Intentional Spirituality by

Philip Brownell

Brownell, P. (2010). Intentional spirituality. In J.H. Ellens (Ed.) The healing power of spirituality: How religion helps humans thrive, vol.1, the healing power of personal spirituality,

pp. 19-40. Santa Barbara: Praeger/ABC-CLIO

This is an exploration of spirituality, including the expression of spirituality in religious practice, using the phenomenological construct of intentionality that was introduced by

Franz Brentano and developed by later phenomenologists, including contemporary thinkers in the world of gestalt therapy.

Intentionality addresses the "aboutness" of experience. Intentional objects link subjective life, a relative dimension, through alterity and critical realism, to the ontological

dimension of living. Since there is also a teleological aspect to spirituality, this chapter deals with intention as purpose and result but distinguishes the teleological perspective from the phenomenological perspective on intentionality. Thus, intentional spirituality

covers the aboutness of the experience, its purpose and its result.

A WORKING DEFINITION OF SPIRITUALITY

In March of 1907 Sigmund Freud addressed a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic

Society in a paper titled "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices." In that paper he spoke of the sphere of religious life, associating religion with various pathological

processes. (Coles 1990) This association has been present ever since. It is evident in distinctions between religion and spirituality, frequently describing religion as a source of suffering, and it is often expressed in a simple reduction, a polarity between the two.

Religion

Many people think of ritual and outward behavior when they think of religion. There is a negative connotation to the fixity and rigidity related to liturgy and dogma. People

associate superficiality with religion that is void of authentic spirituality. People associate inquisition, enforced conformity, and brutality with religion and wonder how religious

people can also ascribe to such virtues as love, peace, patience, and long suffering. The construed difference between religion and spirituality is similar to a distant and

intellectualized manner of being contrasted with an intimate, intuitive manner of being. Indeed, to adopt the outward form of godliness without an experiential understanding of

God is what J.I. Packer (1973) described as the difference between knowledge about God and the knowledge of God. Knowledge about God without knowledge of God seems like the popular idea of religion. Knowledge about God without knowledge of God tends to

evaporate into wandering abstraction on the one hand or hardened legislation on the other. Just as it is possible to make an entire academic career out of the study of God as a

concept without knowing God experientially, it is also possible to experience religion as

some kind of performance owed to God without knowing subjectively that one has met God.

Kwan Tze-wan (2007) asserted that religion is a mix of faith and reason in which God is

an intentional object in the experience. Following Hans Kung, Tze-wan also ascribed to a two-fold criteria useful for sorting true or good religion from false or bad religion: a religion is essentially true or good if it supports humanness and helps people with their

identities, meaningfulness, and values. It is a false or bad religion if it goes in the other direction and detracts or undermines these things in people. When he takes his own

phenomenological approach to religion, Tze-wan explores how the meaning of God is constituted. Applying an epoché in which the epistemological and ontological issues of whether God exists and how one might know that God exists are bracketed, he explores

how human beings give meaning to religious activities, and when he does that he arrives at "God as an Intentional Object."1 (ibid, 89) Thus, the concept of God is intertwined

with the conceiving of God, which is consistent with phenomenology, because for Husserl, the father of phenomenology, the act of constituting (intentio or noesis) and the world of meaning that is constituted (intentum or noema) are one whole. Tracing the

origins of the word "religion" Tze-wan concluded that religion is a matter of linking two things, and the two essential things to be linked are divinity and humanity–God and

human beings. For Tze-wan the idea of intentional linkage indicates that religion can be defined as the earnest aspiration of humankind:

First, as was previously pointed out, religion is a social reality. Although we may ourselves

choose not to believe in any religion, we still cannot guarantee that we will be able to stay

away from religious matters. As far as friendship, courtship, kinship, profession, and

politics are concerned, religion can all of a sudden become a matter of concern for us.

Second, religious disputes can arise not only between believers of different religions, but

also between believers and non-believers…Third, people who have no explicit relationship

with any religion might yet, from time to time, share the religious feelings of others and

become spiritually inspired. For example, two “non-believers” might at times achieve a

high level of spiritual communication over quasi-religious themes such as attending a

funeral service, visiting a medieval church, listening to a Bach piece played on the organ, or

meditating over a Buddhist text or Zen koan. With all this in mind, we cannot help but feel

that if the relevance of religion is not confined to believers alone, then the source of

meaning of the religious must be rooted in a layer of soil deeper than explicit religious

activities such as church-going, prayers, and religious ceremonies. Over the years, I become

[sic] increasingly convinced that if we are to take religion as a form of life, then we should

arrive at the insight that the most important thing about religion is not doctrines or creeds,

but religious feeling or religiosity itself, which is common to all humankind. The word

religiosity is derived from the Latin word religiositas, which is a further abstraction from

the term religion. Literally speaking, it refers to the “reverence for God (the gods).” (Tze -

wan 2007, 95)

This understanding of religion is akin to Paul Tillich's (1957) sense that religious matters are matters of ultimate concern. Thus, one can be ultimately concerned with bike racing

and approach bike racing religiously. However, if we think of religion as the ultimate concern about the linkage between divinity and humanity, then

1 See below on intentionality.

… the important things of life, what Paul Tillich (1987) called the ultimate concerns –even

what some call mystery or still others identify as epiphanal beauty in an aesthetic sense of

form–point past the immediate, visible and obvious to the Artist whose creativity produced

them (Yancey 2003), and it is the relationship with that Person that organizes one's being in

the world. (Brownell in press a, np)

Thus, religion comes full circle in contemporary usage, from outward, form bound and intellectualized to inward, of ultimate concern, and reverential.

