Steven Charleston Quotes

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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)
Celebrating what we hope for together is better than fighting over what we believe separately.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
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)
The historical irony is that European Christians coming to the Americas were escaping highly stratified and intolerant societies; in North America they encountered societies that were open and tolerant; but in response, these European immigrants simply duplicated the oppression they had known by practicing it on the Native People.
Steven Charleston (Coming Full Circle: Constructing Native Christian Theology)
Love is the inheritance of mystery that we leave to the universe—the proof that consciousness is more than chemicals and fire, but rather a song that sings the why and how of all creation. Love sings it now and will sing it until the end of time.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, “reserv[ing] and set[ting] apart for the settlement of the negroes . . . the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida,” to be subdivided “so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.
Steven Hahn (A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (The Penguin History of the United States))
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)
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)
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)
Contemporary American society is the reverse of traditional Native American culture. Whereas Native communities value the group, the dominant society values the individual. In fact, it considers rugged individualism to be a virtue. It looks up to the “self-made” success story. It honors the person who can acquire more than anyone else. It likes heroes who can go it alone and role models who make their own rules. It disparages collective action as a herd mentality and prefers individuals with the right to do as they choose. For millions of people, individuality has evolved into individualism: a cult of personality in which they are the personality.
Steven Charleston (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope)
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)
To grow a church preach from the heart, work for the poor, welcome the stranger, embrace the Spirit. Laugh more than cry. Fail more than wait. Give more than keep. Be unexpected love and trust the becoming to God.
Steven Charleston (Cloud Walking:: A Spiritual Diary)
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)
In the spiritual life, we all have a job description to fulfill. In two of the messages I received, this is seen in the image of a spiritual medic or a spiritual construction worker. These are different images, but they carry similar messages: We are here for a reason. Our lives are entrusted to us for a purpose. It is not always an easy or glamorous job, but it is the vital work of restoration, reconciliation, and renewal that must be done, and done on the run in the face of rapid changes.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
You and I have a contract with the Spirit. We have a working relationship. Our purpose in creation is not just to sit and look pretty, but to stand and go to work. Life is unfinished. Hope is not yet realized.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
An apocalypse may very well bring us together to meet an imminent danger, but once that apocalypse has receded, it will not be strong enough to keep us together. Something greater than fear is needed to build community.
Steven Charleston (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope)
In the darkness, in the valley of shadow, we can feel isolated and afraid. But once we have the light of hope, we begin to see just how many people share in our struggle. The first step toward community is recognizing our common humanity. Instead of seeing strangers in the dark, we recognize fellow climbers in the light.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
The darkness foments racism and bigotry to prevent this simple act of recognition.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
...some people, out of their own prejudice and fear, will lash out when the truth is presented to them. They are not interested in halting apocalypse because they have a vested interest in not doing so.
Steven Charleston (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope)
To question individualism is to question an addition of the dominant society, the mythic ground on which so much of our shared colonial history is centered.
Steven Charleston (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope)
Alexander Stephens, the longtime friend of Lincoln who supported Stephen Douglas until the bitter end, was now the vice president of the Confederacy. Elected by the Confederate Congress the same day as Jefferson Davis as President, he traveled across the South speaking about the new government. Stephens gave his Cornerstone Speech of March, 21, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina. In it he defined Confederacy’s nature. The speech echoed the racist nationalism Southerners held to for years— that Blacks were a lesser order of humanity, and slavery was their natural condition: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery— subordination to the superior race— is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Steven Dundas
In 1860 Rhett “joined a drive to either rule or ruin the 1860 Democratic convention scheduled for Charleston.”97 He succeeded and devised a strategy to destroy the Union by destroying the Democratic Party. In January 1860 he wrote that “the destruction of the Union must . . . begin with the demolition of the party. So long as the Democratic Party, as a ‘National’ organization exists in power in the South . . . our public men will trim their sails.”98 Rhett drafted South Carolina’s Seces sion Ordinance, which claimed that South Carolina was not “perpetrating a treasonous revolution, but . . . simply taking back . . . the same powers it had temporarily surrendered . . . when South Carolina ratified the federal Constitution.
Steven Dundas
We are here for a reason. Our lives are entrusted to us for a purpose. It is not always an easy or glamorous job, but it is the vital work of restoration, reconciliation, and renewal that must be done, and done on the run in the face of rapid changes.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
great deal of our activism in the Spirit is accomplished in simple ways. We are not asked to be heroic. Most often, it is enough that we remain consistent in living out our faith in small ways.
Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage)
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)
be to find that something so we can become the beacon for which we are searching.
Steven Charleston (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope)