The mistake begins when we settle into the explanation as though we have arrived.
In spiritual life, this substitution can become almost invisible. We may believe we are turning toward God while continually examining our own picture of Him. We may call that picture infinite, ineffable, or beyond thought. The vocabulary changes; attention remains occupied with something it has made. ## Kavanah: the direction of the heart Kavanah brings us back to the question of direction. In Jewish prayer, kavanah concerns intention: the inward directedness with which a person prays. The Mishnah describes early worshippers waiting before prayer so that they could direct their hearts toward God. The emphasis falls on the heart’s orientation, rather than the mere completion of an outward act.2 The Godward Way takes this directedness into the movement of consciousness itself. One can speak, feel, think, and act while intention remains offered toward the Creator. Godward names that orientation. Kavanah is its deliberate inward practice. The word “Father” gives this movement a relational address. It does not require a face, a body, a location, or a human personality enlarged to cosmic proportions. The word helps us turn toward the One to whom we offer ourselves. The moment a portrait forms around it, that portrait belongs among the things being offered. ## Silence is praise This discipline has deep company within the traditions from which religious language comes. Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, argued that statements about God’s actions must be distinguished from attempts to describe God’s essence. Human qualities cannot simply be enlarged and attributed to God as though Creator and creature belonged to the same class. In his account, understanding advances through removing mistaken attributions. He invokes the expression, “Silence is praise to Thee.”3 Such silence carries the weight of surrendered assumptions. It asks us to stop requiring God to fit what our words can accommodate. ## Where words reach their limit The Kena Upanishad approaches a related boundary from another direction. It speaks of that through which speech and thought become possible, while declaring that speech and mind cannot reach it as they reach ordinary objects. Its paradoxes challenge the confidence of someone who believes Brahman has become a comprehended possession.4 Laozi’s opening warning is equally memorable: “The Dao that can be spoken of is not the ever-constant Dao.” In the Zhuangzi, words are compared to a trap whose purpose is fulfilled when the fish has been caught. The instrument serves an encounter; attachment to the instrument can obstruct what it was meant to serve.5 These texts offer different accounts of ultimate reality. Their value for the Godward Way lies in the pressure they place on our habit of confusing a verbal form with what it points toward. The Qur’an preserves this tension within a single verse. It declares that nothing resembles God, then names God as Hearing and Seeing. Religious language remains possible, while resemblance to created things is refused.6 Al-Ghazali adds an experiential distinction: knowing the definition of health differs from being healthy, just as explaining satiety differs from having eaten. Study can tell us about a spiritual practice without accomplishing its inward work.7 The Buddhist image of the raft supplies another useful warning. A teaching helps someone cross dangerous water; carrying it indefinitely after reaching the other shore misunderstands its purpose. The teaching’s usefulness does not require permanent attachment to its form.8 We need not flatten these traditions into one doctrine to hear the challenge they present: what has happened to our attention while we have been learning the words? ## Catch and Offer The Godward Way answers through practice. It asks us to recognise what occupies consciousness while remaining directed toward the Creator. This is Catch and Offer. Suppose anger arises during a conversation. Someone has misunderstood you, and the demand to be understood begins to gather force. Your attention narrows around their response. You rehearse the explanation that will finally make them see. In Catch and Offer, consciousness recognises this movement while intention remains Godward. The anger, the demand, the tightening, and the wish to win are offered in that same recognition. Observation and offering belong together. There is no need to establish a detached position first and turn toward God afterward. The conversation may still require a clear answer. You may need to correct an error, state a boundary, or make a decision. Kavanah concerns the direction from which you do these things. The other person’s reaction need not become the final authority around which your consciousness revolves. ## When the feeling is pleasant The same practice applies when the feeling is pleasant. Peace can gather attention around itself. A sense of spiritual closeness can become something we continually inspect, protect, and try to reproduce. We begin measuring prayer by whether yesterday’s feeling returns. Within the Godward Way, that feeling also belongs in the offering. Its beauty gives us no reason to make it the recipient. ## Even the observer can be offered This is where the practice becomes particularly subtle. Even the observer can acquire a mental shape. We imagine a higher self watching the lower self, or picture the “Big Eye” as an inner presence we can look at. Once that happens, consciousness has produced another object. The imagined observer, too, can be caught and offered. This discernment should remain gentle. Turning every passing thought into an examination creates another demand for control. Kavanah can be renewed without making a verdict about the quality of each moment. ## The cloud of unknowing The old writers on unknowing understood how easily the mind rebuilds what it has just relinquished. Pseudo-Dionysius carries negation beyond descriptions drawn from the senses and beyond intellectual categories, finally placing God beyond both affirmation and negation. Even the statement that God is “beyond” cannot become a final enclosure.9 The Cloud of Unknowing gives this movement a devotional expression: “By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.” Its author allows a place for reflection about God while asking the contemplative to release such reflection in the movement of love.10 For Godward practice, this opens a demanding possibility: we can intend toward God without requiring a mental image to sustain the intention. We can offer ourselves without first supplying a definition of the recipient. Love need not wait for comprehension. ## Turning without certainty It also changes the place of uncertainty. We often seek explanations because we fear losing our way. We want a sentence that will preserve the connection, a method that will make its return dependable, or a sign that will settle our doubts. The wish is understandable. It can nevertheless turn prayer into a negotiation for reassurance. Kavanah allows that fear to be recognised and offered while we remain Godward. We do not have to conquer uncertainty before turning. The uncertainty itself can accompany the offering. There is humility in this. An experience does not become divine merely because we struggle to describe it. A powerful feeling does not interpret itself. Our certainty about God remains something occurring within us, and therefore something we can offer rather than enthrone. This humility protects the practice from becoming a performance of mystery. There is no spiritual achievement in being difficult to understand. An explanation of Catch and Offer should make the practice clearer. A teacher who can explain an instruction has helped someone begin; the instruction simply cannot perform the turning on that person’s behalf. ## The ladder and these words Wittgenstein’s image of a ladder is useful here. His propositions serve a purpose that eventually requires moving beyond them. The ladder helps the ascent without becoming the destination.11 The Godward Way must accept this discipline for its own language. “Catch and Offer,” “Kavanah,” “the Big Eye,” and even “Godward” can become objects of loyalty around which attention settles. We should be willing to offer our attachment to those words as readily as anything else.That includes this article.
