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: the central prayers of these services are said by a priest, the anointing prayer in the service for the sick among them, and a text a book assigns to a priest waits for a reviewer however clean the scan is.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Eastern Orthodoxy
- 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.
Content last changed 15 October 2026. Dates come from this page’s own revision history, not from the last time the site was deployed.