On Intentionality

Part 1, Disengaging the Autopilot

I recently read in my New York Times news feed that we’re drowning in the imperative to be “intentional.” Being intentional, it seems, is the cure for everything that is ailing us. Being more intentional with our work, with our relationships, with our health, with our self-care, with our relationship with God.

I’ve contributed my fair share to this discourse. Intentionality sits behind many of the recommendations and practices I describe in my books.

For example, in Stranger God I describe Thérèse of Lisieux’s Little Way as an intentional practice of hospitality. In Stranger God I devote chapters to intentional practices I call “seeing,” “stopping,” and “approaching.” The point I make in the book is that if we’re not being intentional as we move through the day we operate on what I call “social autopilot.” This relational autopilot tends to get captured by social psychological dynamics. One of these dynamics is what David Leong has called “the social logic of homogeneity,” how like is attracted to like, along with our natural wariness toward difference. As I describe in Stranger God, without intentionally disengaging my social autopilot my relationships unconsciously and naturally drift toward affinity groups. I associate with and befriend people who look like me, exist in the same socio-economic bracket, have the same educational status, vote like me, think like me, and share the same hobbies and interests. The social autopilot draws me into an “echo chamber” of sameness. None of this is willfully malevolent, but it creates the social and relational sorting that makes our relational groups very homogeneous. Given this tendency, the only way to diversify our relationships is to adopt intentional practices of navigating our social world that create opportunities to encounter and develop friendships with people very unlike ourselves.

In Hunting Magic Eels I describe how recovering enchantment--God being present and filling all things--involves intentional practices of attention. Many modern Christians, for example, default to the metaphysics of scientism. The world is full of inert objects governed by the laws of physics. We’ve lost what theologians call a “sacramental ontology” where, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, the world is charged with the grandeur of God. In the words of Martin Buber, we default to experiencing the world through an I-It relation. The world around me is an It, a dead object devoid of mind and spiritual resonance. Given this attentional default, we need to become more intentional in how we direct and invest our attention. I describe many such practices in Hunting Magic Eels, from liturgy to prayer to nature to poetry to testimony to sacramentals. These practices foster an I-Thou relationship with the world. Through intentional practices of attention a capacity for sacred encounter is cultivated.

As a last example, The Shape of Joy encourages readers to make an “outward turn” toward transcendence. As I describe in the book, the modern self is self-referential and ruminative. This morbid introversion, being curved inward upon yourself, has destabilized our mental health. When left alone this inward focus is our attentional default. Worse, it’s a therapeutic recommendation. We’re told to “find our true self.” To discover “our truth.” Consequently, if we want to reverse the curvature of the self, to flip the ego inside out, we have to become intentional in directing our gaze outward, toward a sacred, cosmic, existential, and transcendent ground of purpose, mattering, and worth.

Stepping back, as we can see, I’ve made many calls for becoming more intentional. From the Little Way, to re-enchantment, toward stabilizing our mental health, we need to become more aware of a default state of mind and relating to the world, relationally, spiritually, and psychologically. Otherwise, we move through the world on autopilot. And disengaging this autopilot requires intentionality.

So, I think intentionality is a good thing. But might there be some problems here as well?