Spirituality

When thousands of youth between the ages of twelve and twenty-five were asked what it means to be spiritual, young people from Australia, Cameroon, Canada, India, Thailand,

Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States asserted that to be spiritual meant believing in God, believing there is a purpose to life, and being true to one's inner self.

(The Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence 2008) On February 3, 2009 I googled "human spirituality" and got 462,000 results. It is

ubiquitous. Many people seek some kind of synthesis between eastern and western forms of religious practice. Many people are interested in spiritual experience as something

common to being human and seek some kind of synthesis of all that is "inner" for a person. Perhaps Victor Frankl (2000) was correct when he said that the spiritual is what is human in people. I suspect that a better way to put that is to say that spirituality is

intrinsic to being a person.

Kenneth Pargament (2007) asserted that spirituality is the quest for the sacred, which he described as the heart and soul of spirituality. In turn, at "…the heart of the sacred lies God, divine beings, or a transcendent reality." (ibid, 33)

Dallas Willard (1988) claimed that spirituality

…is not an extra or "superior" mode of existence. It's not a hidden stream of separate

reality, a separate life running parallel to our bodily existence. It does not consist of special

"inward" acts even though it has an inner aspect. It is, rather, a relationship of our

embodied selves to God that has the natural and irrepressible effect of making us alive to

the Kingdom of God–here and now in the material world. (Willard 1988, 31)

Finding an operational definition can often be facilitated by creating some kind of measuring stick for human experience. Such measuring sticks are the bread and butter of

experimental psychologists; they call them "scales." Just so, researchers Underwood and Teresi (2002) developed the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale in order to measure

"…a person's perception of the transcendent (God, the divine) in daily life and his or her

perception of his or her interaction with or involvement of the transcendent in life. The

items attempt to measure experience rather than particular beliefs or behaviors; therefore,

they are intended to transcend the boundaries of any particular religion. Many

characterizations of spirituality involve such an inner dimension." (Underwood and Teresi

2002, 23)

When they developed the scale, they purposefully selected the term "spiritual" over the term "religious," and their rationale is stated in "A Report of a National Working Group

Supported by the Fetzer Institute in Collaboration with the National Institute on Aging" (Fetzer Institute 1999):

Religiousness has certain behavioral, social, doctrinal, and denominational characteristics

because it involves a system of worship and doctrine that is shared with a group.

Spirituality is concerned with the transcendent, addressing ultimate questions about life's

meaning, with the assumption that there is more to life than what we see or fully

understand. Spirituality can call us beyond self to concern and compassion for others.

While religions aim to foster and nourish the spiritual life–and spirituality is often a salient

aspect of religious participation–it is possible to adopt the outward forms of religious

worship and doctrine without having a strong relationship to the transcendent. (Fetzer

Institute 1999, 2)

A person's perception of the transcendent, that is of God, will also be mediated by his or

her refined worldview. Thus, Sara Savage (2008) distinguished between conservative and liberal Christians, both holding to a faith in Jesus, by attending to the difference in the

way people make figure/ground adjustments. In solving moral dilemmas, for instance, Conservative Christians take an intratextual (looking to the Bible) approach and focus on the figure of the person in the dilemma, while liberal Christians take an intertextual

(looking to the social context) approach and focus on the ground of the person in the dilemma.

Taking an admittedly intratextual approach, then, in Biblical spirituality spirit is the medium in which God relates to people. (Brownell, in press a) People have spirit, and

God is spirit. There is no material place that can contain God or from which He can be barred, and He has no body in the sense that human beings do, but God is a Being, a

Being in whom resides aseity (self-existence). While human beings are created in God's image, that is a description of a set of immaterial attributes that are derived from God's nature; thus, we are not self-existent, but we do exist. As God says "I am," so a human

being can assert, "Because God is, I also am." Not only that, but because "I am created in God's image, I am spirit." That is, I am a spirited body.

Synthesis

The shift away from religion in favor of spirituality is a relatively recent phenomenon. (Jones, Wainwright, and Yarnold 1986) One can see this shift by comparing the usage of

three previous thinkers with a relatively recent one. Jonathan Edwards' (1703-1758) preferred term for what he understood to be spirituality

was "religion" when he wrote A Treatise on Religious Affections:

Edwards recovered, through his doctrine of the new sense and the new nature, the

distinctively religious dimension of life; he pointed the way to a form of understanding

broad enough to retain its relation to the direct experience of the individual; he showed how

piety, though ultimately rooted in the individual's relation to God, could be subject to

rational scrutiny in the form of tests aimed at revealing its genuine or spurious character.

