Christmas Mass Year A
December 2007
A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau takes an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. Every day when she looks out, she sees an old Jewish man praying vigorously. So the journalist, being curious, goes down and introduces herself to the old man.
She asks. “You come every day to the wall. How long have you done that, and what are you praying for?” The old man replies, “I have come here to pray every day for twenty five years. In the morning I pray for world peace and then for the brotherhood of man. I go home, have a cup of tea, and come back and pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth.”
The journalist is amazed. “How does it make you feel to come here every day for twenty five years and pray for these things?” she asks. The old man looks at her sadly and replies, “like praying to a wall.”
You have probably heard about the letters written over the years by Mother Theresa to her spiritual director. They reveal how, for the last fifty years of her life, she too felt that she was ‘praying to a wall.’
St. John of the Cross and St Theresa of Avila, two of the greatest mystics and contemplatives in the history of the Church, state that in their experience also, their prayer is often like ’praying to a wall.’
The world’s great religions, someone has said, are all about the same thing: our search for God. On the contrary the Bible, that is Judaism and Christianity, are concerned not with our search for God, but with God’s search for us.
The message of Christmas is ‘Immanuel’ - God with us.
At times I can ‘feel’ close to God. This is an occasional and passing thing and not of importance. True faith is a hard nosed belief in ‘Immanuel.’ A committed belief in the presence of God and total trust in the Goodness and Love of God, no matter what may happen. This is why we keep ‘praying to a wall.’ &, incidentally, God will not tell you when He has found you!