Thanksgiving
Prayer that names what has been received.
Prayer that names what has been received and returns thanks: life, health, family, food, deliverance. Grace at meals is its most visible household form across many branches. Catholic teaching goes further and calls the Eucharist, the church's central act of worship, the fullest expression of every form of prayer, thanksgiving above all.
Thanksgiving names specific things rather than gratitude in general, and teachers of prayer press that point: the discipline is in the naming, because a vague sense of being fortunate does not require anything of a person.
It has a fixed place in most structured approaches to prayer, usually after confession and before asking.
It also survives outside religious practice, and the secular gratitude exercises now recommended for wellbeing are recognisably the same activity with the address removed.
Does it have a text?
A mode rather than a text. The General Thanksgiving from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is a fixed prayer in this mode, and this site holds it.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Christian
- Praise and adoration — Prayer that addresses God for who God is rather than asking for anything.
- Confession — Naming what has gone wrong, privately or in a congregation.
- Petition — Asking for oneself.
- Intercession — Asking on behalf of someone else.
- Set and free prayer — The long argument between prayer that is written down and prayer that is not.
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.