Attention is the only faculty of the soul that grants access to God.
— Simone Weil
Let the record reflect that I am the original buzzword hater. Permit me to submit as evidence that I’m humbug enough to even hate the term “buzzword.” It’s hard work being the crème de la crème of lingual hipsters, but it does come with its perks. One of them seems to be, as I grow older, that my distaste for trendy lingo feeds a much more productive impulse to investigate the cause of said distaste.
With the stage set by my sixth-sense of detecting vapid vocabulary, you’ll understand how my sights became fixed on the word “intentional.” Intentionality has risen to the station of one of the seven heavenly virtues of both secular and evangelical pseudo-religion. It’s been canonized through repetition as the crown jewel of Romantic morality. In the game of lived experiences and the realm eternal rendered the realm internal, intentionality is naturally touted as the locus of love.
This development is, as should be expected, not entirely incorrect. Our Lord Himself is quite a stickler about intentions in the Gospels, it seems. But the real question, with a view to the postmodern context of intentionality’s prominence, is whose intentions truly matter. The question is perhaps incomprehensible to the language of interiority because it acknowledges that the isolated worlds of intentions have intersecting orbits, that they are materially relevant as they are borne out in the interspace of actions.
I recently read Richard Beck’s excellent work Hunting Magic Eels, which was such a delight and boon to the soul that I may write a whole review of it. Beck got me thinking about intentionality through the way he characterized telos as an omnipresent essence of all material existence. Beck largely finds the answer to his problem of re-enchanting the Christian faith in recapturing the sense of telos, the sight of things not just for how they appear but for what they are, and uncovering what they are through the knowledge of what they mean. That is to say, modernity is caustic to meaning because it erodes telos, and the meaning indelible to Christianity can and must be salvaged from its corrosive grip.
As I read through Beck’s fine work, I felt the word “intentional” ricocheting around the admittedly quite roomy cavern between my ears. In finding myself unable to do otherwise than contemplate the word, I also found myself unable to escape its woeful insufficiency. Beck was so helpful because he doesn’t write like a self-help writer. His focus isn’t on the reader, but on the object of worship to which the reader must also direct his focus. So much of his applicable knowledge could have been summarized by a lesser writer in some syrupy version of, “Be intentional about your faith.” But, again, with Beck’s words in my own hands, the weakness of such a paraphrase was painfully clear.
At this point, I arrived at a number of conclusions that I hope will be of benefit to my brothers and sisters in the faith. First, evangelicalism broadly has completely hamstrung its own vocabulary — not the mere words it permits for its lexicon, but the language of its culture, story and history. As I read through Beck, I was simultaneously being greatly edified by brief quotes from Orthodox saints shared online — quotes, I should say, whose brevity could not have detracted from their richness in the slightest. Beck uses the lack of saint veneration as evidence of disenchantment in the Christian traditions which eschew it, and I am inclined strongly to accept such evidence. I am not an advocate of veneration of the saints, but I am unable to ignore that, like in so many arenas, the evangelical and Protestant avoidance of superstition has led into the lair of an equally dangerous weakness, namely insulation from heritage.
“Stories convey information no other medium can,” I’m sure I read somewhere (if you’ll permit the preacherism of unattributed quotation). The pattern of language as such propagates upward through culture and history. The saints are not just old people any more than literature is just old books. The lives of the saints and their wisdom, encapsulated in story, become words in a higher-level language than mere words. They become able to impart truths no other medium can. Hence why Orthodox “write” rather than “draw” or “paint” icons. Much of Protestant culture, in its often ravenous and even adolescent avoidance of all resemblance to her parents, is deprived of the ability to use this higher-level language.
Enter the ad nauseum usage of “intentional,” “engage,” “connect,” and any number of modern- and post-modernisms like a popsicle stick scaffold plugging the breach and creaking under the immense weight of Christianity’s vast cathedral edifice of meaning. Secular language, like the “unknown god” of Athens, might work as a starting place for the entry of heathen into the fold of Christ, but it is relegated to the territory of spiritual milk. The language we speak and write is the language we think (“Vernunft ist Sprache”), and so long as a Christian’s language remains untethered to the vast and storied language of his ancient inheritance, he will be unable to digest the meat of meaning. The substance of the faith is not in postmodernism, so postmodern language and culture can never properly reference it.
