Prayers for Healing
These prayers ask God for healing: physical, emotional, and spiritual. Some are for the person who is ill; others are for the family sitting in the waiting room, which is its own kind of suffering.
They do not bargain and they do not pretend to know the outcome. They ask plainly, and they entrust the person to God either way. That is the shape healing prayer has taken in the church for centuries.
32 prayers
- A Prayer Before Surgery
A contemporary prayer before an operation, closing with Christ's own words from the cross (Luke 23:46), which the Church has prayed at…
- A Prayer for a Peaceful Death
Praying for a holy and peaceful death — the grace of the ars moriendi tradition of the late Middle Ages — is one of the oldest requests in…
- A Prayer for a Sick Child
A contemporary parents' prayer at a child's sickbed, echoing the pleas of Jairus and the Canaanite woman in the Gospels — both parents who…
- A Prayer for Doctors, Nurses, and Caregivers
A contemporary prayer for healthcare workers, drawing on the ancient title of Christus Medicus — Christ the Physician — used by the Church…
- A Prayer for Healing of Body
A contemporary prayer for physical healing rooted in the healing narratives of the Gospels and in James 5:14–15, which instructs the sick…
- A Prayer for the Sick
This is the classic prayer for the sick from the Book of Common Prayer's Ministration to the Sick, in use since 1549 and shaped by much…
- A Prayer in Chronic Illness
A contemporary pastoral prayer for long-term illness, disability, and pain, closing with God's answer to Paul's unhealed "thorn in the…
- A Prayer of Renunciation and Recommitment
A plain-language prayer of renunciation, in the pattern that Christians across traditions use when they wish to close the doors that have…
- A Prayer While Awaiting Test Results
A contemporary pastoral prayer for medical waiting — biopsies, scans, diagnoses — grounded in Christ's teaching not to be anxious about…
- Anima Christi
A 14th-century prayer that predates St. Ignatius of Loyola but which he placed at the front of the Spiritual Exercises, making it forever…
- Blessing of a Sick Person
A blessing prayed at the bedside of the sick, asking healing, comfort, and peace.
- Blessing of an Expectant Mother
A blessing for a mother during pregnancy, asking protection for her and for her unborn child.
- Blessing of Throats on the Feast of St. Blaise
St. Blaise was a bishop of Sebaste in Armenia martyred around 316; tradition holds that on his way to execution he healed a boy choking on…
- For Breaking the Wall Built Up Around the Heart
A prayer for the interior hardening that follows deep hurt, which spiritual directors and deliverance ministers alike identify as one of…
- Hezekiah's Prayer in Sickness
The writing of Hezekiah after his recovery: 'I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.' Used as an Old Testament…
- Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes
In 1858 the Blessed Virgin appeared eighteen times to the fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes,…
- Novena to St. Peregrine for the Sick
St. Peregrine Laziosi (1265–1345) was a Servite friar of Forlì, Italy. When his leg became so diseased that amputation was ordered, he…
- Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Devotion to the Sacred Heart spread widely after the visions of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial (1673–1675) and was given…
- Prayer for Breaking Occult Ties
Where the previous prayer renounces occult acts, this one addresses what those acts leave behind: the lingering attachments that pastoral…
- Prayer of Forgiveness for Family Wounds
A modern prayer of intergenerational forgiveness, drawing on Psalm 68:6 and the biblical theme that both blessing and sin travel through…
- Prayer to Be Freed from Evil Habits
A prayer for habitual sin, the ordinary battleground of the Christian life and, in Catholic teaching, the most common way a person hands…
- Prayer to Forgive Those Who Have Wronged Me
A modern prayer of release built directly on the words of Christ from the Cross (Luke 23:34) and the petition of the Our Father.…
- Prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes
In 1858 the Virgin appeared eighteen times to fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, France,…
- Prayer to Remove Generational Spirits
A prayer addressing what deliverance ministers call generational or ancestral influence — the observation, found in Exodus 20:5 and Exodus…
- Prayer to St. Peregrine for the Sick
St. Peregrine Laziosi (c. 1265-1345), a Servite friar of Forlì in Italy, developed a cancer of the leg that was to be amputated; after a…
- Prayer to St. Raphael the Archangel
St. Raphael, whose name means "God heals," appears in the Book of Tobit as the angel who accompanies Tobias and restores his father's…
- Psalm 51 — Have Mercy on Me, O God
Psalm 51, the Miserere, is traditionally ascribed to King David after the prophet Nathan confronted him over Bathsheba and Uriah. It is the…
- Purification Prayer
A prayer of interior cleansing, prayed after confession or as a daily discipline. Its logic is the standard Catholic teaching that the…
- Severing Ties, Bonds and Attachments
A broader companion to the prayer against occult ties, this text addresses the ordinary attachments — resentment, fear, addiction,…
- The Canaanite Woman's Prayer
'Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs.' A mother refuses to be dismissed and is told her faith is great. Prayed by those who feel…
- The Chaplet of the Five Wounds
A medieval devotion honoring the five wounds of the crucified Christ, prayed by Franciscans and Servites from at least the thirteenth…
- The Trisagion (Thrice-Holy Hymn)
One of the oldest fixed prayers of the Eastern Church, sung at nearly every Orthodox service since the fifth century and included in the…