"Pray without ceasing", Session 2: Lord have mercy

Mother Anne Clarke, Abbess OSB, Malling Abbey

In my second talk I’d like to say more about how early Christians prayed and what it can teach us. As I was saying this morning people went out to the deserts of Egypt to live a simple life of prayer, seeking the purity of heart that would enable them to encounter God. The sayings that emerge from the desert reveal a form of prayer that integrated mind, body and spirit. Prayer was neither just a form of words nor an emotional experience but something much deeper, emerging from the heart of a person, that place beneath our everyday selves where we find an inner unity and a sense of God’s presence.

It was as much bodily as it was words and feelings. Prayer used gesture, posture and orientation in space to open the heart to God.

At Compline every night we recite Psalm 134:

Come, bless the LORD,
all you servants of the LORD,
who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
Lift up your hands to the holy place,
and bless the LORD.

Here the servants of the LORD stand to pray and they lift up their hands towards the holy place in temple. For the early Christians too, to pray was to stand with hands lifted up to the LORD. The posture and gesture were one with the words.

We find this in various sayings of the desert tradition, for example:

Abba Macarius was asked, "How should one pray?" The old man said, "There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, 'Lord, as you will, and as you know, have mercy.' And if the conflict grows fiercer, say, 'Lord, help!' He knows very well what we need, and he shows us his mercy."

Here we have an example of the simplicity of Christian prayer, expressed by a bodily gesture and just a few words. I am going to draw on this teaching of Abba Macarius for our prayer exercise this afternoon.

The prayer he uses, ‘Kyrie Eleison’, ‘Lord have Mercy’, is a very early Christian prayer and has been carried forward in the original Greek even when the rest of the liturgy has been translated into other languages.

At Malling Abbey we use the phrase ‘Lord Have Mercy’ frequently in our liturgy, both in English and in the original Greek, as you will have heard at our midday hour.

These days it is often seen as penitential and is used in many Eucharistic rites in place of a prayer of confession. I used to get hung up on a sense of grovelling before God and so felt uncomfortable using this phrase. But it’s central to Christian prayer and worth understanding more of its background so that it can take its rightful place in our prayer.

It is a plea for God’s help in all things, not specifically focussed on our sinfulness. We see this in its liturgical use, especially in the Eastern Churches, as a response in a litany of intercession. We do this in our own Eucharist at Malling Abbey, responding to each petition with ‘Lord have mercy’. The Kyrie Eleison without any petitions in our offices is the residue of what was once a longer litany of intercession.

Mark Francis, a Catholic writer, says:

‘Its emphasis is not on us (our sinfulness) but on God’s mercy and salvific action in Jesus Christ. It could just as accurately be translated "O Lord, you are merciful!"’

Mark R. Francis of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, quoted in Wikipedia article “Kyrie”

So he frames it as an act of praise rather than penitence.

The writer Helen Luke in her book ‘Old Age’ points out that the literal meaning of the word ‘mercy’ has to do with exchange. I’ll quote Cynthia Bourgeault who also picks up on this in her discussion of Abba Macarius’s prayer. She says:

‘At those innermost depths of our being, the human and the divine are always commingling in a dynamic and life-giving exchange.
And in fact, that's the literal meaning of the word "mercy." It comes from the Old Etruscan root merc – as in "commerce" or "mercantile" – meaning "exchange." Mercy has fundamentally nothing to do with "pity" or "clemency," with which it is often confused. It is rather the direct experience of the unity restored: my own aliveness and God's aliveness flowing as a single united will. And from this sacred commerce, renewed continuously at the center of our being, all else will flow.’

So she is finding in the word ‘mercy’ a sense of exchange, of flow between me & God is at the heart of prayer. God’s mercy is the expression of God’s longing for relationship with us.

We can sense ourselves immersed in God’s mercy, at one with it, whilst also knowing God’s otherness and the need for God’s mercy to reach across the gulf between us. It’s one of the paradoxes of prayer.

In our previous session we focussed on the sense of ‘I AM’, the ‘I AM’ of God at the core of our own ‘I am’. ‘All that I am I offer to you for it is yourself’. For me that resides at one end of a spectrum of awareness in prayer, a deeply inward end.

But God is also utterly transcendent and beyond this physical world. We can drop down inside to encounter God but we can also reach out, and for me praying ‘Lord Have Mercy’ is that reaching out. Sometimes one end is more in focus, sometimes the other, sometimes the whole becomes an integrated field of inner and outer.

Really it is always both / and even as our awareness shifts around. I find myself with the sense of a ray that extends from deep within me through to the heart of God way beyond all things, with my awareness moving along this ray.

In my own prayer I touch into ‘Lord have mercy’ in a physical way, as does Abba Macarius when he talks about stretching out one’s hands and saying ‘Lord have mercy’. In this session we will use this linked gesture and verbal prayer, praying together in the church.

© The Benedictine Community at Malling Abbey 2025