When it is said
It is sung at Matins, the morning service, on a weekday in the weeks after Easter. The Greek book marks it as a hymn of compunction, the kind that stirs sorrow for sin.
Anyone can say it at home or at work, the moment you notice your thoughts have drifted.
Where it comes from
No author known
A hymn from the weeks after Easter
The hymn comes from the Pentecostarion, the book of hymns the Church sings in the weeks after Easter. Its place is the Tuesday of the fourth week. The book does not name the person who wrote it.
The Pentecostarion in Greek, Tuesday of the fourth week (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America)
In the Russian prayer book
A Russian prayer book takes the hymn out of the service and offers it to anyone whose mind wanders while praying. It stands first among those prayers. A short one follows it: “Lord, if I have read any prayer without attention and been scattered in my thoughts, forgive me and save me by Your mercy.”
Azbyka, prayers when the mind is scattered and inattentive at prayer
What the words mean
A heart gone to waste
The hymn describes the heart with a word for land. In the Greek it is land gone dry, hard and barren. A Russian prayer book’s note on the Slavonic explains its word as land left untended until brush and weeds grow over it. The plain English keeps that picture: a heart gone to waste like an untended field, which the hymn asks God to clear.
Wiktionary, the Ancient Greek χέρσος; Azbyka, note on the word “оляденевшее”
Peter, the tax collector and the woman
All three turned back to God with sorrow in the Gospels. Peter went out and wept bitterly after he denied Jesus (Luke 22:61-62). The tax collector stood at a distance and beat his breast (Luke 18:13). A sinful woman wet Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair (Luke 7:37-38).
The Scripture in it
And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word that the Lord had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny Me three times.” And he went outside and wept bitterly.
But the tax collector stood at a distance, unwilling even to lift up his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’
When a sinful woman from that town learned that Jesus was dining there, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind Him at His feet weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears and wipe them with her hair. Then she kissed His feet and anointed them with the perfume.
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Greek
Τὸν διεσπαρμένον μου νοῦν συνάγαγε Κύριε,
καὶ τὴν χερσωθεῖσάν μου καρδίαν καθάρισον,
ὡς τῷ Πέτρῳ διδούς μοι μετάνοιαν,
ὡς τῷ Τελώνῃ στεναγμόν,
καὶ ὡς τῇ Πόρνῃ δάκρυα,
ἵνα μεγάλῃ τῇ φωνῇ κραυγάζω σοι·
ὁ Θεὸς σῶσόν με, ὡς μόνος εὔσπλαγχνος, καὶ φιλάνθρωπος.