Beat Down Satan Under Our Feet Processions Within the LITANY

The procession, as R D Crouse said of its conceptual sister the pilgrimage, is ‘[t]he fundamental and all-encompassing theme of spiritual life.’¹R. D. Crouse, Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality (Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2023), p. 11. Although the primitive church spurned processions (pompa) as an expression of paganism – thus the baptismal vow to renounce ‘the vain pomp and glory of the world’ – they (unsurprisingly) reclaimed ambulatory prayer – called litanies or rogations – by the fourth century. The litany, the first vernacular liturgy of the Church of England, was not only first designed to be sung in procession but depicts a procession in three key petitions and facilitates an interior procession within the souls of those who pray it. Those three petitions correspond to three movements of salvation – what we are saved from, what we are saved by, and what we are saved for, or, put another way, the soul’s procession through repentance, faith, and good works.