However, the actions of many modern Christian leaders, including Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the Wall and actually left prayer messages in its crevices, has symbolized for many Christians a restoration of respect and even veneration for this ancient religious site.
Even as I read the thousands of hopeful prayers, messages and scarce updates on her condition, in my heart I knew the Joan Rivers who reverberated so presently in the very depth of my soul was lost to us forever.
Fellow Londoner, Laolu Opebiyi, a Nigerian-born Christian, was asked to leave a plane after another passenger saw a prayer group message on his phone, labelled "Isi" (an acronym for "iron sharpens iron", a Biblical quotation).
"Tonight, a Sunday that started with prayer and messages of unity, peace and justice, took a very different turn after dark," Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri highway patrol, which controls the policing of the protests, said at a 1am press conference on Monday.
As the temples were being built, people left photographs and keepsakes, or wrote prayers and messages on the wood to loved ones who had died.
We were never alone; the feelings, the prayers, the messages that came pouring into Egypt from every place on earth during those 18 days of Tahrir lodged in our minds and in our hearts, and affirmed every minute what we knew already: that the freedom we sought was the freedom the people of the world wanted, for us and for themselves.
Other statues served as gifts to the temple god, and inscribed stelae conveyed to the resident deity the donors' prayers and messages of thanks.
The Bunun people would often take prisoners and inscribe prayers or messages to their dead on arrows, then shoot their prisoner with the hope their prayers would be carried to the dead.
World leaders, including British Prime Minister Theresa May and Swedish PM Stefan Löfven, have joined artists who were performing at the Route 91 festival in tweeting prayers and messages of condolence.