(Ramsey 2008)

William James (1842-1910) used the term "religion" to refer to what many would now

call personal spirituality. He defined religion as

…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they

apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since

the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of our religion in

the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may

secondarily grow. (James 1902)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) conducted a phenomenological study of religion and concluded that religion was an aspect of culture and one way in which "the active life of a people objectifies itself. Objectification is not merely self-expression but also an

externalization of sensibility and physical substrates of the spiritual life of the people, the meaning of which is able to be experienced by subsequent generations." (Hart 1994, 265)

By 1999, however, Alistair McGrath would write:

Spirituality concerns the quest for a fulfilled and authentic religious life, involving the

bringing together of the ideas distinctive of that religion and the whole experience of living

on the basis of and within the scope of that religion…The term "spirituality" has gained

wide acceptance in the recent past as the preferred way of referring to aspects of the

devotional practices of a religion, and especially the interior individual experiences of

believers. It is often contrasted with a purely academic, objective or detached approach to a

religion, rather than dealing with the manner in which individual adherents of the religion

experience and practice their faith. (McGrath 1999, 2)

In contemporary society, spirituality is the broader and more general term, because it can hold under its canopy a number of religious perspectives. In fact, it can also

accommodate a disorganized, eclectic, and idiosyncratic approach to living that is little more than wonder over mystery. Religion, on the other hand, is much more organized with tenets of dogma and devotional practice, and these tenets make one religion different

from another. Theology denotes the distinctive tenets comprising both theory and practice within any given religion (thus, theology could be understood as the praxis of a

given religion). Spirituality is an experience of self, while religion is an experience of the collective. Spirituality passes with the passing of the individual who lives it, while religions have means of passing on their theologies from one generation to another.

(Farley 2005)

TELEOLOGY

One of the best-selling books of recent years is The Purpose Driven Life (Warren 2002).

Many people equate purpose with intention. If a person intends to do something, then he or she purposes to do it. So, one way of understanding intentional experience is to see it

as goal directed and purposive. With this perspective a person's intentional object would be an objective or a perceived outcome or even the result of some process under consideration. Thus, the term teleology, which is related to the telos, or the "end or goal

toward which a movement is being directed…" (Arndt and Gingrich 1957, 819) concerns the study of goal-directed and purposive behavior.

The main focus of this chapter is in another direction, toward an application of the

phenomenological sense of intentionality. A brief description of teleology here will suffice to make the contrast clear.

Expanding the Idea of the Telos

People do what they do to accomplish goals or because they are driven by their character and/or their deliberations (that is, by their reasoning, reflection, and careful

consideration).2 (Thorpe 2008) Discussions of teleology, especially in biological contexts, usually include matters of

function. For instance if one says that the function of the heart is to pump blood, that is like saying that it is there to pump blood; it's purpose is to pump blood and the result of

its action is that blood gets pumped. "The relevant notion of function, then, is thought to be teleological, in so far as it is the notion of what something is for, and normative, in so far as it permits the possibility of malfunction."(Neander 2004) If there is proper

function, accomplished function, functional success, then there can also be improper function, failed attempts and overall dysfunction. Both point to the purpose for which

something exists and have implications for the design structure in which it exists. The telos is also related to arguments for the existence of God as the intelligent designer.

Many have written on this subject. Richard Swinburne, for instance, wrote that an argument from design ascribes a general pattern of order in the universe, or the provision

for the needs of human beings, "to a God responsible for these phenomena." (Swinburne 1979/2004, 153) It is the inferred watchmaker from the existence of a watch. (Gene 2007)

In a sense more easy to discern than to articulate, the fine-tuning of the universe seems to

manifest the presence of a designing intelligence. The inference to design is best thought

of, not as an instance of reasoning by analogy (as it is often portrayed), but as a case of

inference to the best explanation. (Moreland and Craig 2003, 483)

Moving back from apologetics to human behavior, in a self-organizing systems

perspective, to adequately comprehend teleology one must consider the relations between the internal state(s) of a person, the person's outward behavior, and the organism-

environment script (o-e script) inherent to the situation. An o-e script is "essentially a joint set of constraints deriving from the nature of the organism itself and its environment which limit and structure the activities the organism must engage in if it is to satisfy its

viability requirements." (Christensen 1996, 312) Furthermore, intention is evident when choice, or selection is present. Thus, a spider weaves a web according to some pre-set,

genetic algorithm, but before that, and in order to accomplish that, the spider investigates the environment and selects this twig or branch over that one upon which to anchor the web. (Christensen, ibid) Thus, choice is also a component of teleological intention.

Summing up, the teleological sense of intentional acts is that they are (1) goal directed,

2 Technically, character and deliberation are not considered by all to be philosophically part of teleology.

(2) focused on purpose and/or outcome, (3) take into consideration function and/or dysfunction, and (4) attempt to be sensitive to the organism-environment parameters that

affect behavior.3 Thus, spiritual growth programs, systems for discipleship, and methodological approaches to spirituality would all fit into a teleological perspective.

