The Litany of Supplication and the Kiss of Peace

What you'll notice

The gifts are on the altar, the doors are shut, and the deacon is back out front for another round of petitions. But listen to the choir. All morning they've been answering "Lord, have mercy." Now, partway through, the answer changes to "Grant it, O Lord," over and over, and the petitions have changed too: they're about how you'll live today and how you'll die.

Then the priest turns and says, "Let us love one another, that with one accord we may confess," and the choir finishes the sentence: "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and undivided."¹ Behind the screen the clergy kiss each other on the shoulders, saying quietly a line from Psalm 18:1 (17:2 in the Septuagint), "I will love thee, O Lord my strength,"² and then "Christ is in the midst of us." In some parishes the people turn and greet their neighbors too, "Christ is in our midst," "He is and ever shall be"; that's a practice some parishes have taken up, not a rubric, since the service books give the greeting to the clergy. In most Greek parishes nobody moves; today the kiss is usually the clergy's alone.³ Then the deacon shouts, "The Doors! The Doors! Wisdom! Let us attend," and the Creed begins.

What it's called

The Litany of Supplication, also the Completed Litany or, in Greek, the Plerotika (Πληρωτικά), because it "fills out" the prayers; Slavonic prositel'naya ekteniya. The Kiss of Peace is the aspasmos (the greeting). Under the litany, quietly, the priest says the Prayer of Offering, asking God to "accept also the prayer of us sinners, and bear it to thy holy Altar."⁴

What's actually happening

The Church is asking for a good day and a good death, in that order.

The petitions run: for "a day all-perfect, holy, peaceful and sinless"; an angel of peace to guard us; forgiveness; "all things which are profitable to our souls and bodies, and peace to the world"; the rest of our life "in peace and penitence"; and "a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, peaceful; and a good defence before the dread Judgment Seat of Christ."⁵ Time, peace, repentance. The Wisdom of Solomon says God teaches His people that He gives repentance for sins, and that is the whole shape of the litany (Wisdom 12:19).

That last petition is the one people remember. We're praying to die the way the patriarchs did, peacefully and surrounded by our own, and not the way Judas did. It's the one request in the Liturgy that everyone eventually gets an answer to.

The kiss is what has to happen before the Creed can. You confess a shared faith only after you've made peace with the people you're confessing it with.

Why it matters

The Church is a society of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. That isn't a slogan; it's a precondition. Christ said to leave your gift at the altar and go be reconciled first (Matthew 5:23–24), and the Didache, the oldest church manual we have, says no one at odds with his neighbor should join the assembly until they've made up.⁶ Saint Cyril of Jerusalem calls this kiss a reconciliation, a sign that souls have been joined and grudges let go.⁷ Saint Paul signs off four letters with "Greet one another with a holy kiss" (Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26), and Saint Peter calls it a kiss of love (1 Peter 5:14). This is where it lives now.

The Prayer of Offering under the litany keeps returning to the word sacrifice: God accepts "the sacrifice of praise," and we ask to offer "gifts and spiritual sacrifices" for our sins and the people's. Our bread, our wine, our morning. Then He takes it from there.

Where it came from

Saint Justin Martyr, writing around 150, describes the kiss right where it still is: after the prayers and before the bread and cup are brought up.⁸ For centuries the whole assembly exchanged it; the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions put it plainly, "let the men give the men, and the women give the women, the Lord's kiss,"⁹ and the Council of Laodicea (c. 363) assumes the laity do: "after the presbyters have given the [kiss of] peace to the Bishop, then the laity are to give it."¹⁰ Father Thomas Hopko says it "in times past was certainly exchanged among the faithful people as well."¹¹ When the people stopped, no one can say; by the time the medieval commentators describe it, it belongs to the clergy. What you see behind the screen on a Sunday is the remnant, not the rule; the clergy kept the custom when everyone else let it go, which is less a privilege than a reminder of what the rest of us are missing.¹² The American revival of a lay kiss of peace is recent and uneven.

The litany itself is a later addition to the rite.¹³

What you do

If you're Orthodox: answer "Grant it, O Lord" and mean the one about your death; it's good for you. At "Let us love one another," cross yourself. If your parish turns to greet neighbors, say "Christ is in our midst" and answer "He is and ever shall be," with a handshake or a kiss on the cheek depending on the family. If it doesn't, don't start a trend.

If you're visiting: if someone turns and says something to you, a smile and "He is" will get you through. If nobody turns, nothing is expected. When you hear "The doors, the doors," nobody is going to lock you in; that's the next stop.

Field Note: two answers. "Lord, have mercy" is what you say when you're asking for help. "Grant it, O Lord" is what you say when you're asking for a thing. The Church switches responses mid-litany, and once you hear it you can't unhear it.

Field Note: whether the priest is a good man. The Prayer of Offering is said by a man who, in the same breath, calls himself a sinner. The Church settled a long time ago that the sacrament doesn't depend on the priest's worthiness; it depends on God. That's a relief for the priest, and for you.

Go deeper

• Matthew 5:21–26; 1 Peter 5:12–14.
• Saint Justin Martyr, First Apology 65–67 (ANF 1).
• Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses 5 (NPNF2 7).
• Taft, The Great Entrance, ch. XI, pp. 374ff.

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