Prayer is a language unto itself, but it also uses language, and not unlike the emails and Facebook status you may have checked before reading this, it is language which, while it can be visibly seen, usually isn’t.
The reason is that most of our prayers are spoken, or perhaps cried out, or even breathed.
Still, some of you keep a journal where your prayers are written out. Seeing them often makes what is an invisible practice more tangible.
Others of you perhaps have been in a service where you wrote an immediate need or a long-term longing of your heart on a sticky note which you brought forward and placed on something at the front of a church sanctuary or perhaps on a piece of colored paper which you pinned to a wooden cross.
Seeing the above scene in Europe* reminded me of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Wikipedia reminds us that,
Today, more than a million prayer notes or wishes are placed in the Western Wall each year. Notes that are placed in the Wall are written in just about any language and format. Their lengths vary from a few words to very long requests. They include poems and Biblical verses. They are written on a wide variety of papers, including colored paper, notebook paper and even bubblegum wrappers, using a variety of inks.
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, Rabbi of the Western Wall, receives hundreds of letters yearly addressed to “God, Jerusalem“; he folds these letters and places them, too, in the Wall.
Online services offer petitioners the opportunity to send their notes to the Western Wall via e-mail, fax, text messaging and Internet; the note is then printed out and inserted in the Wall. The Israeli Telephone Company has established such a fax service, as have a number of charitable websites.
But the above replica (if that’s what was intended) is made of plaster covered over with chicken wire, in a place available to all people all the time.
It’s a more tangible expression of what we might normally just say, and then the element of walking away, and leaving our request with God is also significant.
Some churches have a prayer request book in the lobby. Others have an email to which you can send requests. Still others will share requests in the main weekend service, although that practice is widely disappearing.
Does your congregation have a vehicle whereby you put either a physical or a community presence to your petitions to God?
*Picture above, taken by Ruth, is of the Heiliggeistkirche Lutheran Church in Heidelberg, Germany
Matt Keller — The Key to Everything: Unlocking the Life You Dream of Living (Thomas Nelson, September 2015)
Nadia Bolz-Weber — Accidental Saints: Finding God in All The Wrong People (Convergence, September, 2015)
Thinking Out Loud 