The Day By Day Prayer

When I was growing up, I attended our local Catholic elementary school.

During music class, Sister Cecilia taught us to sing this prayer, which she called the “Day by Day” prayer:  

Day by day, o dear Lord
Three things I pray!
To see you more clearly, 
Love you more dearly, 
Follow you more nearly, 
Day by day. 

It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I learned the melody we sang this song to is from the musical Godspell, first performed in 1970. It’s a catchy tune and certainly helped us to learn and remember this prayer.   

But I did a little research and discovered that this prayer predates the '70s by a lot — by several hundred years, in fact. It is attributed to Richard of Chichester, an English bishop and saint who lived in the early 13th century. It comes down to us today because it was transcribed from Latin by Saint Richard’s confessor and later published in the Acta Sanctorum, an early encyclopedia-like text on the lives of the saints.  

The prayer, in just a few short lines, expresses so well the reason for our hope: to be conformed to Jesus in our minds, in our hearts, and in our souls, seen in our actions, little by little, day by day.  

Think Like God  

The line “to see you more clearly” reminds us to pray to be able to think with the mind of God. In Scripture, seeing is always conflated with understanding and apprehension, as though seeing and understanding is one fluid motion. In the Gospel of John, Jesus invites Andrew and John, the son of Zebedee, to come and see. He offers a personal invitation to them by saying, “Come, and you will see” (John 1:38). Come and talk with Me, listen to Me, and you will be able to see the world as God sees it, because you will understand as God does. 

Love Like God 

The next petition prompts us to love Jesus more dearly, to order our emotions and desires so that our hearts are like the heart of Christ. In today’s world, we tend to think that the mind is where the personality of the person lives, but in the Biblical world, the heart was believed to be the seat of the person. Even more important than disciplining our emotions, the heart is the home of the will.

Jesus taught His followers to examine our hearts and “store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” (Matthew 6:20-12) In my opinion, loving like Jesus is harder than learning to think like Him. This line is all about praying for help in overcoming ourselves, to move into that self-emptying type of love that Jesus displays. 

Act Like God 

The last petition nudges us to pray for help in being witnesses of God. Jesus told His disciples that “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). With our hands and feet, as well as the words we speak, we pray we can show God in the world, that we mirror His presence now in our own times, just as Jesus and the saints did in their lives.  

Each of these petitions are difficult to do, and impossible to do on our own. But we know that the man who composed this prayer, Saint Richard of Chichester, succeeded in obtaining all three supplications because today we call him a saint. He has been completely conformed to the mind, heart and actions of the Lord. As every saint reminds us, if even one person can achieve sanctity, then it is possible for any of us. That’s the great hope we have in praying to the Communion of Saints — that if we imitate them, we will also obtain what was given to them.  

But it’s the last line of this short little prayer that gives me the most hope. Those three words, “day by day,” reassure us that nothing must be accomplished overnight. A little bit at a time is just fine. God is patient with us and will see us through, in this life and the next. The most important thing is to keep taking those slow, small steps every day and eventually we will arrive. We will fully see the Lord, completely love the Lord, and follow the Lord entirely, in our minds, in our hearts, and in our souls. 

For the Jubilee of Hope, our writers reflect on prayer as a source of hope in their lives.

Copyright 2025 Sarah Pedrozo
Images: Holy Cross Family Ministries