Prayers for Peace
Peace in Scripture is fuller than calm — it is things set right. These prayers ask for both: quiet inside you, and repair between people.
Some are for a restless heart late at night. Others are for a divided household, a strained friendship, or a world at war.
48 prayers
- A Blessing for a New Home
Adapted from the ancient Visita quaesumus collect used at Compline and in the Roman Ritual's blessing of a house, and preserved in the Book…
- A Collect for Peace
One of the fixed collects of Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, translated by Cranmer from an ancient Latin source in the…
- A Prayer for a Difficult Family Relationship
A contemporary pastoral prayer on Christ's command to love and pray for those who wound us (Matthew 5:44). The Christian tradition…
- A Prayer for a Grieving Heart
A contemporary pastoral prayer that follows the biblical pattern of lament, closing with the ancient Requiem aeternam used across the…
- A Prayer for a Marriage
This prayer comes from the marriage rite of the Book of Common Prayer, whose central petitions Thomas Cranmer composed in 1549 and later…
- 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 Families
This collect, "For Families," entered the Book of Common Prayer in the American revision of 1928 and draws on older English collects going…
- A Prayer for Peace of Mind
A contemporary pastoral prayer woven from Psalm 46:10, Psalm 131, and Psalm 127:2. It is written for rumination — the mental loop that…
- A Prayer for the Human Family
From the Prayers and Thanksgivings of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It is the prayer many parishes turn to after violence, unrest, or…
- 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 for Travellers
The Church has blessed travellers since the earliest centuries, when a journey was genuinely dangerous and often took months. This collect…
- A Prayer in Anxiety
A contemporary pastoral prayer shaped around Philippians 4:6–7 and Christ's words in Matthew 6. Anxiety is not treated as a failure of…
- Be at Peace (St. Francis de Sales)
Drawn from the spiritual letters of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, written in the early 1600s to lay people trying to live devout…
- Benediction of Hebrews
A benediction from Hebrews 13:20-21 asking God to complete His good work in those He blesses.
- John Henry Newman — Support Us All the Day Long
Adapted from a sermon by St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and now found in Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist prayer books. It is prayed at…
- Leave Me Alone with God (St. Aidan of Lindisfarne)
A prayer of the Lindisfarne tradition associated with St. Aidan (d. 651), whose island monastery is cut off by the tide twice a day. It has…
- Night Prayer (Compline)
Compline is the Church's last prayer of the day, prayed by monks before the great silence since at least the sixth century and codified in…
- Nunc Dimittis (The Song of Simeon)
These are the words of the aged Simeon in the Temple as he took the infant Jesus in his arms (Luke 2:29-32), having been promised he would…
- Peace Prayer of St. Francis
Though named for St. Francis, this prayer first appeared in 1912 in the French Catholic magazine La Clochette. Its wide use by St. John…
- Prayer After Confession
A traditional thanksgiving prayed after absolution, while performing one's penance. The Church has always paired sorrow with gratitude:…
- Prayer Against Oppression
Catholic theology distinguishes several degrees of extraordinary demonic activity — temptation, oppression, obsession, infestation and,…
- Prayer for a Nation
A prayer for the civil order in the tradition of the Prayer Book's petitions for those in authority, used in Anglican, Catholic and…
- Prayer for Forgiveness of Self
A modern prayer for the scrupulous and the self-condemning, built on Romans 8:1. The Christian tradition distinguishes godly sorrow, which…
- Prayer for Troubled Souls
A gentler prayer offered for those under interior affliction, which the deliverance tradition treats as a distinct and far more common…
- Prayer in Time of Anxiety
A contemporary prayer for anxious nights, in the tradition of the psalms of lament, which never pretend the distress away but speak it…
- Prayer of Abandonment (Charles de Foucauld)
Charles de Foucauld was a French soldier and explorer who converted dramatically in 1886 and spent the rest of his life as a hermit among…
- Prayer of Brother Lawrence
Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (c. 1614–1691) spent thirty years in a Carmelite kitchen in Paris and taught what he called the…
- Prayer of Deliverance
A litany-form deliverance prayer widely used in Italian Catholic practice and circulated in English through Fr. Gabriele Amorth and later…
- Prayer of St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Widely circulated as a prayer of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and consistent with her “Little Way,” though its exact provenance in her writings…
- Prayer of the Cloud of Unknowing
From The Cloud of Unknowing, written in Middle English by an anonymous fourteenth-century English contemplative. It is the founding text of…
- Prayer of the Desert Fathers
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers record that when Abba Macarius was asked how to pray, he taught these few sentences and warned against…
- Prayer of the Optina Elders
Composed at the Optina Monastery in Russia, a center of the Russian spiritual revival of the nineteenth century whose elders counseled…
- 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 St. Dymphna for Mental Health
St. Dymphna, according to a thirteenth-century account, was an Irish girl of the seventh century who fled her father's madness and was…
- Psalm 121 — I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes
Psalm 121 is one of the Songs of Ascents, sung by pilgrims climbing the road to Jerusalem, watching the hills for both danger and the first…
- Psalm 139 — Thou Hast Searched Me and Known Me
Psalm 139 is the great prayer against loneliness. It insists that there is no place — height, depth, distance, or darkness — where a person…
- Psalm 23 — The Lord Is My Shepherd
The most beloved of the psalms, attributed to David, who had been a shepherd before he was a king. It is the prayer of the deathbed, the…
- Psalm 46 — God Is Our Refuge and Strength
Psalm 46 inspired Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" (1529) and has been prayed through plagues, wars, and natural…
- Restless Until It Rests in You (St. Augustine)
The opening paragraph of the Confessions, and the sentence that has defined Christian anthropology ever since: we are made for God and…
- Solemn Trinitarian Blessing
The solemn blessing pronounced over the assembly at the close of Christian worship.
- St. Teresa's Bookmark (Let Nothing Disturb You)
These lines were found written on a bookmark in the breviary of St. Teresa of Ávila after her death in 1582. Teresa was a Carmelite…
- The Aaronic Blessing
Given to Moses for Aaron and his sons in Numbers 6:24–26, this is the oldest blessing text in continuous liturgical use. A silver amulet…
- The Blessing of Saint Clare
The final blessing of St. Clare of Assisi, given to her sisters before her death in 1253.
- The Grace (Apostolic Benediction)
The Trinitarian benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:14, used to close Christian worship across traditions.
- The Irish Blessing
A traditional Gaelic blessing invoking God's protection and companionship until we meet again.
- The Jesus Prayer
The Jesus Prayer is the heart of the Eastern Christian tradition of hesychasm, or prayer of stillness. Its roots reach back to the Desert…
- The Second Collect, for Peace (Evening Prayer)
The evening collect for peace from the Book of Common Prayer, itself a translation of an ancient Latin collect used in the Gelasian…
- The Serenity Prayer
Written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s and adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, this short prayer has probably done more practical…