Meals for the Soul — Orthodox Resources

Prayers · For particular occasions

For the first of a harvest

Who says it
The priest's.
When
When the first of a crop is brought.

Master, Lord our God, who biddest everyone according to their purpose to offer unto thee thine own of thine own, and bestowest upon them in return thine everlasting blessings, who didst favourably accept the offering of as much as she could of the widow; do thou now also accept the things offered by thy servant, name, and vouchsafe to lay up the same in thine eternal treasury, and grant unto him abundant possession of thy worldly blessings, together with all things that are serviceable unto him.

For blessed is thy name, and glorified is thy kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.

From G. V. Shann, Book of Needs of the Holy Orthodox Church, David Nutt, 1894, chapter XXVII, pp. 257–258. The book itself — public domain.

“Thine own of thine own” is the phrase from the Liturgy itself. The widow is the one in Mark 12 who put in two mites.

Where these come from. Every prayer here is transcribed from a printed book that is out of copyright, and each one says which book and where in it. That is not fussiness. An English translation of an Orthodox prayer is a copyrighted work in its own right, separately from the Greek or Slavonic behind it, and in 2012 a monastery took a bishop to federal court for putting its translations on a website — and won. So these come from Hapgood's Service Book of 1906 and Shann's Euchology of 1891 and Book of Needs of 1894, which anyone may reprint. More on the sources and what is missing.