A prayer before leaving home: the short family text, in both of its forms
The prayer
Praying alone — the author’s words, in her Portuguese:
Grande Nome de Jesus, chagas abertas, coração ferido. Sangue de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo, entre mim e o perigo. Amém.
In English: Great Name of Jesus, open wounds, wounded heart. Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, between me and danger. Amen.
Praying with others — she wrote both forms, and a single word changes:
Grande Nome de Jesus, chagas abertas, coração ferido. Sangue de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo, entre nós e o perigo. Amém.
In English: Great Name of Jesus, open wounds, wounded heart. Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, between us and danger. Amen.
In short
This is a family prayer, composed by Adelan Maria Brandão for the moment of leaving the house. It is three lines: the Name of Jesus, the wounds and the wounded heart, and the Blood of Christ set between the one praying and danger. She wrote two forms, for praying alone and for praying with others.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 6 min read
When to pray it
At the door, with the key in your hand, and on any departure that frightens you — the walk to work before dawn, the way back down a dark street, the day someone in the house leaves for somewhere far. It fits in the time it takes to shut the door.
The second line is the whole prayer, and it is worth noticing what it does not do. It does not ask for the danger to stop existing, or for the day to go well, or for the street to be empty. It asks for something to stand in between — and that something is not an abstract shield but the Blood of Christ, which is the Catholic way of saying that the protection being asked for already cost somebody something. Whoever prays it is not asking to be spared the crossing; they are asking not to cross alone.
“Wounded heart” is not the language of sentiment, and reading it that way flattens the line. The heart of Catholic devotion is the side pierced by the lance after the death, in John’s Gospel — a physical wound, in a dead body, from which blood and water come. Read that way, the first line is a single sequence: the Name, and then two wounds still open in the body of the one who rose.
Its length is a quality and not a limitation. A leaving-the-house prayer that takes two minutes does not get prayed on the days you are running late — which are exactly the days you go out without paying attention to anything. This one fits between turning the key and reaching the first step, and that is how a family manages to pray it for years.
The caveat every protection page needs, said once: praying does not replace locking the door, telling someone where you are going, or avoiding the street everyone knows is dangerous. No prayer on this site promises that nothing will happen, and promising it would be writing against the person who leaves home praying and is hurt anyway. What this one asks for is company on the way, and company is what Scripture actually offers to those who set out.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A family composition, no date on record
The prayer was composed in Portuguese by Adelan Maria Brandão. It has no published edition, does not circulate in print and came from no devotional book: it reached this page through the family that prays it, in the author’s own wording. The date it was written is not on record, and this page does not invent one.
The two forms are hers as well, and not an adaptation of ours. In the transcription the family keeps, the second line carries both possibilities at once: whoever prays alone says “entre mim”, between me; whoever prays with others says “entre nós”, between us. It is a prayer meant for the doorway, and in a doorway there is sometimes more than one person leaving. Printing the two words run together would publish the note rather than the prayer — nobody prays a slash — so both forms appear above in full, ready to be said aloud.
The three images in the first line are not one person’s invention: each has centuries of devotion behind it. Calling on the Name of Jesus alone, as a whole prayer, is an old practice in both the Christian East and the West, and it rests on the passage where Paul speaks of the name that is above every name. The open wounds and the wounded heart come from the closing scenes of the Gospels — the side pierced on the cross, and the marks the risen Christ tells Thomas to touch eight days later. What belongs to this prayer is the arrangement: three images in a row, with no verb between them, and only then the one sentence that asks for anything.
Little-known details
There is not a single verb of petition in it
Blood set between a house and what is outside it is the oldest form of this gesture
What the passages say
13But the blood will be for you as a sign in the buildings where you will be. And I will see the blood, and I will pass over you. And the plague will not be with you to destroy, when I strike the land of Egypt.
The biblical origin of the gesture this prayer repeats: something is set between the house and what passes outside. Notice that the sign does not stop the plague from existing or from crossing Egypt — it makes it pass on beyond that door.
9Because of this, God has also exalted him and has given him a name which is above every name,
10so that, at the name of Jesus, every knee would bend, of those in heaven, of those on earth, and of those in hell,
11and so that every tongue would confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.
The text behind the devotion to the Name of Jesus, invoked on its own as a whole prayer. It is the reason the prayer’s first word is “Great”: the name is not there as a form of address, but as what this passage says it is.
26And after eight days, again his disciples were within, and Thomas was with them. Jesus arrived, though the doors had been closed, and he stood in their midst and said, “Peace to you.”
27Next, he said to Thomas: “Look at my hands, and place your finger here; and bring your hand close, and place it at my side. And do not choose to be unbelieving, but faithful.”
The wounds are still there after the resurrection, and Jesus tells Thomas to touch them. This is the scene that gives “open wounds” its literal sense in the prayer: not the memory of an old injury, but marks the text describes in a living body.
8May the Lord guard your entrance and your exit, from this time forward and even forever.
The verse that names the two ends of any departure from home — the one you cross on the way out and the one you cross coming back. It is a psalm of people already on the road, and what it promises is continued keeping, not an uneventful journey.