They are focused on the outcome, and they might be implemented in order to bring about an imagined result, achieve a spiritual goal, maximize a perceived spiritual function and even to accomplish these things within the religious community,4 but they would all

reside outside the phenomenological understanding of intentional spirituality. They would lead to, or depend upon intentional spirituality, but they would be of a different

kind of intentionality. INTENTIONALITY

Kwan Tze-wan claimed that with regard to God, for Husserl "there was no need to even

make a real distinction between the intentional or immanent object on the one hand and the actual, transcendent or external object on the other, for the reason that these two conceptually different kinds of object are from man’s standpoint 'numerically' identical."

(Tze-wan 2007, 91)

Indeed, the intentionality of attending to God as an immanent object or to God as a transcendental object is the experience of continually shifting back and forth between the two perspectives; we have trouble contemplating the enigma of them occurring

simultaneously in one Being:

How a Being can be both transcendent and immanent, simultaneously, would make for a

fine meditation. Of these two constructs Martin Buber (1952/1988) asserted that a complete

inclusion of the divine within the sphere of the human would effectively abolish its divinity.

Levinas would say that it would make the divine Other the "same" as oneself, confining

God to one's thematization. (Levinas 2000, 1998) Buber further claimed that if a person

were to dare to turn toward God, in a face-to-face meeting, and to call out to Him, then

"Reality" would meet him. Levinas would say that this sentient meeting constitutes the

enjoyment of God, experienced directly and immediately in the course of embodied living,

as opposed to an objectification of God through intentional representation. (Critchley 2002)

With such a perspective, if a person refuses to limit God to the transcendent, he will have a

fuller conception of God than the one who does so limit Him; conversely, if a person limits

God to only the immanent, then it is not actually the divine Being one is talking about.

(Buber ibid) (Brownell, in press a, np) All this pertains to the intentionality in thinking about God, but what is the

phenomenological understanding of intentionality in the first place, and how does that relate to one's spiritual or religious experience?

Intentionality Described

3 What has not been dealt with fully are the teleological arguments for the existence of God and all the

implications of purpose in intelligent design. Although relevant, to explore those things adequately would

take the emphasis of this chapter in another direction. 4 See Brownell, "The Healing Potential of Religious Community" elsewhere in this series.

Intentional objects link subjective life, through alterity and critical realism, to the ontological dimension of living. Intentional objects are situated by the interest in a

person's voice, held by faith, surrounded by a person's attitude, and enlightened by the horizon of potential and possibility in a person's life.

Intentionality Has A Voice

The intrinsic nature of intentionality is such that it relates its subject to the object in question as thinker to object thought. (Brower 2005) Every mental phenomenon includes

something as object within itself. "In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired." (Brentano/Banchetti-Robino 2004, 78)

Consequently, a person can contemplate something that actually exists as a physical

object, often perceived in the moment, something that has physical existence but is not present to the senses, something conjured up by symbolic reference, and something which is more a construct, having more a cognitive or conceptual existence than a

physical presence. (Sokolowski 2000) Perception directly links a person to an object. Both perception and memory operate with belief; memory comes as the sense of "how it

was" while perception comes with the sense of "how it is." Both of these are related to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) called perceptual faith. Imagination, however, comes with a measure of contingency–"how it could or might be." In signitive

intentionality, one bestows meanings on the symbols of words, and one calls to mind what the words refer to, leaving the words themselves and holding in one's mind the

object to which they refer. Pictures or works of art depicting something in life operate in much the same way, except it is possible to find one's focus on the picture as artistic object or the real life referent that it stands for. In categorial intentionality, however, there

is no physical referent. Rather, this is a "…kind of intending that articulates states of affairs and propositions, the kind that functions when we predicate, relate, collect, and

introduce logical operations into what we experience." (Sokolowski 2000, 885) Thus, a person might think about the providence of God, justice, or empathic attunement.

When we think of something, we think of it as real. If it is a non-existent object (such as a unicorn), it is conceived of as a real fantasy. Thus, the hermeneutic of intentionality is

a critical realism; the meaning is about something actually present to the subject, and when symbol and figurative language are utilized, they signify something authentic–intentionality interprets the figure literally. We feel some emotion, and we feel it as real,

not as if fooling ourselves–not as if our consciousness, the subjective experience of self, is a phantasm. It is just this realism that breaks down in psychosis when a person

eventually doubts that his or her intentional objects can be trusted. Even when one suspects he or she is hallucinating the focus of intentionality shifts and the realism becomes about having actual hallucinations.

Since intentionality relates subject to object thought, there is an implicit relationship

5 The reader will find a good description of these and other forms of intentionality/intentional objects in

chapters 5-7 of Sokolowski, 2000

between the subject and the action of intending, between the thinker and the act of thinking. The aboutness of the experience makes intending a transitive process, and the

person creates his or her own experience, which is a matter of voice.

Voice is a grammatical feature in verbal systems; it "…is that property of the verbal idea which indicates how the subject is related to the action." (Dana and Mantey 1927/1955, 155) The subject may take an active, passive, or middle voice in doing or intending

whatever he or she is engaged with. That is, the active voice describes the subject as producing the action or representing the state intrinsic to the object, the passive voice

shows the subject receiving the action, and the middle voice describes the subject as participating in some way in the results of the action; it relates the action more intimately to the subject. (Dana and Mantey 1927/1955)

When we have an experience of some thing–when we think of an idea, when we perceive

a percept, when we feel an emotion–we are intending. It is an active process. What is the relationship of the subject, the person intending, to the action of intending? "Consciousness bestows meaning upon the world rather than finding meaning already in

the world. Thus, the intentional object is a product of the constitutive activities of consciousness and of its directedness." (Banchetti-Robino 2004, 79 There is no

consciousness but that which is a property of the human organism, the person; once again, the process of constituting intentional experience is active, but with extreme self-interest.

Our lives are structured by multiple interests, and those interests direct the way in which

we go about dealing with things. Thus, we are never completely passive but active in the pursuit of intentional objects. Furthermore, one's interest is always surrounded by a concomitant attitude (see below) that acts like a lens or tint through which a person

perceives things and organizes interests. For instance, if someone is an architect, he or she might observe buildings with an architectural attitude, and the interest and attitude

will direct attention to features of buildings that someone operating with a baker's set of interests and attitude would not have.

Shifting from one interest to the other lies within my free will. The fact that I always

perceive a thing in a certain interest I shall term situation. I am always in a certain situation,

in the sense that I always have a certain, specific interest in something. I do not live

jumping from one situation to the next as if there were “gaps” in between. Rather I always

live in a certain context within a flow of temporal succession. Also, my interest within a

situation is not limited to this certain entity, but can be shifted to any other entity in the

same form of interest. It is here that the term attitude comes into play. My specific interest

in a certain entity, my situation in other words, is always embraced or surrounded by an

attitude. The attitude is like a halo (or an aura) around a certain act of interest. (Luft 1998,

157)

It is this aspect of directed self-interest and idiooptic attitude that makes the middle voice

the best analogy for understanding the relationship between a subject and his or her action of intending.

As explained in Dana and Mantey (1927/1955) the middle voice is that use of a verbal

idea describing the subject as participating in some manner in the results of the action. Mounce (2003) calls this the self-interest nuance of the middle voice. The active voice

emphasizes the action, but the middle voice emphasizes the agent, thus is more immediately relevant to self experience. Hindu grammarians described the active voice as

parasmai padan (word for another), while they described the middle voice as atmane padan (word for one's self). The context in any given situation indicates how the subject participates, but here are three common examples (Dana and Mantey, ibid):

1. The direct middle: the results of the action are referred directly to the agent with a

reflexive force, i.e., the man hit himself. 2. The indirect middle: sometimes the stress is upon the agent as producer of the

action rather than participant in its results (the action is related to the agent in

some special way), i.e., the man, himself, hit the ball. 3. The permissive middle: the agent voluntarily yielding self to the results of the

action, or seeking to secure those results for his or her own self interest, i.e., the man hit the ball for himself.

Thus, I intend–think, feel, experience in some way some "thing," some aspect, some feature of my phenomenal landscape–in the middle voice. It is this reflexive self-

reference, this self-interest that connects the subject to his or her intentional object, and it is an immediate action. That is, the first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena is accounted for by a pre-reflective self-consciousness, which is present whenever a person

is living through an experience; that is, whenever one is consciously perceiving the world, thinking a thought, feeling an emotion or sensing a sensation. (Zahavi 2006) One

is having an experience, not noticing oneself having an experience. However, if one begins to attend, on a meta level, and thinks about oneself having an experience, then the pre-reflective self-consciousness, the middle voice of intentionality, shifts to another

intentional object, but the flow of intentionality keeps moving in that same middle voice.

Intentionality Is A Matter Of Faith Building on Descartes' thinking, Edmund Husserl (1970) stated that "…every cogitatio

has its cogitatum. Each is in the broadest sense an act of believing [ein Vermeinen] and thus there belongs to each some mode of certainty–straightforward certainty, surmise,

holding-to-be-probable, doubting, etc." (Husserl 1970, 82) Every act of thorough consideration takes an object for contemplation, and as it does so, the person, through the process of considering, accepts the givenness of the object in question.

The content of such an intentional focus is called a noema, and the process of bringing to

mind such content is called a noesis. These are bound together as one whole, a complete gestalt. Intentional faith is similar. In faith there is something believed and there is the process of believing. Furthermore, as stated already, faith is required to hold something

as actual. We trust in the process of intending, and we believe that what we consider is something actual, or that it is a real fantasy. We are not lost in a swirling cloud of

confusion. Thus, intentional objects

… that are not actually physically present can still be aspects of experience. Indication

signs point toward an absent object, but a real object nonetheless. A hat reminds s omeone

of a best friend. A picture brings to mind a remembrance, stimulates an imagination, or

promotes an anticipation. These can all be experiences of intentional objects that cannot be

seen, but are of actual objects, places, events or people not pres ent to the senses (but

presented to the mind)…All these features of intentionality, in which one involuntarily

comprehends something through a partial perception, a symbolic indication, or logical

implication of reason, can be considered automatic…they are examples of intentional faith.

