Burial of Prayers from the Labyrinth Prayer Wall Sunday April 22, 2018 – Earth Day
We have collected prayers from the Labyrinth Prayer Wall for twenty years now and have an uncounted number that we have pledged not to destroy. The following information about the burial of prayers from the prayer wall (wailing wall) in Jerusalem has given us a way to honor that pledge. We see Earth Day as an appropriate time to return these notes to the earth.
The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz and a dozen others carefully remove the notes upon which people from around the world place their prayers. They never read them and have never counted the number of scripted prayers, but in each collection, there are enough to fill about 100 shopping bags, each with thousands of notes.
Twice a year this team collects hundreds of thousands of notes and buries them on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to destroy holy texts. Instead, prayer books and scriptures are often buried in Jewish cemeteries.
We, like our Jewish fellow prayers, will not destroy the collected prayers from our prayer wall but, as they have done, bury them in the church grounds here at St Paul’s. You may also visit the Labyrinth to see the plants that will be placed in the garden the same day as well.
Weather permitting, the burial of the collected prayers will follow the 11:00 am service and the Labyrinth Walk on Sunday April 22nd at approximately 12:30 in the church’s front garden. You are invited to attend as you wish.