Prayers for everyday moments

The historical Christian tradition is large and old and covers an enormous range of human experience, but it does not cover everything. There is no canonical 6th-century Latin collect for the first day of a new job. There is no 17th-century Anglican prayer for a difficult conversation with a colleague. The reasons are obvious: the people who wrote those prayers were not working in modern offices.

The prior article, How to write a prayer, laid out seven principles the tradition has settled on across two thousand years. This article puts the principles to work. Below are twelve short editorial prayers, written by the Faith in Practice editorial team for specific contemporary situations. Each one follows the seven principles. Each is honest about being recent. Each links to the closest traditional prayer in the historical collection for readers who would rather use something with the weight of centuries behind it.

These prayers are not part of the historical collection. They are examples. They live here, inside this article. They do not appear elsewhere on the site.

If you want to use them, you may. If you want to use them as starting points to write your own, that is exactly what they are meant for.

1. Before an exam

2. Before a job interview

3. For the first day in a new job

4. For a difficult colleague

5. Before a meeting

6. For patience

7. For a friend

8. For letting go

9. At the start of a new year

10. For someone leaving home

11. For the world in difficult times

12. For help when I cannot pray

A note on using these

Christian prayer has always been larger than the most famous fixed prayers. People praying alone in their kitchens, walking to work, sitting in waiting rooms, lying awake at night, have always prayed in their own words about their own situations. The fixed prayers exist alongside that practice, not in place of it.

If a phrase in one of the prayers above lands and the rest does not, take the phrase and leave the rest. If a whole prayer is useful, use the whole prayer. If none of them quite fits your situation, the seven principles in the prior article will help you write the one you need.

Almost no Christian prayer in history was written from scratch. The Lord's Prayer adapts Jewish prayer patterns Jesus would have grown up with. The Hail Mary begins with the angel Gabriel's words in Luke and Elizabeth's words at the Visitation. The medieval Latin collects rework biblical phrases. The Reformation prayer books translate medieval Latin sources. Every prayer is a remix of what came before.

These twelve are also remixes. They draw on the language and the patterns the tradition has handed down. They do not pretend to be ancient. They do not need to be. They are starting points, written by people who know the tradition, for situations the tradition's older texts did not directly anticipate.