We’ll mark the beginning of the season of Lent this Sunday’s by beginning our service with what’s known as ‘The Great Litany,’ a long series of prayers and petitions with sung responses. While it was originally intended for use every Sunday morning (and on Wednesdays and Fridays!) in more recent times it’s mostly been used as a Lenten tradition, either on the Sundays in Lent, or on the first Sunday in Lent, or simply not at all! Douglas tells me it hasn’t been sung at St. John’s since time immemorial, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a few words about the Litany today.
A ”litany” is simply a kind of prayer in which a leader reads (or a cantor sings) a number of petitions, to which the people give a repeating response. If you’re not familiar with the Great Litany, you’ll probably recognize litanies in general as one of the fairly common forms for the Prayers of the People, for example Form I:
With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying “Lord, have mercy.”
For the peace of the world, for the welfare of the Holy Church of God, and for the unity of all peoples, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.For our Bishop, and for all the clergy and people, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.
“The Litany” with a capital “L” was among the very first services used in English, rather than in Latin, during the earliest days of the reformation of the Church of England (first published in 1544, it predates even the first Book of Common Prayer!), and it became a cornerstone of Anglican liturgy. A typical Sunday’s services would consist of Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Liturgy of the Word from the service of Holy Communion (although usually not actually communion, for reasons I may write about another time!), followed by a break for lunch, followed by catechesis for the children and a service of Evening Prayer in the late afternoon. As the patience of both clergy and parishioners wore thin over the years, the service was typically streamlined—especially in the wild world of the Americas!—such that a typical Sunday morning became merely Morning Prayer, or later simply the Eucharist, and the Litany dropped out of regular use.
The Litany, you may noticed on Sunday, is something of an odd duck. Its theology is not always entirely in line with the rest of our liturgies, or indeed with some of our own personal beliefs! You may notice an emphasis on wickedness and punishment that seems downright medieval, and indeed it is, reflecting as it does a particular moment in the transition between medieval, reformed, and modern theology. It only takes one hearing of some of the petitions to understand why it’s often relegated to Lent, and to one Sunday at that (e.g., “From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation, / Good Lord, deliver us”; “From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and commandment, / Good Lord, deliver us,” et al).
But there’s a power in the Litany, at least for me, at least this year. While its structure and verbiage have been tweaked somewhat over the generations, it still fundamentally captures the concerns of people praying five hundred years ago. And while their theology or worldview may be somewhat different from yours, their fears and anxieties are not.
We live in a time of climate change and global pandemic, and we pray with our siblings in Christ across five centuries: “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, / Good Lord, deliver us.”
We watch in horror as Putin’s Russia reenacts the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany, wreaking havoc on dense urban areas with missiles and rocket artillery, and we pray with ancestors long gone who lived through the Blitz: “From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, / Good Lord, deliver us.”
We pray for faithful church leaders, and just politicians; for the homeless and the hungry, for women in childbirth and for children; for the lonely, and the suffering, and the departed, and for all the world.
And as strive to keep our balance amidst the storms of this world, we cry out to God, “That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; to comfort and help the weak-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet, / We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.”
(Whatever you think of Satan, that’s undoubtedly one of the baddest lines in the history of prayer.)
If the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 have taught me anything, it’s that the distance between our lives and those of the past is fairly small. Medicine and technology and the United Nations have made incredible strides in improving the wellbeing of human beings as a whole; yet we live, as we have always lived, in a world that is full of suffering, disaster, war, and pain. Which is, of course, the same world in which we have always lived, a world that is full of love, compassion, and courage; a world that is full of the presence of God.