Prayer to the Holy Spirit: the text of “Come, Holy Spirit”
The prayer
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of thy love.
Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
O God, who didst instruct the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that in the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in his consolation. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
In short
The prayer to the Holy Spirit has two parts: the versicle “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful” and the collect that follows it, taken from the Mass of Pentecost. It is prayed before studying, deciding, preaching or opening the Bible.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
Before anything that requires discernment: a decision, an exam, a hard conversation, the beginning of a course of study or the opening of the Bible. It is the prayer for before, not for after.
The prayer asks for two things, and the second is stranger than it looks. The first is fire: that God’s love be kindled in the person praying. The second is right wisdom — not more knowledge, but rightly directed knowledge. Whoever prays this is not asking for information; they are asking not to be mistaken about what they already know.
The image of renewing the face of the earth lifts the prayer out of the individual register. The request is not only for the one praying: it is for a world still being made. That single line changes the tone of the whole thing, which without it would read as a request for personal illumination.
There is a practical reason this is the prayer said before opening the Bible. Christian tradition reads Scripture as a text inspired by the Spirit, and the natural consequence is to ask the same Spirit in order to understand it. It is not a good-luck ritual before reading: it is an acknowledgement that reading a text and grasping it are two different things.
Of all the prayers in this group, this is the least divisive. It asks nobody to intercede and addresses God directly — which makes it one of the few old Catholic formulas that Protestant and evangelical churches also pray, sometimes without knowing where it came from.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A collect of the eighth century or earlier; the versicle taken from a psalm
The prayer is a liturgical assembly of two pieces of different ages. The middle part — “Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth” — is a psalm verse used as versicle and response. The closing part is the collect Deus qui corda fidelium, which appears in the Gregorian Sacramentary as the prayer of the morning Mass of Pentecost and is probably older than that book.
The opening line, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful”, is the antiphon that binds the two. The whole became the standard way of invoking the Spirit before an act that requires light — which is why it turns up at the beginning of councils, classes, retreats and parish council meetings, and not at the end.
Because the middle verse is a psalm, the warning this site issues everywhere applies here too: the recited wording does not match the psalm published here word for word. The liturgical formula is a different object, fixed by use, and the biblical text is just below among the passages for anyone who wants to compare.
Little-known details
Three different prayers go by almost the same name
The middle verse is a psalm, and the recited wording is not the psalm’s
The collect survived an entire liturgical reform by changing address
What the passages say
30You will send forth your Spirit, and they will be created. And you will renew the face of the earth.
The verse the prayer uses as its response. Note the number: this is Psalm 104:30 in most English Bibles, but the CPDV published here follows the Vulgate numbering, which is one behind from Psalm 9 to 147. Compare the wording with the text above — the recited formula is shorter and blunter than the translated psalm, and it is the formula most people know.
1And when the days of Pentecost were completed, they were all together in the same place.
2And suddenly, there came a sound from heaven, like that of a wind approaching violently, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
3And there appeared to them separate tongues, as if of fire, which settled upon each one of them.
4And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. And they began to speak in various languages, just as the Holy Spirit bestowed eloquence to them.
The scene at Pentecost, source of the fire the prayer asks for. Note that the text describes tongues as of fire settling on each one: the gift is collective and individual at once, which is exactly the structure of the prayer’s request.
26But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will suggest to you everything whatsoever that I have said to you.
The promise the prayer rests on. The verb is to teach, and the object is recalling what has already been said — which matches the request for right wisdom rather than the request to know more.
26And similarly, the Spirit also helps our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself asks on our behalf with ineffable sighing.
Perhaps the most consoling sentence in Scripture about prayer: Paul assumes we do not know how to ask as we ought. It is the argument that makes this prayer coherent — asking for the Spirit before asking for anything else, because he is the one who corrects the request.