James,
I believe that your telescope has a GoTo drive. If it does, are you able to program it to locate a first magnitude star? Likely candidates (assuming that you're not in the southern hemisphere) in the early part of the night are Arcturus, Vega, Altair, Deneb, and Fomalhaut. (The very colorful second magnitude binary star Beta Cygni - Albireo - is another good choice.) If the telescope reliably acquires these stars, which are undoubtedly part of its catalog of alignment stars, the problem is not in the drive system. Try locating some of these bright deep-sky objects: M31 and its companion galaxy M32 in Andromeda, M2 in Aquarius, M30 Capricornus, M29 and M39 in Cygnus, M13 and M92 in Hercules, M57 in Lyra, M15 in Pegasus, M11 in Scutum, and M27 in Vulpecula. Information and pictures of these objects can be found at
http://www.seds.org/messier/data3.html]
Do you have a Telrad pointing device? Is your finderscope accurately aligned? How bad is the light pollution at your observing site? The Meade Schmidt-Newtonians are fast telescopes (i.e., they have low f/ratios) so proper collimation is a must - see
http://hometown.aol.com/astropjm/tel.html and
http://www.astunit.com/tutorials/startest.htm
Many amateur astronomers locate deep-sky objects manually by star-hopping. If you want to learn this reliable technique, purchase Alan MacRobert's _Star-Hopping for Backyard Astronomers_ or the more elementary _Turn Left at Orion_. You'll need an atlas such as the Bright Star Atlas 2000.0 or, better still, the Sky Atlas 2000.0.
Dave Mitsky