“We Beseech Thee to Hear Us, Good Lord”: Praying the Great Litany

Tomorrow, May 10, is the last Sunday of Easter, called Rogate. The bulletin has been uploaded to the “Boniface Group – Worship and Catechesis” shared Google Drive folder and to the Holy Trinity Gem County Telegram channel.

(If you missed the post that announced this project, you can catch up by reading it or listening to this podcast episode.)

“Rogate” means “pray.” More literally it means “ask,” which is even better, because this reminds us that the essence of prayer in the narrow sense is petition, that is asking.

The Small Catechism:

What is the Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer? Answer: Our Father who art in heaven.

What does this mean? Answer: God would by these words tenderly invite us to believe that He is our true Father, and that we are His true children, so that we may with all boldness and confidence ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.

The Gospel according to St. John:

Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. And in that day ye shall ask Me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. (16:22-24)

The Last Sunday of Easter

Just to get this out of the way: Rogate really is the last Sunday of Easter. The following Thursday (May 14 this year) is the Feast of the Ascension. Ascension, not Pentecost, marks the end of the season of Easter. Ascension has its own ten-day season leading up to Pentecost — or Whitsunday, as it is customarily known in some churches.

Easter is forty days long. It is not fifty days long. Every calendar-respecting Christian in the West knew this until the homosexual Jesuit higher critics that I mentioned in the last post decided to move Chesterton’s Gate. This means that the Sunday following Rogate, called Exaudi, is not a Sunday of Easter. That is OK. None of this is worth dickering about on the internet. But it is true, and if you want to know what Old Lutheran practice is . . . well, I’ve just told you.

Luther’s Catechism Hymns

Martin Luther wrote many wonderful hymns. The one that most everyone knows, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” is indeed excellent, but it is not his best hymn. It’s hard to say which is best, but it might be “O Lord, Look Down from Heav’n, Behold.” If you enjoy the Stone Choir podcast, or if you’ve ever hate-listened all the way to the end of an episode, you have heard an electronica version of this hymn’s melody as the outro.

Luther wrote hymns for each of the five chief parts of the Catechism. Here they are:

  1. The Ten Commandments: “That Man a Godly Life Might Live” (TLH 287)
  2. The Creed: “We All Believe in One True God” (TLH 251)
  3. The Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, Thou in Heav’n Above” (TLH 458)
  4. The Sacrament of Holy Baptism: “To Jordan Came Our Lord, the Christ” (ELHB 401)
  5. The Sacrament of the Altar: “O Lord, We Praise Thee” (TLH 313)

On Rogate, it is customary to sing the Lord’s Prayer hymn, “Our Father, Thou in Heav’n Above,” so you will see it appointed as the chief hymn in the bulletin. If you need help learning the melody, the Lutheran Kantor project is here to help:

Luther’s hymns inspired the great Evangelical-Lutheran composers and organ masters of the Renaissance and Baroque eras: Demantius, Praetorius, Schütz, Scheidt, Pachelbel, Böhm, Buxtehude, Crüger, Telemann and, of course, the greatest of them all, Bach.

Short motifs drawn from hymn tunes (some Luther composed, others he adapted) were developed, adorned, and embellished by these and other composers into longer works. Sometimes an entire line of melody would receive the same treatment. J. S. Bach would often use an entire chorale as the basis for a cantata.

The results of such wise master building have endured throughout the centuries as the most sublime music ever created: vessels of lament to chasten and soothe contrite hearts, offerings of praise and thanksgiving — all of them catechesis for Christian minds and hearts, words of faith and of good doctrine drawn from the Scriptures, able to make one wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

Take Georg Böhm’s Vater unser im Himmelreich, for example.1 This is the most beautiful thing you will ever hear played on a pipe organ — provided that it meets the standard set by the late great Wim van Beek.2

The Martinkerk’s west-gallery organ is one of the most famous church instruments in the world. The video below features some impressive visuals of it. But hang fire, anon — you’re going to want to save this for when have about five minutes of uninterrupted dead quiet. Make sure you have earbuds or headphones with good low end or an audio setup with a decent subwoofer.

