Lord, Have Mercy

I would imagine (and hope) that those who have been liturgical Christians since childhood have gone through a significant journey of maturation in how the liturgical responses resonate inside them. I’m going to take the Kyrie, or Lord have mercy as a case in point. 

I grew up in the Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church, where we sang the Lord have mercy in every service. When I look back now at the actual words we prayed, I see they are very similar to traditional Catholic prayers. But interiorly, I took these words as a plea I had to renew every Sunday. I had to state that I was a “poor, miserable sinner” and that this was forever to be my lot, and so I constantly had to beg God anew to have mercy on me. I knew I was not, in myself, pleasing to Him. But for whatever reason, our worship started with us acknowledging this and begging again for mercy. It was just what you had to do to.

As a young adult, I came to know Jesus in a different way, and started worshiping in a non-liturgical church. I came to know the mercy of God as an event that freed me, one I could put a date on, one that changed me. At that point, I felt sorry for the poor schmucks who went to church and groveled before God, begging for mercy. Apparently they didn’t actually believe that God had had mercy on them. If they did believe it, they wouldn’t have to keep asking, apparently without ever receiving. I imagined their cries for mercy were like a shield they thought they needed to protect them from God’s wrath.

Then there was an event that changed my life. I went to a Christmas Eve midnight Mass, the first Catholic worship experience I attended with an open (but scared) heart. I had been studying Catholic doctrine after friends of mine had entered the Church and left my head spinning. I was shocked that it was actually Biblical, and it made sense. The theology was coherent, unlike the tortured logic and contradictions of much Protestant theology I’d learned. 

That night I was brought to my knees (interiorly!) by the penitential rite. The words were familiar, but the heart of it… that was totally different. What I heard was the priest talking to his people, the Catholics, telling them they, and he, needed to repent of their sins. This wasn’t to be a ritual of self-shaming. It was to be a bringing of their hearts before the Lord to ask for concrete forgiveness. 

I was floored. 

For years, I had ridiculed Catholics, insulted them, thought of them as either stupid fools or evil demon worshippers. In my shock I told the Lord, “They aren’t the ones who need to repent. I’m the one who needs to repent!” I was so moved by their act of humility of asking for mercy.

After I became a Catholic, I became aware that when we pray for mercy, we ask not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. As the Letter to Diognetus says, “The Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body.” We will constantly ask for mercy as a Church until there is no longer anyone in need of God’s mercy and tender compassion.

Today as I prayed this at Mass, I was very much aware that yes, I am a sinner. This is really such a terrifying reality, because sin separates us from God and casts us into a life and eternity of misery, and only God’s mercy can raise us up again. But I delighted in breaking right into the Gloria. The liturgy can go through this so quickly that we can miss it, but we are touching on things that are being engraved into our hearts through experience. We acknowledge our great misery, we recall how God has met us, forgiven us, redeemed us, how He walks with us through our ordeals of brokenness, and how he brings us through pain to glory. We are declaring, “Sin isn’t just terrifying anymore! Christus Victor! Christ is Victorious!”