“Te lucis ante terminum”: A bedtime prayer for all ages

When I was little, my bedtime routine involved me propping up my plush Precious Moments doll beside me on my bedside floor, her hands Velcroed together, so that she could accompany me in praying this prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

This rhyming quatrain from colonial New England,^[1] simple though it is, cultivated in me a warm sense of God’s care and protection through the night.

Perhaps the latter half sounds morbid—but keep in mind that it comes from a time when child mortality rates were much higher, as, given the lack of advanced medicine and effective vaccines, illnesses were frequent and often fatal. A later variation of the prayer omits the reference to death, replacing the second couplet with the cutesier “Thy love guard me through the night, / And wake me with the morning light.”

I will both lie down and sleep in peace,
for you alone, O LORD, make me lie down in safety.

—Psalm 4:8

As an adult, I’ve encountered another evening prayer that reminds me of “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”—similar content, same meter, but likely dating all the way back to the fifth or sixth century, and originally written in Latin. It’s called Te lucis ante terminum (Before the Ending of the Day):

Te lucis ante terminum,
Rerum Creator poscimus,
Ut pro tua clementia
Sis præsul et custodia.

Procul recedant somnia,
Et noctium phantasmata;
Hostemque nostrum comprime,
Ne polluantur corpora.

Præsta, Pater piissime,
Patrique compar Unice,
Cum Spiritu Paraclito
Regnans per omne sæculum.

Before the ending of the day,
Creator of the world, we pray
That with Thy wonted favor Thou
Wouldst be our Guard and Keeper now.

From all ill dreams defend our eyes,
From nightly fears and fantasies;
Tread under foot our ghostly foe,
That no pollution we may know.

O Father, that we ask be done,
Through Jesus Christ, Thine only Son;
Who, with the Holy Ghost and Thee,
Doth live and reign eternally.

Trans. John Mason Neale

This prayer is sung liturgically as the office hymn at Compline in the Roman Rite. It was originally, and continues to be, sung to plainsong melodies from the Liber Usualis (Usual Book) and the Sarum Rite, such as this one:

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(To hear it chanted in English, see the album Lighten Our Darkness: Music for the Close of Day by the Cambridge Singers.)

The great English High Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis wrote two five-voice settings of the hymn in 1575, of which the ferial tone is performed here by The King’s Singers:

In 1998 J. Aaron McDermid of North Dakota composed a setting, performed by The Singers—Minnesota Choral Artists under the direction of Matthew Culloton:

McDermid writes,

Upon my first reading [of Te lucis] I was immediately struck by the color and imagination inherent in the language, particularly in the second stanza – where the deep calm of the previous verse is replaced by foreboding images of the shades of night. A beautiful symmetry is achieved by the addition of the eloquent Gloria Patri that brings the hymn to a close. Through the patient and fluid unfolding of the Latin, St. Ambrose^[2] has imbued this hymn with a sense of comfort and warmth, offering hope for a light to illumine the dark hours to come.

The last setting I want to share is Owain Park’s from 2020, released under the title “Night Prayer.” His was inspired by ancient plainchant and was specially composed for virtual choirs during COVID-19. Listen to the premiere performance by his vocal consort, the Gesualdo Six (Park is the singer at bottom right):

The photographs by Ash Mills in this video, some of them long-exposure (gorgeous!), are of Salisbury Cathedral’s annual “From Darkness to Light” Advent procession, in which the medieval church is gradually filled with the light of over one thousand candles.

For an album recording of Park’s “Night Prayer,” available on Spotify and other streaming platforms, see When Sleep Comes: Evening Meditations for Voices and Saxophone from Tenebrae.

These are just a few of the many musical settings of Te lucis ante terminum that have been composed over the centuries. For a list of others, see https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Te_lucis_ante_terminum.

The music gives the words a gravitas and a beauty that I think they lack on their own. Why not choose one of these as a bedtime track to play for your little one as they fall asleep! Or for your own anxious soul. The pronouns are first-person plural, indicating that this prayer is intended to be prayed in community. Make it a family listening event. And if you feel so inclined, you might even try chanting along with the choir of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in Toronto!

NOTES

1. Although I’ve seen “As I Lay Me Down to Sleep” spuriously attributed as “Old English,” its earliest known appearance in print is in the 1737 edition of the New England Primer, a popular reading textbook used in the American colonies, published in Boston.

2. Abbot S.-G. Pimont, author of Les Hymnes du Bréviaire romaine (Paris, 1874), is the one who attributed the text of Te lucis to Ambrose of Milan (ca. 339–397), but this authorship claim was rejected by the Benedictine editors of The Catholic Encyclopedia (Robert Appleton, 1912) and by patristics scholar Luigi Biraghi and today is generally regarded as false.