Commontide

Preparation for Personal Prayer

Holy Spirit, breath of God and fire of love, I cannot pray without your aid: Kindle in me the fire of your love, and illumine me with your light; that with a steadfast will and holy thoughts I may approach the Father in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ my Lord, who reigns with you and the Father in eternal union. Amen.

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Commontide
Collect
Prayers

Ash Wednesday

O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire you with our whole heart: that desiring you, we may seek you; and that seeking you, we may find you; and that finding you, we may love you; and that loving you, we may hate those sins from which you have delivered us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Found in the Prayer Book

  • Ash WednesdayLent & Holy Week

Provenance

Anselm (attrib.); ACNA 2019

Draft — AI-assisted research under editorial review.

A short, climbing prayer: desire leads to seeking, seeking to finding, finding to loving, and loving to hating the sins we've been freed from. Anglican devotion has long carried it under the name of St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109); it entered an actual prayer book for the first time in the ACNA's 2019 Book of Common Prayer, as the concluding collect of Ash Wednesday.