“ . . . his father saw him . . . and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Lk 15:20 [EA])
“God’s ground and the soul’s ground is one ground” (Meister Eckhart [c.1260-1328]).
This blog, begun in 2013, consists of a series of posts which are an amalgam of prayers and ponderings about prayer. Over that decade embracing and honing this discipline became an essential component of the blogger’s spirituality. A recurring theme, informed by Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” and reflected in the domain name, is that of the divine ambush, the experience of being encountered by The One, whether mediated or unmediated. It is the experience of the blogger, the ambushee, that faith involves both the Lover’s engendering and recurring ambushes (receptive) and the beloved’s responsive agency (active).
The prequel of this blog, first an unfolding itinerárium of one spiritual journey and then vehicle for sharing that experience with others, is long, varied, and nonlinear. Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings (1965), described by him as “concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God,” was an early seed. Another precursor was Abraham Heschel’s aphorism: “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and [God] gave it to me.” Subsequent encounters with renaissance Christian mystics, first Juan de la Cruz and later the Beguines of the low countries and the Rhineland Dominicans, were and remain transformative. The “minority report” from the Christian tradition’s mystical edge was increasingly becoming core for the blogger.
Granted, there is an oxymoronic dimension to this endeavor. Why would one with both a thirst for the Ineffable and the experience of being drawn to the apophátic (beyond the reach of intellect, image, word, and linearity) generate hundreds of prayers made up, of all things, of words?! That conundrum remains paradoxically unresolved here except to note that Jesus defended the hosannas of his disciples thus: “if these remained silent, the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19:40). Both the longing to communicate of that beyond sense, mind, image and imagination, and Jesus’s pithy words, have remained near at hand amid the crafting of this decade of posts.
Several additional comments about the posts of this blog:
- Having been relentlessly tracked and repeatedly brought to ground, the blogger finds himself counter-intuitively addressing The Pursuer as “Lover.”
- The genre being prayer, the operative grammatical person, with a nod to Martin Buber’s Ich und Du, is the singular second (“You”).
- The apophátic notwithstanding, the blogger is committed throughout to finding fresh language and image for life lived vis-à-vis the Lover. Rather than for novelty’s sake, the goal is better to point toward how The One is actually being experienced. The blogger has found himself both burdened and blessed with an unremitting yearning to name The Unnameable.
- The blogger self-identifies as a Roman Catholic (albeit troubled) whose decisive image for Reality is the Incarnátio of the Christ intimating identification and solidarity, immanence and unítas. This concretion of the Lógos, Immanuel (“God with us”), this finite-friendliness, is a dominant and ever-expanding theme in much of the Christian tradition’s neglected “minority report.”
- This ambushee.net site constitutes a resumption of the blogger’s prayer posts during the years 2013-22 under the domain name ambushee.com.