Seekers

A guidebook explores avid seekers and their vision quests.

“Why does everyone else seem to be content with their answers, while I continue to have questions?”—this and similar queries open up the wide-ranging discussions in Dunion’s (Dare to Grow Up, 2016, etc.) latest book. It deals with the special challenges and fulfillments faced by people he calls “threshold dwellers,” individuals who are “familiar with the gateway from the familiar to the unknown.” These seekers are characterized by their restless search for self-identification and the vision quests they undertake to answer a range of basic questions—What do I want? Where am I going? Who’s coming with me on the way?—that most people spend little or no time pondering. Dunion analyzes the dangers that lurk on such quests and the potential pitfalls seekers face, including the risks of cynicism or self-righteousness. He spends a corresponding amount of time looking at the personal reasons that might create inertia and inhibit the questing that should come naturally to seekers. The ultimate goal of all such questing is to find home, and when Dunion examines the multifaceted nature of that concept, his book is at its strongest. The underlying contradiction—a group of people seeking home but identified by their never quite finding it—is not lost on the author. “The paradox for us seekers,” he writes, “is that we are called to be at home and to pursue a larger vision of home.” Dunion’s writing is fast-paced and invitingly intellectual—literary and philosophical references abound in these pages—and this greatly compensates for the book’s keen supply of fortune-cookie pseudo-profundities (“the willingness to feel vulnerable allows us to be penetrated by love, which can be given and taken away,” etc.). Introverts—part of Dunion’s target audience—will likely be fascinated by his concept of expanded presence, and all readers feeling a vague lack in their lives should find something thought-provoking in the author’s ruminations.

A densely packed celebration of the resilience in some questioning souls.