A THEOLOGICAL MEDITATION · WEDNESDAYS, FRIDAYS & ROGATIONTIDE
The Great Litany
The First English Liturgical Text · 1544 · The Church’s Cry from the Depths
Litany — LIT-ah-nee · deprecations — dep-reh-KAY-shunz · obsecrations — ob-sek-RAY-shunz · Kyrie — KEER-ee-ay · Rogationtide — roh-GAY-shun-tyd · Cranmer — KRAN-mer
O God the Father of heaven: have mercy upon us miserable sinners. O God the Son, Redeemer of the world: have mercy upon us miserable sinners. O God the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son: have mercy upon us miserable sinners.
The Great Litany of 1544 is the oldest surviving piece of Anglican liturgy — older than the Prayer Book itself by five years, the first vernacular liturgical text that Cranmer (KRAN-mer) produced, and the most comprehensive act of corporate intercession in the English tradition. It was written at Henry VIII’s command, during the French war, and was intended to be sung in procession through the churches of England as a national act of prayer. Its structure follows the ancient litany tradition of the Western Church — the Kyrie (KEER-ee-ay), the invocations of the Trinity, the deprecations (dep-reh-KAY-shunz), the obsecrations (ob-sek-RAY-shunz), the intercessions for the Church and the world, and the Agnus Dei — and Cranmer translated and adapted them into English prose of extraordinary rhythmic beauty. It was the form in which England first heard the Gospel and the prayer of the Church in its own language, and it has never been improved upon.
The deprecations are the theological heart of the Litany and among the most honest prayers in the BCP tradition: From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord, deliver us. From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us. The Litany does not ask for prosperity or comfort or the removal of difficulty; it asks for deliverance from sin — which is the condition from which every other deliverance flows. The obsecrations are equally precise: the Church asks God to deliver it by each specific act of the Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection, invoking the concrete events of salvation history as the grounds of its prayer. By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation; by thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord, deliver us.
The Litany is appointed to be said or sung on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, and in Rogationtide (roh-GAY-shun-tyd) — the three days before the Ascension, when the Church processes the parish boundaries and prays for the blessing of the crops and the community. The combination of penitential prayer and territorial blessing in the Rogation procession is one of the oldest and most distinctively English liturgical practices: the Church walking its ground, claiming it for God, asking his mercy on the people who live on it. The Litany leads the procession because it is the prayer that acknowledges what the community is before God — miserable sinners in need of deliverance — and asks for the mercy that alone makes the blessing possible. It is the prayer of humility that precedes and enables the prayer of petition.
The archive has meditated on the BCP as the living voice of the tradition, and on Cranmer as its primary author. The Litany is Cranmer’s first gift to the Church of England, earlier than the BCP, more raw and more urgent than the polished collect form, closer to the crying of the Psalms in its sustained petition and its frank acknowledgment of human need. From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us — this is the prayer of a Church that knows itself, that does not dress its petition in the elevated language of the collects but speaks plainly from the condition of its need. It is the prayer that belongs before the Order for Holy Communion, the cry from the depths that must be heard before the comfortable words can be received. The Litany is where the archive’s great confession begins every Wednesday and Friday: not with the beauty of holiness but with the truth of wretchedness, and the mercy that receives it.
O God, who by the mouth of thy servant Thomas Cranmer didst give the Church of England the first prayer it ever prayed in its own tongue; Grant that we may pray the Litany as it was prayed in the processions of 1544, with the full urgency of a people that knows what it is asking and why it needs to ask it; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.