The wish to write it carries its own vulnerability: the fear that a living orientation might be forgotten unless it is preserved in sentences. Explanation can become a way of trying to secure what asks to be lived. These words acknowledge that fear. They, too, belong in the offering. They have served their purpose if they help someone recognise the difference between attending to an idea of God and directing intention toward the Creator. They need not remain in the foreground afterward. ## Living the turning You may sit in silence, speak a prayer, attend to your children, answer a difficult message, or face a decision you would rather postpone. Thoughts and emotions will continue to arise. Kavanah gives you a way to meet them without requiring any one of them to become the centre around which everything turns. Recognise what is here while offering it Godward. Let the image be offered with the feeling, the explanation with the doubt, the wish for certainty with the fear of losing it. You can explain the turning. You can teach the practice. The One toward whom you turn remains beyond the reach of everything you can hold. --- ## Sources 1. Augustine, *Sermon 117*, §5; numbered “Sermon 67 on the New Testament” in this edition. [Text](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160367.htm). 2. *Mishnah Berakhot* 5:1. [Text and translations](https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Berakhot.5.1). 3. Maimonides, *The Guide for the Perplexed*, I.58–59, translated by M. Friedländer. [Chapter 58](https://sacred-texts.com/jud/gfp/gfp068.htm); [chapter 59](https://sacred-texts.com/jud/gfp/gfp069.htm). 4. *Kena Upanishad*, I–II, translated by F. Max Müller. [First khanda](https://sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe01/sbe01176.htm); [second khanda](https://sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe01/sbe01177.htm). 5. *Dao De Jing*, chapter 1, translated by Bruce R. Linnell. [Text](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49965/49965-h/49965-h.htm). *Zhuangzi*, chapter 26, “External Things.” [Bilingual text](https://warringstates.day/library/zhuangzi/26-wai-wu). 6. Qur’an 42:11. [Parallel English translations](https://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=42&verse=11). 7. Al-Ghazali, *Deliverance from Error*, section on Sufism. [Text](https://www.ghazali.org/books/md/gz101.htm). 8. *Alagaddūpama Sutta*, MN 22, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. [Text](https://origin.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN22.html). 9. Pseudo-Dionysius, *The Mystical Theology*, especially chapter V, translated by C. E. Rolt. [Text](https://ccel.org/ccel/rolt/dionysius/dionysius.v.html). 10. *The Cloud of Unknowing*, chapter 6. [Text](https://ccel.org/ccel/anonymous2/cloud/cloud.xii.html). 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*, 6.54. [Text](https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)). ## Frequently asked questions ### What does “If you can explain it, it is not it” mean? An explanation can guide us toward God without delivering God. An account of water can be accurate and still leave a thirsty person thirsty. The mistake begins when we settle into the explanation as though we have arrived, and attention comes to rest on an idea of God instead of turning toward the Creator. ### What is Kavanah in the Godward Way? In Jewish prayer, kavanah is intention: the inward directedness of the heart toward God, as in Mishnah Berakhot 5:1. The Godward Way carries that directedness into the movement of consciousness itself. Godward names the orientation; Kavanah is its deliberate inward practice. ### How does Catch and Offer work with a difficult emotion? When anger or the demand to be understood arises, consciousness recognises it while intention remains Godward, and the feeling is offered in that same recognition. You may still answer clearly, correct an error, or set a boundary, but the other person’s reaction no longer becomes the centre around which your consciousness revolves. ### Which traditions warn against confusing words about God with God? Augustine (“if you comprehend, He is not God”), Maimonides (“Silence is praise to Thee”), the Kena Upanishad, Laozi and the Zhuangzi, the Qur’an 42:11, Al-Ghazali, the Buddhist parable of the raft, Pseudo-Dionysius, The Cloud of Unknowing, and Wittgenstein’s ladder. They give different accounts of ultimate reality but press on the same habit of mistaking a verbal form for what it points toward.