Lord, Have Mercy

Kyrie eleison, Lord, have mercy, is one of the oldest and most widespread of Christian liturgical responses, a Greek petition that remained in Greek even in the Latin Mass long after the rest had been translated. It is the people's repeated answer in the litany, the form of prayer in which a leader names a series of intentions and the congregation responds to each, and in the Eastern liturgies it may be sung dozens or even hundreds of times. It also stands near the beginning of the Roman Mass, traditionally in a threefold or ninefold pattern addressed to Christ.

Brief and endlessly repeatable, the cry for mercy became the basis of a whole tradition of repetitive prayer, most notably the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Christianity, which weaves the plea for mercy into a formula repeated with the breath. Its persistence, in the original Greek, across churches that otherwise worship in many languages, marks it as one of the common inheritances of Christian prayer.