Around about the year 381, a nun called Egeria made the difficult journey from the Atlantic coast of Spain or France to the Middle East. She wrote of her pilgrimage in a vivid book of travels, describing how she was welcomed to the great Syrian Christian centre of Edessa by the bishop who marvelled how her faith had brought her “right from the other end of the earth”. The high point of her journey was the places made holy by the life of Christ, and particularly the holy places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. She carefully noted how Christians worshipped there and especially the pattern of services for Holy Week and Easter. From that ancient description is derived the pattern of the great traditional services of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter that are still at the centre of Christian celebration of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord.

Egeria was a keen observer, with an eye for detail, and she describes the litany, one of the most ancient patterns of prayer, where the deacon offers a petition to God, and a boys choir responds, Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy. The word litany simply means a supplication, and this pattern of prayer is woven into the Orthodox liturgy, where the deacon, holding his stole as a plenipotentiary would before the Byzantine emperor, gathers up and leads the prayers of the people. In the West litanies were often sung in procession, as at Rogationtide when the crops were blessed, or penitentially in Lent. The rhythm of the prayer and the simple responses in times when few could read, made a litany into a powerful congregational prayer. Because it was a long prayer the word litany survives in secular usage when we read or hear of a litany of complaints. In Catholic contexts the litany of the saints gathers the prayers of the whole company of heaven, for the living and the departed are one in the church, the body of Christ, and the saints whose lives are transfigured by the grace of Christ can only long for God's will to be done.

At the English Reformation the first service that Archbishop Cranmer provided in English was the Litany, which appeared in 1544. Incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer it became one of the basic patterns of prayer for English Christians not only on Sundays but also on Wednesdays and Fridays. It is a prayer that reminds us that before we can pray for the needs and right ordering of the church and the world we need ourselves to be cleansed and delivered. Penitence precedes petition. So Cranmer's Litany prays powerfully that we may be delivered from “all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and from all uncharitableness”. We need God's grace at all times, and so we pray that “in all times of our tribulation; in all times of our wealth; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment, Good Lord, deliver us”.

There are litanies of longing, litanies of lamentation and litanies of loving concern. The litany form has inspired many individual Christians. Bishop Jeremy Taylor prays “for all that roar and groan with intolerable pain and noisome diseases...all troubled with despairing consciences - with the stone and with the gout - with violent colic and grievous ulcers”. The Victorian Congregationalist John Hunter has a powerful penitential petition asking for forgiveness “for our fretful sufferance of wrong; for the vindictive passions we have cherished; for our intolerance, injustice and uncharitableness; for our readiness to blame and our want of thoughtfulness, patience, kindness and sympathy in our social relations”.

Others have seen the beauty of the world itself as the litany of a landscape of praise: “the whirling wings of birds in flight,/ Beat living litanies of light.”

To gather prayer for ourselves and for others into a living litany we should be mindful of the encouragement of the medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing - that when we cry to a God who may often seem hidden, we must “smite on that dark cloud with the dart of our longing love”.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe