Make A PrayerGUIDANCE. PRAYERS. CARE.
For Clinicians

Every text here names its edition and how it was checked. No reviewer has signed anything yet.

About Make A Prayer

For the Absent

A prayer for those we love who are away from us, asking that they be defended from danger and held together with those at home. It is among the family prayers of the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer. The book gives its family prayers to the household itself: one of the family, or anyone appointed, says them, not a minister.

Every text below comes from the edition named under it and was checked twice, independently, before it appeared. Neither check was a person. That is a claim about wording only: nothing here is selected or endorsed for a particular situation, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed it. Older spelling is kept as the edition prints it.

Print Large print Make a memorial card

For the Absent (Prayer Book 1928)

A prayer for those we love who are away from us, asking that they be defended from danger and held together with those at home. It is among the family prayers of the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer. The book gives its family prayers to the household itself: one of the family, or anyone appointed, says them, not a minister.

English · The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 1929Checked against a second scanned copy

O GOD, whose fatherly care reacheth to the uttermost parts of the earth; We humbly beseech thee graciously to behold and bless those whom we love, now absent from us. Defend them from all dangers of soul and body; and grant that both they and we, drawing nearer to thee, may be bound together by thy love in the communion of thy Holy Spirit, and in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

James Pott and Company, New York (Cambridge Edition), 1929. Printed 1929 from the Standard Book adopted in 1928; published before 1930, US public domain. Retrieved and verified 2026-10-20. Source

Out of copyright in the United States on the basis stated here, and free to reuse there. Please keep the citation with it.

Share this prayer

The full verification record for this text

Printed as it stands on page 585 of the James Pott and Company printing.

When is this prayer said?

The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.

Which tradition is this prayer from?

Every prayer on this site

This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.

Content last changed 20 October 2026. Dates come from this page’s own revision history, not from the last time the site was deployed.