Early in 2018, I decided to travel to the Holy Land — Israel and Palestine. Like many travellers who are also writers, I had high hopes of what I would be able to capture of my impressions and thoughts on this first visit. I’m a Christian (specifically, an Anglican) lay reader with some Jewish ancestry. So I knew I had a lot of baggage. I hoped to set aside my expectations and so be open to what I would be experiencing. Not easy. Stepping into pilgrimage mode is already to be immersed in a vast tradition of expectations. Travelling with a cloud of witnesses whose sight has been heavily influenced by their previous experience and by their personal and collective hopes and dreams and fears and tentative or bold longings. It would be impossible not to have expectations, even if those stand squarely in the way of genuine experience.
Yet only when we lay down our expectations can we be open to what’s really happening. Near the eve of my departure, my Jewish friend W told me she found herself in tears at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I think this was in part because she didn’t have expectations of what she would find there.
And I was unprepared, despite my expectations, for the Western Wall.
I’d known I would visit it. I’d been reading two different books on the history of Jerusalem. I knew the Wall was the traditional focus for devout Jews, both pilgrims and local people, and I knew I wanted to come and pray there, too, in a more or less traditional way. I knew enough to bring prayers with me written on tiny slips of paper, I brought them for friends and I brought my own. When our leader invited us for an “evening walk,” he didn’t say we would go there, but I brought the written prayers. I carried them forward among the women who were praying, I moved somewhat tentatively and with reverence and determination, finding places to put them among the bits of paper crammed into the chinks between the ancient stones. I’m tall and so I reached up and found room for those prayers. Then I backed away carefully, among the other women who had come, not turning my back on this holy site.
Two days later, early in the morning, our local guide brought the whole group again to the Wall. She told us that some Jews believe that all prayers come here before ascending to God.
This conflation of geography and devotion seems to open a line of thought in itself, doesn’t it? We Christians pray in churches where the altar is said to be at the East end no matter what the actual position of the church, so there is some deep shared tradition here. Yet the trajectory of prayer–or the other idea that when the little papers are taken out of the chinks in the wall, they are buried on the Mount of Olives where they will continue being prayed in eternity–these notions seem to obscure as much of the truth as they reveal. So I took her words in, and also set them somewhat to the side. Marked for further notice.
I went to the Wall again, and then came back to the place from which I took this photo. I had ten minutes to spare. I found a little group of those ubiquitous white plastic stacking armchairs that seem to populate the whole world, and sat down in one of them. I didn’t need to do anything at all.
Sitting there, in the silence of the beautiful morning, watching people move deliberately towards and away from that so-revered wall of gigantic stones, aware that my fellow pilgrims were together in the distance, chatting, I was content to inhabit the moment. I took up very delicately the notion that prayers from all over the world were flooding forward and rising into the heavens. Like a vast river of love and desire, a river of connection and conviction and hope and need. I was empty of the need to “pray” any particular intercessions. In fact, I found the notion of prayer as “something to do,”–and I am a person who relishes lists of things to do, and for years have kept a running list of prayer requests and people to pray for in the back of my journal–remarkably meaningless. In its place was a delicious freedom from any obligation besides being present. In the context of the river of prayer, not “items” but connection between us and God, individual cares and concerns are truly insignificant. It is not that they are not worth our attention–my attention. I have given and will again in the future give loving attention to them, that did not change. What changed was the feeling that it was in any way a task, or a job, or a kind of work or obligation.
I tried to describe this to a secular friend, and I found myself saying: “Well we know that light is both a wave and a particle, yes? It seemed to me that prayer is also both a wave and a particle. The individual names, or things we pray about, are like particles, but if we only see them that way–names on a list, pieces of paper–we lose sight of the wave. We separate them from what they really are.”
For that moment I feel the lightness of being without obligation in regard to prayer. Knowing it only as participation. I wanted to remember this forever. I took this photo, in the hope that I would remember being not simply in this place but in this state of mind.
New Life Supermarket 