Litany

Orthodox worship rarely prays in a single voice. Its characteristic form is dialogue: the deacon (or the priest, where there is no deacon) stands before the people and bids prayer — "let us pray to the Lord" — naming one intention at a time, and the people answer each bidding with a short cry, usually "Lord, have mercy" (its own entry). The English word litany comes from the Greek litaneia, supplication; Orthodox usage also inherits the Greek-Slavonic term ektenia, from a word meaning "stretched out, fervent" — prayer extended link by link.

The form does several things at once. It keeps common prayer genuinely common — no petition belongs to the clergy alone, since every one is completed by the people's response. It keeps prayer concrete: real intentions, one at a time, rather than a general religious haze. And it is a school: pray the litanies for a few years and you have memorized, without trying, what the Church thinks is worth asking of God.

The Great Litany — "In peace let us pray to the Lord" — is the longest and most complete, opening the Divine Liturgy, Vespers, and Matins; it has its own entry. The Little Litany is its abbreviation: "Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord," followed directly by "Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God, by Thy grace" and the commemoration of the Theotokos — a recollecting breath between antiphons at the Liturgy or between kathismata of the Psalter.

The Litany of Fervent Supplication (the ektene proper, "the fervent") intensifies: from its petition "Have mercy on us, O God, according to Thy great goodness, we pray Thee, hearken and have mercy," each response becomes a threefold "Lord, have mercy," and its petitions name the Church's people in detail — clergy, civil authorities, the departed founders, those who bring offerings, those who sing. The Litany of Supplication changes the response: to biddings beginning "Let us complete our prayer unto the Lord," the people answer "Grant it, O Lord," asking for a day "perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless," for "an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies," and for "a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless and peaceful; and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ." It appears twice in the Liturgy, before the Anaphora and before the Lord's Prayer.

Two more complete the family. The Litany of the Catechumens prays for those preparing for baptism, a living fossil of the ancient catechumenate which ends the first half of the Liturgy. And the litany for the departed — familiar from the Panikhida — asks rest for the dead "where the just repose." The wording quoted here follows the service books of the Orthodox Church in America; other jurisdictions' translations differ slightly, and parish practice varies in how many litanies are taken in full — in many Greek parishes, for instance, the catechumen litany and some repetitions are quietly abbreviated or omitted.

Because litanies recur, they invite two opposite mistakes: tuning them out as filler, or treating them as the choir's business. The remedy for both is the same — remember that the response is the prayer. The deacon only proposes; the person in the pew disposes, and "Lord, have mercy" said with attention is the whole Christian petition in three words: the publican's prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13), widened to take in the Church, the sick, the travelers, the crops, and the world. St. Paul asked that "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men" (1 Timothy 2:1); the litany is the Church's standing machinery for obeying him.