The Great Litany and the General Thanksgiving

Prayers written by others can help add variety when our own prayer life gets bogged down and repetitive. There are many great ones to borrow from: the Jesus Prayer, any number of Psalms, the prayers found in our hymnals, and of course the Lord's Prayer. Here are two that may be new to you:

The General Thanksgiving

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) gives us The General Thanksgiving (on page 101). Whether you are starting or ending your day, these words are great reminders of why we should give thanks to God:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.

The Great Litany
My friend David Taylor recently blogged about The Great Litany, also found in the BCP (pages 148-153). (It's a bit long to paste into this post, but click here to go to an online version.) A litany is a form of prayer in which the entire congregation responds in unison to a petition read by a worship leader. The responses used here are in an older form of English. You can update "We beseech thee to hear us" to something like "Hear our prayer." Try it out at the link above. It only takes 3 minutes to read straight through, but you could spend hours by stopping and praying for the people and situations these requests will bring to your mind.

You can also sing The Great Litany. Charles Wesley wrote a hymn based on this prayer. It did not make it into the hymnal, so you will have to go online to read the words to Jesu, Show Us Thy Salvation. (You can sing it to the tune associated with Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.) Here is the first stanza:

Jesu, show us Thy salvation,

In Thy strength we strive with Thee,

By Thy mystic incarnation,

By Thy pure nativity;

Save us Thou, our New-Creator,

Into all our souls impart,

Thy divine, unsinning nature,

Form Thyself within our heart.