When You Light the Second Candle and Want It to Mean Something: An Advent Candle Prayer for Peace

By Hayley Louisa Mark

A short advent candle prayer peace blessing, for lighting the second candle of the wreath:
Lord of the coming light, we light this second flame for peace. As this small fire pushes back a little of the dark, push back the dark in us — the worry, the hurry, the quarrels we carry into December. Let Your peace come down into this room, this family, this waiting. We are not ready, and we light it anyway. Come, Prince of Peace. Amen.

There’s a specific moment I want to name, because it catches a lot of us off guard. It’s the second Sunday of Advent. The wreath is on the table or the altar, the first candle is already a little shorter than the others, and now someone strikes the match for the second one — the peace candle. And in the half-second before the wick catches, there’s a small ache in the chest that’s hard to explain: a wanting. You want this to mean something. Not just to be a pretty seasonal thing you do because you’ve always done it. You want the lighting of this particular flame, the candle that stands for peace, to actually do something inside a season that, ironically, is the least peaceful stretch of the whole year.

Because that’s the strange truth of Advent, isn’t it. The candle says peace, and meanwhile the calendar is a war zone — the lists, the spending, the family logistics, the grief that always sharpens in December, the low hum of dread under the tinsel. You strike the match with hands that have been busy and tight since the day after the first one. And you think: I don’t want to just light a candle. I want to actually receive what it’s pointing at.

So this is a page for that exact moment. It’s not a generic “prayer for peace” — there’s a whole collection of those, and I’ll link you to it. This is written specifically for the lighting of the second Advent candle: a small liturgy your family or your congregation can say out loud as the flame catches, a more personal prayer for when you’re sitting alone in front of the wreath, and a wordless one for when December has worn you down past the reach of sentences. Underneath them is the real KJV Scripture the Advent peace candle leans on — and there’s a lot of confusion about what these verses actually say, so I’ll be careful with them. Then one simple thing to do with the flame itself, an honest note about what the candle can and can’t do, and where to go next.

Light the candle. Then, before the matchsmoke clears, pray one of these.

First — the candle is a sign, not a switch

Before the prayers, one small thing, because it quietly determines whether this works for you or leaves you faintly disappointed every year.

The Advent wreath is sacramental in the small-s sense: it’s a sign, a pointer, a piece of acted-out hope. The four candles count down the waiting; the increasing light week by week says, plainly and bodily, He is coming, and the dark is losing. The second candle, the peace candle, points to the title the prophet gave the child who was coming — the Prince of Peace. So the flame is not a switch that, once flipped, fills the room with calm. It’s a sign that turns your face, and your family’s faces, toward the One who is the peace.

That matters because of what it frees you from. You don’t have to manufacture a peaceful feeling to make the lighting “count.” You don’t have to get the children to sit still and glow with serenity, or feel a wave of holy calm wash over you on cue. The candle isn’t measuring your inner state. It’s making a declaration — peace is coming, peace has a name, peace is a Person who is on His way — and your job is simply to turn toward it and ask. A distracted family at a slightly chaotic table, lighting a candle and saying a true prayer over it, has done the whole thing rightly. The peace the candle points to was never something you light into being. It’s Someone you wait for. So light it as you are, December-frayed and unready, and ask.

The prayers below ask exactly like that — not pretending to a calm you don’t feel, but turning toward the coming peace and asking it, honestly, to come down into a room that needs it.

Three Advent candle prayers — for the family table, for your own heart, and for when December has worn you out

These are written distinct on purpose — distinct from one another, and from every other prayer in this series. The first is a short liturgy to say aloud together as the second candle is lit, with a part anyone can read and a line the whole table can answer. The second is longer and personal, for when you’re sitting alone in front of the wreath after everyone’s gone to bed. The third is for when you’re too tired and frayed for any of it, and you just need to sit in the light.

A family (or congregation) liturgy, to say as the second candle is lit

Reader: On the first Sunday we lit the candle of hope. Today we light the second candle — the candle of peace.
(Light the second candle.)
Reader: The prophet said a child would be born to us, and called Him the Prince of Peace.
All: Come, Lord Jesus. Be our peace.
Reader: Into this room, into this family, into this loud and hurried season —
All: Come, Lord Jesus. Be our peace.
Reader: For the worried, the grieving, the stretched-too-thin, and the world that aches for an end to its wars —
All: Come, Lord Jesus. Be our peace.
Reader: As this small flame pushes back the dark, push back what is dark in us, and make us ready.
All: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

Keep it where the wreath is, so you can find it next week without hunting. The responses are short enough for a child to learn by the second Sunday and say from memory by the fourth. You don’t need a perfect, reverent hush for it to be real — a half-distracted table saying these words together is doing exactly what the candle is for.