Why? Because they are held in the mind as real, even if only for the purposes of

contemplation. They are not held in the mind as false positives unless presented as false

positives. (Brownell 2008, 225) Intentionality Is Illuminated By An Attitude

As mentioned above, our interest, what gestalt therapists call a figure, is illuminated with an attitude. What is this attitude? It is the filtered light that drops through the canopy of

a rain forest. Without that, the ground would remain in shadow or even undetected, and certainly it would go unappreciated and lost to one's attention. However, in this attitude, a subject can attend to this figure or that, but each one will be lit up by the same light cast

upon other figures, and all these figures would be understood as in some way fitting together in one attitude.

Gestalt therapists understand the background of a person's life to be the ground of current experience. Thus, when a person is in a particular attitude, it is that attitude that lights up

various aspects of the person's ground. This is not a plodding sequence of logical determination; this is more the automatic sparkle that catches a person's attention pre-

reflectively. Portions of a person's overall ground are lit up selectively, but instantaneously, by the situated attitude in which a person moves at any given moment.

For example, if I am walking through a mall while in a shopping attitude, then I am caught by sales and items I have been waiting for. If I am walking through that same

mall with a structural engineer's attitude, then I am looking for stress factors and building materials. If the same person walked through the same mall on successive days with two different attitudes, that person would attend to different things each time. Furthermore, if

I am just operating in a non-critical, mundane fashion I could be described as having a natural attitude, but if I stop to reflect on what is happening around me, leap to a meta-

level cognition to consider the aboutness of my experience, then I could be described as having a phenomenological attitude. In the same way, if I conduct scientific investigations, suspending judgment in order to observe in a systematic fashion, I could

be described as having a scientific attitude, and if I stop to contemplate God, creation, the flow of divine history and my place in the Kingdom of God, my relationship with the Son

of God, and my being as an eternal child of God, then I could be described as having a spiritual attitude. Indeed, I believe that is exactly what is happening when people are described as being "in the Spirit." It is not a humanly construed experience, in that it is a

partnership with divinity, and it is also one phenomenon among the many experiences available to people in life.

Intentionality Reaches Toward A Horizon

The horizon is comprised of everything potential for a given figure of interest–the

possibilities not yet fully grasped by the act of intending. Thus, there are as many horizons as there are situations and attitudes available to a given person. Horizons "…are

implicit structural aspects of our original experience…" (Moran 2000, 162)

Analogously to the way an act has its correlative intended object, so we can also say that an

attitude has a correlative. But if in a certain attitude there is no limit in principle to that

which can become an object of this attitude, what could be the correlative of an attitude?

This correlative Husserl calls an open horizon or also a world. Thus, we have a correlative

to this world-horizon, namely an openness on the side of the experiencing person. In a way

this openness can also be called a horizon, albeit on the side of the subject. (Luft 1998, 157

This relates to the way in which people perceive. Although one side of a car may be in the visual field, the horizon provides an understanding of the other side, with another door or doors and potential for another passenger to sit or for cargo to be carried. Thus,

the horizon is part of the whole-making capacity of persons and related to the faith it takes to imagine as true the unseen side of things. We do not simply perceive two-

dimensional objects; we anticipate, or fill in the dimensional aspects we cannot see to complete the whole, and we also contribute an understanding of the functional possibilities inherent with the object. If we know what it is, we know what it's for, and

we can imagine what might be done with it. Even if we know in part, or if we need to inquire, we infer a functional capacity that is part of the horizon, although perhaps dimly

lit. Thus, a poorly formed gestalt will come with an impoverished horizon, while a well-formed gestalt will come with bountiful imaginations, projections, and associations.

Finally, the horizon is a domain of the self that is affected by the freedom to imagine. It is one thing to want something, but it is another to not even know what one wants; just so, it

is one thing to imagine various possibilities, but another to be so constrained by social obligations, interpersonal restrictions, and introjects–to be so rule-bound that one cannot freely and creatively associate. Thus, the horizon is where faith ignites hope and

stimulates existential risk and authenticity.

Intentionality Applied to the Experience of Spirit

God is spirit and spirit is the medium in which God relates to human beings. Kierkegaard

called the innate dimension of spirit primitivity (Rohde 1988), alluding to the spiritual potential that exists in every human being. The Bible describes human beings as having

spirit and operating with spiritual capacity in regard to will, emotions, and thought life. Spirit is a holistic and functional capacity. When the Holy Spirit comes upon one or indwells one, that leads to intentional situations in which Spirit calls to spirit. A person

finds him or herself caught up in a fascination, drawn toward the person of God, undone emotionally, marveling over a concept, or otherwise directed and responsive to God in a

spiritual attitude. Yet, what is it that one is experiencing when affected in that way? Is this a construct of

the human mind, or is this something that comes from the divine Other?

