Kyrie Eleison Invocation

About this poem

Domine, miserere. Lord, have mercy. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him, the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6, NIV). The biblical acclamation, invocation, or petition, “Kyrie Eleison,” which is employed liturgically at the beginning of the Eucharist or as a response to a litany in Christian worship of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Anglican Faith, is of pre-New Testament origin and can be traced to the wisdom literature text of Psalm 123 (See particularly verses 3-4 that focus on mankind’s scorn and contempt of God with a petition for God’s mercy), where the psalm is entered in the psalmody of the 1599 Geneva Bible (GNV) as “A prayer of the faithful, which were afflicted either in Babylon or under Antiochus, by the wicked worldlings and contemners of God. ” In Biblical Hebrew, the text of Psalm 123:3 (Hebrew Bible) reads pleadingly as follows: חננו יהוה חננו כי רב שבענו בוז Expressed in Hebrew transliteration the poem reads: “chan-ne-nu Yahweh [adonai] chan-ne-nu; ki rab sa-ba’-nu buz.” And in Modern English the text reads: “Have mercy on us LORD, have mercy on us for exceedingly we are filled with contempt.” A more concrete version of the text in the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) reads as follows: “Show us favor, Lord, show us favor, for we’ve had more than enough contempt [for you].” The Kyrie Eleison’s first appearance in the Mass was as the response of a litany in Antioch-Jerusalem liturgy which occurred after the middle of the fourth century Anno Domini. This five-stanza extended tanka poem is written as a confessional invocation, a plea for mercy, and a petition for humanity of the twenty first century, now delving into the advanced technological field of algorithmic Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), to abide by the appealing conditional biblical statement of 2 Chronicles 7: 14 (King James Version), which reads as follows: “If my people who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” This tanka poem closes the way it began, written in the form of a literary Inclusio to echo the resounding plea of 2 Chronicles 7: 14. Lord, hear our prayer! Christ, have mercy! more »