A longer, personal prayer, for sitting alone in front of the wreath

Lord of the coming light,
everyone’s asleep, and the house is finally quiet, and I’m sitting here in the dark with this one small flame.
I lit the peace candle today and I have to be honest with You: I don’t feel peaceful. I feel behind. I feel the weight of all the things I’m carrying into this December — the worry I keep picking back up, the grief that gets louder this time of year, the tiredness that’s gone bone-deep, the small resentments I haven’t dealt with. I wanted the candle to mean something, and part of me is afraid it was just a nice thing we did before dinner.
But here I am in the quiet, and the flame is still burning, and I’m going to do the one thing the candle is actually asking of me: I’m going to turn toward You and wait.
You are the Prince of Peace. Not peace as a mood, not peace as the absence of the lists and the noise — Yourself, a Person, coming. So come. Come down into the part of me that’s been tight since the day after the first candle. Quiet what I can’t quiet. Loosen what I’ve been clenching. Be the stillness at the center of a season that has no still places left in it.
I’m not ready for Christmas, and I’m not ready for You, and I’m lighting the candle anyway, the way Advent always asks — not because I’ve prepared the room, but because I’m asking You to.
Let this one small flame be a true sign tonight: that the dark is losing, that peace has a name, that You are already on Your way. Amen.

A wordless prayer, for when December has worn you down past sentences

God.
I’ve got nothing left for words tonight.
Just this candle, and the dark, and me, too tired to pray it properly.
You said You hear the wordless too.
So here. This is the prayer: me, in the light, waiting.
Come. Amen.

If you only got as far as striking the match and sitting down — if the prayer was really just sitting in front of a lit candle too tired to speak — please read the honest note further down before you decide you did Advent wrong. You didn’t. Sitting in the light, waiting, is the prayer Advent is built on.

The Scripture the peace candle leans on

The Advent peace candle isn’t a generic “be calm” symbol. It points to specific Scripture — and there’s real confusion about what some of these verses say, so let me give you the exact KJV wording and an honest note on each, including one phrase you’ve almost certainly heard that isn’t quite what the Bible says.

Isaiah 9:6 (KJV) — “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

This is the verse behind the peace candle — the one that gives the coming child the title Prince of Peace. Hold what that word “Prince” is doing: peace isn’t pictured here as a feeling or a state of the world but as something belonging to a Person, a ruler who carries it the way a sovereign carries authority. That’s why the candle points to a Someone, not a something. When you light it, you’re not lighting “calm.” You’re naming the One whose very title is Peace, and asking Him to come.

Luke 2:14 (KJV) — “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

The angels’ song over the shepherds, and a true Advent-into-Christmas peace text. One honest note on wording, because it matters: you’ll often hear this rendered “peace on earth, good will to men” or even “peace, goodwill to all” on cards and signs — that’s a loose paraphrase, not the KJV. The KJV reads “on earth peace, good will toward men.” (Some other manuscripts and translations render the second half as “peace to those on whom his favour rests,” which is a real and ancient reading worth knowing — but it’s a translation difference, not the KJV, so I’m naming it rather than blurring it into the verse.) The plain KJV is enough for the candle: peace, announced to earth, the night the Prince of Peace was born.

John 14:27 (KJV) — “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

I include this because it tells you what kind of peace the candle is pointing at. “Not as the world giveth” — the world hands you peace by removing the threat (and snatches it back the moment the threat returns). December is the world’s kind: peaceful only if the lists get done, the family behaves, the money stretches. The peace this child brings is a different sort entirely — one that doesn’t wait for your circumstances to cooperate first. That’s why you can light the candle honestly while still behind on everything. You’re asking for the peace that doesn’t depend on the season calming down.

(A gentle, honest note on a phrase you may expect here: the lovely line “He came to bring peace on earth and goodwill to all men” as a single neat sentence is a hymn-and-card paraphrase woven from Luke 2:14 — not a verse you’ll find in that exact form in the KJV. It’s a beautiful summary; just hold it as a summary, not as Scripture you’re quoting word-for-word. And the well-loved title “Prince of Peace” comes from Isaiah 9:6 above — that one is exact.)

