The prayer to the Holy Spirit that opens almost every Orthodox service and most private prayer. It is left out between Pascha and Pentecost, when the tradition waits for the Spirit's coming rather than invoking it.
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.
O Heavenly King (Hapgood 1906)
The prayer to the Holy Spirit that opens almost every Orthodox service and most private prayer. It is left out between Pascha and Pentecost, when the tradition waits for the Spirit's coming rather than invoking it.
English · Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church, 1906
O heavenly King, the Comforter, Spirit of Truth, who art in all places and fillest all things; Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and take up thine abode in us, and cleanse us from every stain; and save our souls, O Good One.
Isabel Florence Hapgood. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1906. Published 1906, before 1929, US public domain, and the translator died in 1928. Retrieved and verified 2026-09-17. Source
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Hapgood's is one English rendering among several, and most parishes today use a later one; hers is printed here because it is the one that is out of copyright. She is also not consistent with herself. The same prayer appears with different punctuation in different services of the same 1906 volume, so this is the text as printed in the Third Hour, and makes no claim to be the only form.
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The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
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.