Richard Beck can be classed as a kind of Christian mystic, and thanks to developments in my own thinking prior to and resulting from reading his work I think that I can be, too. Mysticism seems to be a remedy for much of what ails the Church militant. To return to the initial thought, “intentionality” is not wholly bankrupt of significance. I’ve begun to ruminate on the proposition that mystery is a point of commonality between postmodernism’s attempt to escape modernity and premoderns’ actual escape therefrom. Just as mystery may be the conduit by which the mindset of postmodernity can get off the track headed toward metamodernity and “RETVRN,” so to speak, finally derailing itself from the confines of modernist thought, perhaps teleology is the point of contact by which the present church can avoid the same trajectory. Linguistically, I think this entails a movement from “intentionality” to “purposefulness.”
Intentionality predicates meaning and significance on the agent in question, usually a Christian being supposedly exhorted toward a more morally pure or effectual lifestyle. But what Beck’s kind of mysticism proposes — quite biblically — is that meaning springs from the intention of the Creator. This is telos. God’s intention is a pure and uninhibited expression of His nature, which is not contingent on anything but itself. Where postmodernism finds the self-referential “unmoved mover” in the realization of human self, and metamodernity threatens to locate it in self-reference in itself or something (chew on that one, just not too long), the premodern sense is that the Absolute locus of self-reference, the One to whom all things are for, from and through à la Romans 11:36, is the transcendent Trinity.
Purposefulness, then, is the predication of value upon the agency of the Divine. This is a far more monumental shift in perspective than it might at first seem — and indeed perspective is itself key to Beck’s thesis. The aim of “living intentionally” is the self, but the crux of “living purposefully” falls well beyond the self. The thrust of intentionality is still postmodern. Purposefulness clears a perceptual and cognitive avenue to ancient, mysterious Truth Himself. Intentionality manages to wrest some semblance of meaning from the insatiable vacuum of modernity, but it needs relocating to the true Agent whose intention is not contingent on but rather generative of meaning.
“Why does this matter?” is the pragmatic question that follows from the shrewd consequentialism of modernity. The first answer is that the question is wrongheaded since it does not properly respect that the matter is meaning itself. The second is that this truth is applicable because it is essentially not practical. Grateful as I am to have been surrounded by believers in my youth, I wince at the memory of modern Christians’ ol’ faithful tool of deep-cutting demystification so oft repeated after readings of the Holy Scriptures: “How do we apply this to our lives?” Whatever practical benefits these truths have are nullified by such a disposition by virtue of their benefits issuing from attention worshipfully purposed toward God rather than toward oneself.
This is the whole point, that the point matters immensely, more than anything, even. Beck cites Simone Weil, “Attention is the only faculty of the soul which gives access to God” (an expression that has wrought upon my journey into mysticism what a champagne bottle effects upon a ship). Purposefulness is linguistically teleologically oriented, which is to say that it retains meaning through its essential reference to the external and therefore in the realm of faith to the transcendent. Orientation toward the transcendent is essential to union with Christ and glorification of God. To gnaw at the tie that binds the nous to the Logos is to set the vessel of the soul adrift from the safe harbor of telos. That is to say, language that turns the eye of the mind inward, unless it eventually contributes to an outward gaze at the Divine, is purposeless and therefore meaningless. To know God, to love Him, enjoy Him and glorify Him forever is the end of man. I would posit, even, that man is incidental to his own relationship with God rather than essential.
Only after this realization can the movement be made toward the material. Only after the course has been charted by the guidance of the compass can the vessel set sail. Faith is preceded by total resignation, via Kierkegaard. Orthopraxy is the fruit rather than the root of faith. My challenge to the Christian reader is to stop living with a view to one’s own intent and begin acting always with a view to God’s intent. As Beck articulates, when one sees the world at a teleological angle, one sees the identity of things. The faces of the inanimate come roiling out of dull materialism into vivid meaning. The whole of creation “shines like transfiguration.”
The Heraclitean mystery that “all the world’s a flame” to which I in no small part committed the sentiment of my writings makes a fine adornment of this reality. Teleology brings out the fiery glow in all things. God’s grace permitting, that glow becomes like the streetlamps on the straight and narrow road. His word is indeed a lamp unto our feet, lest we forget that all creation itself issues from His word, too. God has made everything beautiful in its time and made it through Christ. To truly accept these truths in faith is to take every step, every breath, and every moment of stillness with an all-permeating love for Him. This is the great challenge of the life truly Christian in the deepest sense of the moniker, rendered surmountable only by the invincibility of the initiatory, creative love of God Himself.
For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. — Romans 11:36 (KJV)
Being Kindled 
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