Husserl focused on the intentional acts of subjects rather than upon material objects. He suspended concern with the objective world, a physical self, and even a psychological

self in the attempt to arrive at consciousness itself. For phenomenologically oriented people one can sidestep concern with an extramental reality, because experience itself has

meaning. (Banchetti-Robino 2004) For gestalt therapists, for instance, it is not whether munchkins flew out of their clients' television sets while they were watching the Wizard of Oz, but that the clients have experiences around that; it is the clients' experiences and

construction of meaning that are of concern. Gestalt therapists are focused on the phenomenological field, not the ontological field of the clients they see (although, these

are fused in the unity of the field as a pneumatic field6). For believers in God, however, the external reality is all important (1 Corinthians 15: 12-19). A clinical psychologist might say the client hallucinated or has delusions of munchkins infesting his or her

house, and the relationship between the client's experience and consensual reality leads to a diagnosis. For a Christian, if Jesus was not the second person of the godhead and raised

from the dead, then he or she is unforgiven. As Paul said, "If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied." (1 Corinthians 15:19, NASB7)

The ontological issues of the existence of God and the theological veracity and historical reliability of Biblical texts are tangential to the immediate focus on the experience of the

believer. However, they are related, because the experience of believing something that is untrustworthy and false is one kind of experience, but the experience of trust in something solid is another.

Immanence and Transcendence Revisited

Intentionality is a difficult concept for some people, because it abrogates the transcendent nature of a truly other, another person who is both enigmatic and imposing at the same

time. The other presents an ethical obligation precisely because he or she is transcendent, but to contemplate that other person intentionally makes him or her immanent to the

intentional subject. This is the core of God's prohibition in the Decalogue against making any kind of image to represent Him; nothing could possibly provide an adequate representation, nothing could capture in any kind of thematization the actual being and

nature of God. This is the challenge of God's transcendence. We cannot even speak of Him. We cannot even think of Him without falling short in our thinking and expression.

Contemporary phenomenologists, under the influence of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, refuse to deny alterity by reducing a phenomenon to the constituting ego. In the

realm of the Spirit of God, that is akin to Marion's refusal to reduce God's infinity to the finite limits of the human mind. (Smith 2002) In terms of the experience of worship it is

a refusal to allow the structure of liturgy and/or the limits of one's personal theology to constrain the free movement of the Holy Spirit. Only the "telling of a mystery," the revelation of God, or, put another way, the discourse of God (Wolterstorff 1995), can

overcome a finite person's thematization of God. In philosophical terms

6 See Brownell, "Spirituality in the Praxis of Gestalt Therapy," in volume three of this series. 7 Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972,

1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Levinas and Marion both, in different ways, attempt to locate a "giving" or "donation"

which undoes the self, which overwhelms the ego, which saturates the intention and thus

exceeds the concept. This "saturated phenomenon" is a giving for which phenomenological

description–as conceptual–is both inadequate (because the phenomenon exceeds conceptual

grasp) and unjust (because the concept, as an operation of the immanence, violates and

reduces the transcendence of the phenomenon). (Smith ibid , 8)

It is this "giving" or "donation" that God accomplishes by making Himself known to us. Ironically, that is a manifestation of God's immanence. He intervenes in our history.

This is what is lost when people cannot hold at once the polar extremes of transcendency and immanence. For Levinas intentionality destroys alterity, because he sees that as the subject limiting the transcendent-intentional object through thematization. However, that

is viewing the object as a passive, although transcendent, "thing" that does not push back against human grasping, instead of a living Being Who is often engaged in relationship.

The same God who inspired this:

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways My ways," declares the Lord.

"For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways

And My thoughts than your thoughts…"

(Isaiah 55: 8-9, NASB)

also inspired this:

"You are my witnesses," declares the Lord,

"and My servant whom I have chosen,

So that you may know and believe Me

And understand that I am He.

Before Me there was no God formed,

And there will be none after Me.

"I, even I, am the Lord,

And there is no savior besides Me.

"It is I who have declared and saved and proclaimed,

And there is no strange god among you;

So you are My witnesses, " declares the Lord,

"And I am God."

(Isaiah 43: 10-12, NASB)

God who is holy, set apart in a class by Himself and "higher" than our thoughts with ways that are not our ways, is inscrutable. However, this same God is among us and has

made Himself known to us sufficiently that we are His witnesses. That is, we attend to our experience of Him and make this known to others. In fact, if a person has experienced

God, then his or her life is filled with numerous and diverse intentional interests, which are illuminated by a spiritual attitude that expands to an infinite horizon.

The Spiritual Attitude

The spiritual attitude is not a deduction. It's not a conclusion. It's a way of seeing, breathing, sensing, and of making meaning, but it's not a product of a linear process. It is

contextual and relational. It is the light of recognition and reverence for God's creation, God's Being, God's presence, God's actions, and God's intentions toward mankind.

