Lord, Have Mercy (Kyrie Eleison)

Orthodox common prayer is a dialogue, and this is the people's side of it. The deacon bids prayer intention by intention — for peace, for the sick, for travelers, for the harvest — and to nearly every bidding of every litany the people answer the same three words. Stand through one Divine Liturgy and you will say or sing "Lord, have mercy" dozens of times; at some services it is appointed twelve times in a row, and at the old daily Hours forty. Slavic churches sing it as Gospodi, pomilui; every Orthodox people has it as one of the first phrases of faith a child learns.

The cry is older than any of its translations. Its bones are in the Psalms — "Have mercy upon me, O God" (Psalm 51:1) — and on the lips of nearly everyone who approaches Jesus in the Gospels: the two blind men at Jericho crying "Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David" (Matthew 20:30-31), the Canaanite mother, the ten lepers calling from a distance, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us" (Luke 17:13). Even the Latin West, when its worship became Latin, kept this one response in its original Greek: the Kyrie eleison of the Roman Mass. The Church, East and West, has treated these words as too primal to lose.

"Have mercy" can sound like a prisoner begging the judge to soften — as if God's default were wrath and prayer existed to talk Him out of it. That is not what the Church means by the word. Behind the Greek eleos stands the Hebrew Scriptures' word for God's covenant love, His steadfast, spousal faithfulness; and in the Gospels the people who cry "have mercy" are not asking to be let off — they are asking to be healed. Mercy is what the blind receive when they see. Asking God for mercy is the sick calling for the physician, not the guilty flattering the executioner.

Greek preachers have long delighted in the near-identical sound of eleos, mercy, and elaion, olive oil — the oil the Samaritan poured into the wounds of the man left for dead. The two words are probably not related, but the image is exactly right: to pray "Lord, have mercy" is to ask to be found, bound up, and carried to the inn. That is why the response never grows stale with repetition. It fits every petition the deacon can name, because everything the Church asks — peace, good harvests, a Christian ending to life — is one need wearing different clothes.

A response said this often invites the obvious danger: saying it without noticing. Christ warned against praying like the pagans, who expect to be heard for their many words (Matthew 6:7) — but the Church's repetitions run in exactly the opposite direction. The pagan multiplies words to change God; the Christian repeats three words until they change him. The model is the publican, who had one line — "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13) — and, Christ said, went home justified.

Two habits help. First, remember that in the litanies the response is intercession: when the deacon names the sick, the captives, and the travelers, your "Lord, have mercy" is your signature on the Church's prayer for them — it is the laity's priestly work, not filler between hymns. Second, notice that the Jesus Prayer — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" — is simply this response unfolded and made personal, carried out of the service into the rest of the week. The Church gives you the words ten thousand times in church precisely so that they will be there, worn smooth and ready, at three in the morning when no other prayer will come.