means to be alone.”
― Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus