Heavenly Father, who created man and woman for one another and blessed their union from the beginning, I place into Your hands the one whom You may will me to marry.
Wherever he or she may be at this hour, watch over them, keep them in Your grace, and guard their heart in purity for me, as I strive by Your help to guard mine for them.
Teach me to love them even now, before we have met, by praying for their soul, their faith, and their perseverance. Prepare us both: make me the husband or wife I ought to be — patient, faithful, chaste, and holy — and lead us to one another in Your time, not mine.
If it be Your will that I marry, grant me a spouse who will help me to heaven and whom I may help in turn; and if You call me to another path, give me the grace to embrace it with joy. St. Raphael, guide of Tobias, and Holy Family of Nazareth, pray for us. Amen.
This is a prayer for the many souls who long for marriage but have not yet found the one they will marry — a way of beginning to love a person one has not yet met. Rather than treating the years before marriage as an empty waiting room, it turns them into a school of charity: the one praying begins to love a future spouse now, by asking God to keep them in grace and to guard their purity, even as they guard their own.
Its great scriptural model is the Book of Tobit. There the young Tobias is led by the Archangel Raphael to Sara, and the two are joined in a marriage begun not in passion but in prayer: on their wedding night they rise and pray together, "And now, Lord, thou knowest that not for fleshly lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity…" (Tobit 8:9). The Church has always held up Tobias and Sara as the pattern of a chaste, God-centered courtship, and Raphael as the patron of those seeking a holy spouse.
The prayer keeps discernment honest. It asks for "a spouse who will help me to heaven and whom I may help in turn" — the true measure of a Catholic marriage — but it also submits the whole desire to God’s will: "if You call me to another path, give me the grace to embrace it with joy." Marriage is a vocation, not an entitlement; and the purity kept before it is itself a first gift of love to the one God may send.
Heavenly Father, who created man and woman for one another and blessed their union from the beginning, I place into Your hands the one whom You may will me to marry.
Wherever he or she may be at this hour, watch over them, keep them in Your grace, and guard their heart in purity for me, as I strive by Your help to guard mine for them.
Teach me to love them even now, before we have met, by praying for their soul, their faith, and their perseverance. Prepare us both: make me the husband or wife I ought to be — patient, faithful, chaste, and holy — and lead us to one another in Your time, not mine.
If it be Your will that I marry, grant me a spouse who will help me to heaven and whom I may help in turn; and if You call me to another path, give me the grace to embrace it with joy. St. Raphael, guide of Tobias, and Holy Family of Nazareth, pray for us. Amen.
Heavenly Father, who created man and woman for one another and blessed their union from the beginning, I place into Your hands the one whom You may will me to marry.
Wherever he or she may be at this hour, watch over them, keep them in Your grace, and guard their heart in purity for me, as I strive by Your help to guard mine for them.
Teach me to love them even now, before we have met, by praying for their soul, their faith, and their perseverance. Prepare us both: make me the husband or wife I ought to be — patient, faithful, chaste, and holy — and lead us to one another in Your time, not mine.
If it be Your will that I marry, grant me a spouse who will help me to heaven and whom I may help in turn; and if You call me to another path, give me the grace to embrace it with joy. St. Raphael, guide of Tobias, and Holy Family of Nazareth, pray for us. Amen.