Kyrie

The story

Kyrie is the Greek word for "Lord" in the form used to address someone, and it gives its name to one of the important prayers of Christian liturgy, the Kyrie eleison, "Lord, have mercy". The prayer comes from the Bible. A plea for mercy addressed to the Lord appears often in the Psalms (6:2, 9:13, 31:9, 86:3 and 123:3), and the Greek words are those of the Septuagint. In the Gospel of Matthew the same plea is made to Jesus three times: by a Canaanite woman, by a father for his son and by two blind men. In Luke's parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, the despised tax collector who asks for mercy is set against the Pharisee who believes he needs no forgiveness. In the Bible the plea always names who is to receive mercy; in the liturgy it becomes a more general expression of confidence in God's love.

In Eastern Christianity it is one of the most often repeated phrases of worship, in Greek or in other languages, in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian and Eastern Catholic Churches. The Coptic liturgy of Egypt, which uses both Coptic and Greek, sings it in Greek. In the litanies of the Eastern Orthodox rites it is the people's answer to each petition, once or three times, and some petitions are answered with twelve or even forty repetitions. The phrase is also the origin of the Jesus Prayer, a foundation of personal prayer among Eastern Christians.

In Rome the liturgy was first celebrated in Greek. Josef Jungmann suggested that the Kyrie in the Roman Mass is best seen as the remnant of an opening litany like those of some Eastern churches, kept even after Latin became the normal language of worship; so a Greek prayer stands in the Latin Mass. As early as the 6th century Pope Gregory the Great noted that East and West sang it differently: in the Eastern churches everyone present sang it together, while in the West the clergy sang and the people responded, and the West sang "Christe eleison" ("Christ, have mercy") as many times as "Kyrie eleison". In the Tridentine Mass it is sung or said three times, followed by three "Christe eleison" and three more "Kyrie eleison"; the nine invocations are said to unite the petitions of the faithful with those of the nine choirs of angels. It also opens the litanies of the Roman Rite, such as the Litany of the Saints and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Churches outside Rome kept it too. Since 1549 Anglicans have normally sung or said it in English; the Book of Common Prayer of 1552 set it into a recitation of the Ten Commandments, and modern revisions have restored the choice of saying it without them. The Lutheran Mass places it after the Prayer of Thanksgiving, and other denominations, Methodism among them, use it as well.

As the first sung prayer of the Mass ordinary, the Kyrie is part of almost every musical setting of the Mass; the early English school was an exception, since its liturgy used a troped Kyrie, with added words, proper to the day. Kyrie movements often take a three-part form (ABA) that mirrors the symmetry of the text, and polyphonic settings in five (or four) sections were meant to alternate with Gregorian chant or with organ verses. After the Second Vatican Council, theologians such as Mark R. Francis argued that its emphasis falls not on human sinfulness but on God's mercy and saving action in Christ, so that it could as well be rendered as a cry of praise leading into the Gloria.

What it says

A plea for mercy, addressed first to the Lord, then to Christ, then to the Lord again. Repeated by priest and people in turn, it is both a petition and, as theologians have read it, an acknowledgement of what God has done. The mood is humble and steady.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.