Nicholas Wosterstorff, in reflecting on the upbringing he experienced as a boy in his family and in the Dutch Reformed Church, described how such a spiritual attitude took

form in his life:

Reverence for wood and for art in my father; reverence for the land and the animals in my

uncles, sometimes even for machinery; longing reverence for music in my aunt; reverence

for the life of the intellect in everybody. In the tenth book of his Confessions Augustine

imagines the things of the world speaking, saying to him: Do not attend to us, turn away,

attend to God. I was taught instead to hear the things of the world saying: Reverence us, for

God made us as a gift for you. Accept us in gratitude. (Wolterstorff 1996, 154)

The spiritual attitude does not illuminate a separate world or a parallel universe that is compartmentalized from what is seen in the natural attitude. Rather, the natural attitude

and the spiritual attitude overlap, with the spiritual attitude accounting for more in life. In the spiritual attitude one can see a baby and marvel at the gift of life that God gives. One

can watch the sun go down and feel moved by God's gift of beauty. One can look up into the starry sky and feel dwarfed by the magnitude and comprehensive interdependence of God's design, a design that extends at once from the microscopic to the cosmic, but which

finds fractals transcending the dimensions of both. It is the spiritual attitude that finds God in all such things.

Paul drew a distinction between a natural or unspiritual person (psychikos) and a spiritual person (pneumatikos). In 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 God's revelation is in and through the

Spirit of God. It is mediated by the Spirit. The appraisal of matters in this world is conducted by a spiritual person, and I would say that it is no stretch to claim that that

spiritual person must do this using a spiritual attitude. In another place Paul draws the contrast between a person who is foolish, unwise, and

asleep to the things of God and a person who is filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:6-21). There are many understandings of what it means to be filled with the Holy

Spirit. An analogy is often made to a cup or a glass that, regardless of its size and capacity, is filled when liquid is poured into it to the brim. Here, I want to use the metaphor of the attitude in intentionality and to say that the spiritual attitude is the light

filtering through the canopy of the tree tops that illuminates the ground of one's existence such that it points out elements, relations, and dynamics in the world as God sees them. It

vitalizes one's spiritual interest. This, then, is not to emphasize the capacity to act in the power of God, but the ability to perceive, understand, and commune with God in relationship and even the desire to do so. Thus, the spiritual attitude lights up intentional

objects of interest and concern, of desire, of need, and of necessity that are linked to one's relationship with God.

The Infinite Horizon

The horizon is the plane of possibility. It is not the plain of perception. It is the realm of

faith, imagination, and hope. Christian people walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Philip Yancey noted:

I have found that living with faith in an unseen world requires constant effort. After all, the

"garden" in which we live, the natural world, conceals as much about God as it reveals.

The Westminster Catechism teaches that the primary purpose of life is "to glorify God, and

to enjoy him forever." But how does that well-honed answer translate into actual day-to-day

living, especially when the God we are supposed to enjoy and glorify remains elusive and

hidden from view? (Yancey 2003, 43)

Thus, the infinite horizon in intentional spirituality is filled with the person of God

Himself–the inscrutable and holy One, who also says, "If you hear my voice, do not harden your hearts… come, let us reason together." Such an encounter with God

produces increased understanding in the knowledge of God at the same time that it produces more wonder and awe, more yearning and desire, more curiosity, more humility, more adoration, and more awareness of vast realms yet to be understood and

assimilated into one's being.

Encounter with God extends and expands one's sense of the infinite horizon. That, in turn, contains intentional objects not commonly considered. Perhaps the greatest one is the enjoyment of God Himself. John Piper understood this when he wrote, "Sin is what

you do when your heart is not satisfied with God. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it holds out some promise of happiness. That promise enslaves us until we

believe that God is more to be desired than life itself." (Piper 1995, 9) The alternative horizon of the world, of the natural world which is at enmity with God, is what is in mind here. So, the contrast is between a horizon offering possible happiness associated with

God (spiritual attitude) and one offering possible happiness associated with something else (unspiritual attitude).

One could go on indefinitely pointing out one possibility in the spiritual life after another. All of them would be peripheral to the reader's individual and specific horizon. Not all

things inhabit all horizons for all people.

The obvious elements in the horizon of most Christians, however, are the elements of personal and Christological eschatology. Personal eschatology includes the ultimate destiny of the Christian, his or her accomplished sanctification, and the life after death. It

includes one's dying. Christological eschatology is described by Richard Bauckham:

The history of Jesus can only be adequately understood against an eschatological horizon,

which makes clear its universal significance for the future of all things. Understood against

an eschatological horizon, the history of Jesus, as the paradigmatic and creative beginning

of the eschatological future of the world, gives to the eschatological hope its character and

content. (Bauckhan 2001, 2)

Finally, the horizon is filled with all the potential that relationship with God offers. God is a companion who is available as a person navigates life. Thus, His perspective, His

response, His "take," on any given situation, to say nothing of His presence in the flow of life, is always potential and resides in the infinite horizon of intentional spirituality.

CONCLUSION

Our world is filled with a desire for the pragmatic. People want to know how to do everything better, more efficiently, with more excitement, impact, and profit. However,

intentional spirituality demands more from a person than that.

Intentional spirituality includes purpose, outcome, and goal-directed attention, but it goes beyond that. Intentional spirituality is God consciousness. It requires that a person focus in the aboutness of his or her spiritual experience and wait on God. It views the spiritual

attitude as manifest through a relationship with God in which God illuminates the ground of one's existence and then opens up increasing vistas in the horizon of a person's life.

When that happens, one can see God at work in the intentional objects related to God's guidance and providence. When that happens, one marvels over the categorial objects once enigmatic or not even imagined. Nothing could be more practical.

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