There is a bit of fry in the video. But there is no fry in this Telegram playlist of the full album of van Beek’s recital, from whence the recording of Vater unser was taken.

Singing “Our Father, Thou in Heav’n Above” as the chief hymn is indeed a fixture of Rogate Sunday. But if you’re looking at the bulletin3, you will notice something else way before you get to the chief hymn. In fact it will be the first thing you notice, after the lovely cover art:

Singing the Litany

The opening hymn, Invocation, Introit, and Kyrie are gone, and in their place is this long thing, which you may or may not recognize. And since the only labels in our bulletin are placeholders, you might not know that this thing is called “The Litany,” sometimes called “The Great Litany.”

A lengthy digression on the history of the Litany at this juncture would be tedious, so I won’t make one. Check the footnote.4

For now:

  • The Litany is old.
  • The Litany is a long prayer. It is best sung. “He who sings prays twice,” St. Augustine says, and he’s right.
  • Over time the Litany was embellished with un-Christian things like invocations of the saints.
  • I am not going to debate you on invocation of the saints, and if you compose an essay about it in the comments, you will have wasted your time. Repent, or you are going to waste an eternity.
  • Martin Luther, the pious servant of God raised up by Him to reform His Church, purged the Litany of its un-Christian accretions. He published a German version and a Latin version.
  • The version in the bulletin is #661 in The Lutheran Hymnal. It is a translation of Luther’s Latin Litany. It is slightly more prolix than the German version.5
  • This version (below) is #368 in Walther’s Hymnal.6 It is a translation of Luther’s German Litany. The differences from the one in TLH are minor, e.g., it keeps “Kyrie Eleison” in Greek at the beginning and the end. I set it to the same melody, so it should still work as a guide. This was recorded in 2019 when I was headmaster of Trinity Lutheran School in Cheyenne. I’m a little surprised to see it up still.
  • You should buy Walther’s Hymnal, even though it is expensive ($43.99).7 New is the best price, unless you are one of the three people who will save $2.67 by buying one from Alibris.
  • It is customary to pray the Litany in church on St. Mark’s Day (April 25), on the three so-called “rogation days” in between Rogate Sunday and the Feast of the Ascension, during Lent, and at various other times.
  • It is customary for some children (for example, my children, and soon yours) to sing the Litany to themselves while they while away a half hour in the Fisher-Price swing on a breezy summer day.
  • The version of the Litany published in the Lutheran Service Book has been bowdlerized, like virtually everything else that appears between its covers.8

In future years at Holy Trinity, if the Lord tarries, we might mark the three rogation days with the corporate praying of the Litany at Matins or Vespers. For now, we are marking Rogate Sunday in this way. (We also pray it at Matins from time to time.) When the Litany is prayed at the beginning of the divine service, it takes the place of the entrance rite. Think of it as an extended Kyrie.

Here is what I want to leave you with:

The hymns and prayers of the Church belong to you. You can learn to sing the Litany. Like all Christian hymns, it is a thing to be prayed, sung, and in all ways taken to heart, not passively consumed as a product.

“Look at this video of this Russian monk singing the Litany, so based”

Do not do this.

Flee every form of spiritual voyeurism as if it were the devil himself. Exorcise the low-rent demons of para-spirituality through prayer and fasting. Sing and pray. Pray and work. Fill your mind and heart with the Word of God through songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. Paul and Silas were not watching videos of Russian monks in the Philippian jail: they were singing from what they had stored up in their hearts.

Taking the time to learn the Litany and singing it : catching a trout, cleaning it, panfrying it on the bank, and eating it9 :: watching videos of other people performatively praying : ingesting Swedish Fish Oreos through an abdominal feeding port.

Experiencing target confusion? Don’t know where to start?

Every week, there will be recordings of two or three great hymns in the Google Drive folder and the Telegram channel. Use those in conjunction with the weekly bulletins to learn the hymns. In time you will find that their words have become part of the furniture in the room of your heart.

