Advent is the four weeks before Christmas, and in most houses it goes by in a blur of shopping and school concerts. It is also the one season where the Church asks you to slow down and wait, which is a hard thing to do when the calendar is full. These four prayers are short enough to say at the kitchen table with the wreath lit, one week at a time.
You can read them on this page. If you would rather have them printed and on paper, the free Advent Prayer Guide has all four Sundays, the blessing of the wreath, the seven O Antiphons for 17 to 23 December, and a prayer for the years when Christmas hurts.
Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:33-37
Advent opens with a strange kind of prayer. Israel is not asking for presents. It is asking God to come and to find them where they are, which is a place they are not proud of. Watch, the Gospel says, and the watching is not passive. It means keeping your attention on something you cannot see yet. Hope in Scripture is not a mood. It is a decision to keep facing the right direction while nothing seems to be moving.
Lord God, you have promised to come, and we have been waiting a long time.
Give us the patience of people who know they are waited for by you.
Where we have stopped expecting anything, come and surprise us.
Where our hope has gone quiet, light it again.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 and Mark 1:1-8
A voice cries in the wilderness: prepare the way. Every valley filled, every mountain brought low, the road made straight. This is not tidying up for a guest. It is demolition work. The wilderness in this reading is the state of the ground between you and the people you love. Peace usually arrives after somebody has walked the distance first, and often that somebody has to be the one who is not at fault.
Lord, you promised that the crooked would be made straight.
Show us the road we have left broken.
Give us the humility to be first to speak, and the honesty to say exactly what we did.
Where peace is impossible by our own strength, do what only you can do.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Isaiah 61:1-2, 10-11 and John 1:6-8, 19-28
Gaudete means rejoice, and this Sunday the Church breaks the purple with a rose candle. The joy here has nothing to do with how the week went. It sits on top of everything going badly. John the Baptist, who lived on locusts, is the happiest man in the Gospel of John because he knows exactly who he is and who he is not: I am not the Christ, I am a voice. Half of our unhappiness comes from answering a question nobody asked. Joy starts when you stop auditioning.
Lord, you are the light that John came to announce.
Teach us to be content with being a voice, and not the Word.
Take away the need to be seen, and give us back the freedom to be glad.
Let there be joy in our homes that does not depend on the news.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38
The fourth week gives us the shortest and largest answer in Scripture. Mary is told what will happen to her, and she is told that it will cost her everything she had planned. Her answer is four words long. Love in the Gospel is not a feeling that arrives first and makes obedience easy. It is a yes spoken before the feeling arrives, and the feeling comes afterwards, in the ordinary days of the following thirty years.
Lord, you asked a young woman in a village and she said yes.
Give us the same readiness without the same excuses.
Where we have said no because we were afraid, say it again to us.
Make our love more like a decision than a mood.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The wreath is not a decoration and it is not complicated. Four candles, three purple and one rose, one for each Sunday, and a short prayer when you light them. On the first Sunday the wreath can be blessed at home by the head of the family, which the Church has allowed for centuries. You do not need a priest in the room for a family blessing to count.
The rhythm is the same every week: the sign of the cross, the blessing prayer, then the candle, then the prayer for that Sunday. Keep one answer for the whole of Advent, so that the children learn it by heart: Come, Lord Jesus. Come and do not delay.
In the last week before Christmas the Church sings seven short antiphons before the Magnificat, one for each evening. Each names Christ with a title from the prophets, and each ends with the same request: come. If you only use one part of this guide, use this one. Read the antiphon of the day, then keep it in your head until evening.
Someone reading this page has an empty chair at the table this year. If that is you, Advent is not a season you have to sit out. The first Christmas was announced to people who were frightened, and the Holy Family spent it running. Light the candle anyway. Pray the shortest prayer on this page, twice if you can manage it, and let that be your Advent.
Hope, peace, joy and love, one for each of the four Sundays. The third Sunday is called Gaudete, which means rejoice, and it is the one where the rose candle is lit in the middle of the purple. The themes are not a slogan: each one matches the reading of that Sunday.
Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, so it falls between 27 November and 3 December. In 2026 the first Sunday of Advent is 29 November, and the fourth is 20 December. Christmas is on a Friday that year.
Yes. The Church allows the head of the family to bless the wreath at the family table. Begin with the sign of the cross, read the blessing prayer, then light the candle. A family blessing is a real blessing, not a substitute for one.
Seven short prayers sung before the Magnificat on the evenings of 17 to 23 December. Each one names Christ with an Old Testament title, from O Wisdom to O Emmanuel, and every one ends with the same request: come. They are the last week of Advent in seven sentences.
Five minutes is enough, and it is better than the twenty minutes you plan and never do. One candle, one prayer, one minute of silence afterwards. The season rewards the people who come back every week, not the ones who start perfectly.
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