Orthodox supplication and blessing services
Short services asking for help, healing or blessing outside the main liturgy.
For the living in illness, danger, or discouragement, parishes sing the Paraklesis, a canon of supplication most often addressed to the Theotokos; Akathist hymns honor Christ, Mary, or a saint. Holy Unction, the anointing of the sick, asks healing of soul and body; in many parishes it is served publicly during Holy Week. Priests also bless homes, water, travel, and undertakings.
Beyond the Liturgy sits a set of shorter services for particular needs. The Paraklesis is a service of supplication, most often to the Theotokos, and is widely used in illness and distress. A moleben is a shorter service of intercession or thanksgiving that can be served for almost any occasion.
There are also blessings for things rather than people: houses, water, vehicles, fields. The blessing of water at Theophany is the best known, and the water is taken home and kept.
These are the services a priest is most likely to serve at a hospital, a house or a workplace, and they are short enough to fit into those settings.
Does it have a text?
Each of these has a fixed text in the service books. Hapgood's 1906 volume carries many of them and is out of copyright; none is published here yet.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Orthodox
- The Divine Liturgy — The central Orthodox service, sung throughout and almost entirely fixed.
- The Orthodox daily cycle and prayer rule — Vespers, Matins and the hours in church, and a personal rule kept at home.
- The Jesus Prayer — A single repeated sentence at the centre of Orthodox contemplative practice.
- Prayer with icons — Prayer before images that are venerated rather than worshipped.
- Orthodox prayer for the departed — Memorial services for the dead, kept at set intervals after a death.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.