Amen, that is, So shall it be.
Confirm our faith and hope in Thee
That we may doubt not, but believe
What here we ask we shall receive.
Thus in Thy name and at Thy Word
We say: Amen. Oh, hear us, Lord!

+SDG+

Thank you for reading. The Boniface Group is the mission society of Holy Trinity Ev.-Lutheran Church of Gem County. If you would like to support our work, you may do so here. (Crypto options coming soon.) To learn more, visit our homepage and start reading from the top. Thank you, and God bless you.

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Footnotes

  1. This particular composition is entirely instrumental, but it still serves the catechetical function described. How? Well, it’s based on a hymn which is based on the Lord’s Prayer, which is the prayer that Jesus taught us, His disciples, and commanded us to pray. It’s all woven together. ↩︎
  2. Some organists, while technically very talented, lack the spirit of the great Orgelmeistern and are thus unable to connect with the soul of the Baroque literature. Van Beek was not one of these moist robots. ↩︎
  3. If you want the Google Drive link to a pdf, here it is — I don’t think that will dox you, if that is a concern, but I don’t know for certain. Use a private tab or something. If you want a link to the file on Tele, here it is. Same caveat. If we purchase a higher-tier WordPress plan in the future, this won’t be necessary. ↩︎
  4. “The German and Latin Litanies became very popular and were seen by Luther, the Reformers, and their heirs as a core component of their life of worship and faith. All over Reformation and post-Reformation Germany, the Litany appears to have been sung once or twice weekly (Friday and in some places also Wednesday). It thus must have been extremely well known, probably well loved, and certainly well ingrained into the minds and hearts of all Lutherans. In his detailed study of early Lutheran worship practice, Joseph Herl notes that the German Litany was the fourth most popular “hymn” in the church orders that he investigated” (Benjamin Mayes, “Restoring the Great Litany in the Lutheran Church,” CTQ 81 [2017]: 321-330). Unfortunately pdf is the only available format for this one, so do what you must — take the Kindle Scribe pill, bros. It’s an enjoyable read. ↩︎
  5. The version in TLH does not include music for the minister or leader of the prayer. The urban legend reason for not printing these parts — here or anywhere else in TLH — is that it was a cost-saving measure during the war (TLH was published in 1941). Maybe this is part of the reason why the Litany was not much used in American Lutheranism. I don’t know. Whatever the case may be, the version in the bulletin is from The Music for the Liturgy, a small volume published in 1944. You can guess what’s in it. Anyway, it has the music for the minister’s part. You’re looking at what they call a “rare find.” ↩︎
  6. This is not a real hymnal name; it is just what CPH decided to title it instead of “Church Hymnbook for Evangelical-Lutheran Congregations of the unaltered Augsburg Confession,” which is what it’s called in German (but in German). Around here we just call it the KGB, short for Kirchengesangbuch. ↩︎
  7. I will talk more about this later, but frankly you can see for yourself when you open WH and compare it to modern Lutheran hymnals, especially to the Lutheran Service Book, published by CPH in 2006, q.v. footnote 6. WH slots into the “This Is What They Took From You (And They Are in the Process of Taking Even More, And, No, It Won’t Make a Difference Who Wins the Missouri Synod Presidency This Summer)” file with a resounding thud. ↩︎
  8. Published in 2006, LSB is the consensus hymnal. Which consensus? You pick. In the Litany, “to preserve all women in the perils of childbirth” has become “to grant all women with child, and all mothers with infant children, increasing happiness in their blessings” — not a bad sentiment, but why the replacement? “To set free all who are innocently imprisoned” has become “to free those in bondage” — a very bad sentiment, if you think about it. “To have mercy upon all men” has become “to have mercy on us all” — the classic feminist edit. Truth be told, the entire LSB suite of liturgy and hymnody is so inimical to true Lutheran piety that you would think it had been designed with the sole purpose of emasculating the churches of God. The purpose of a system is what it does, and this is what LSB has done and continues to do. ↩︎
  9. If you don’t like fish, substitute a tasty vertebrate of your choosing. ↩︎

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