Commontide

For the Acceptance of Prayer

Heavenly Father, you have promised to hear what we ask in the Name of your Son: Accept and fulfill our petitions, we pray, not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as you know and love us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Commontide
Collect
Prayers

Lighten Our Darkness

Compline

Lighten our darkness, we beseech you, O Lord; and by your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Illumina, quaesumus, Domine, tenebras nostras: et totius huius noctis insidias tu a nobis repelle propitius.

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Original-language source

Provenance

Gelasian, c.700

Draft — AI-assisted research under editorial review.

This brief night prayer has been closing the Christian day for well over a thousand years, beginning as a Latin evening collect in early medieval Roman service-books, passing through the Sarum Compline of pre-Reformation England, and reaching its familiar English form through Thomas Cranmer in 1549. Cranmer's translation added the now-characteristic Christological ending, and in every Book of Common Prayer since, the prayer has stood as the Third Collect at Evening Prayer – a petition so urgent it skips the customary address to God and plunges straight to its plea.