Thanksgiving prayers
Thanksgiving is the counterpart to petition, and the Christian tradition has kept far fewer set texts for it. The four gathered here show the range. The General Thanksgiving entered the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 and is the best known of them. The Orthodox Prayer After Holy Communion and the Catholic Prayer After Communion both belong to the moment immediately after receiving the sacrament, where the older liturgies appoint thanksgiving rather than petition; the Orthodox form was formalized by the 9th to 10th centuries, and the Catholic one reached its current wording in the 16th to 17th. A Prayer of Thanksgiving for a Recovery draws on the same 1662 book and marks the end of an illness. This is a small collection by design. Where a prayer of thanks belongs to a season or a sacrament, it is filed under that season or sacrament instead.