One practice: lighting the flame slowly, and watching it

Every prayer in this series has its own bodily anchor — the long sigh for the racing mind, the room-by-room blessing for the cooled home, the wave-riding for grief. This one belongs to the candle itself, because the candle is the practice. The trouble is that most of us light the Advent candle the way we do everything else in December: fast, half-present, already thinking about the next thing. So the act that’s meant to slow you down doesn’t, and the candle that’s meant to mean something slides past unfelt. This fixes that, and it takes ninety seconds.

Do it whether you’re alone or with the family. If you’re with others, just slow the whole table to your pace.

  1. Before you strike the match, put both feet flat on the floor and take one slow breath — in through the nose, and a long, unhurried breath out through the mouth, longer than you breathed in. One breath. You’re arriving before you light, instead of lighting on the run.
  2. Strike the match and light the second candle slowly, watching the wick actually catch. Don’t look away to the next thing. Watch the small flame steady itself and stand up straight. This is the whole point of the wreath made visible: the light is increasing.
  3. Now just look at it for three slow breaths. Breathe out long each time. Let your eyes rest on the one flame. You’re not trying to feel anything in particular — you’re letting your body do, for ninety seconds, the one thing Advent actually asks: wait, and watch the light.
  4. As you breathe out the third time, pray the short prayer at the top of this page, or just the four words the whole tradition turns on: Come, Lord Jesus. Breathe them out toward the flame.
  5. Leave it burning a while. Don’t blow it out and bustle off. Let the lit candle sit there through dinner, through the reading, through the quiet — a small steady sign in the room that the dark is losing and peace is on its way.

You’re not performing a ritual correctly to earn anything. You’re letting a sixty-second slowness interrupt a season built entirely out of speed — and giving your eyes, your breath, and your prayer one shared still point to rest on. That’s most of what “keeping” Advent even means.

A note on the science

Two ordinary, bodily mechanisms make a practice like this settling, and neither has anything to do with the spirit. First, a slow exhale that is longer than the inhale stimulates the vagus nerve and shifts the autonomic nervous system toward its parasympathetic, “rest and recover” branch, lowering the over-activated stress response that a hurried, overloaded season keeps a person in. Second, resting the gaze steadily on a single, gently moving point of light — as in candle-gazing — narrows visual attention and tends to reduce the rapid, scattered scanning associated with a vigilant, aroused state, which for many people produces a measurable drop in arousal. This describes only the settling of one person’s own physiology; it makes no claim about prayer, about Advent, about God, or about the coming of any peace beyond the body’s own.
The body-science here reflects established neuroscience of the nervous system. What the science actually says about a settled body → · the research behind these pages

An honest note: what the peace candle can and can’t do

Let me be straight with you, the way I’d want someone to be straight with me — because Advent is exactly the season where lovely-sounding promises pile up, and I won’t add one.

Lighting the peace candle does not make December peaceful. There is no arrangement of candles, no liturgy said correctly enough, that obligates God to hand you a calm heart or a calm house by the time the match goes out. The lists will still be long after you light it. The family tensions won’t dissolve because there’s a flame on the table. The grief that always sharpens this time of year will not be talked out of its sharpness by a wreath. If you light the candle, say the prayer with your whole heart, and still feel the same December weight on your chest five minutes later — that is not a sign you did it wrong, or that your faith is too thin, or that the ritual is empty. Prayer is not a lever, and the candle is not a switch. It’s a sign you turn toward, not a spell you cast.

And there is a real freedom in that. You don’t have to generate peace to light the peace candle worthily. The whole logic of Advent runs the other way: you light it because you can’t manufacture the peace yourself, and you’re turning, honestly and unready, toward the One who can. So you are allowed to light it frayed. You are allowed to light it grieving — Advent has always held its candles in the dark, and the peace it points to is precisely the kind that comes into trouble rather than only after it. The wordless, too-tired sitting in front of the flame counts as fully as the most fluent prayer; the tradition is clear that God hears the groaning too deep for words. If all you managed this Sunday was to light it and sit there, you kept Advent.

One clear word, because love means saying it. If what December is surfacing in you is more than the ordinary holiday weight — if the grief won’t let you function, if the season is pulling you down into a depression you can’t climb out of, if you’ve had thoughts of not being here — please hold the candle and real help in the same hand. The holidays are genuinely hard on a great many people, and reaching for a doctor, a counsellor, or a crisis line is not a failure of Advent faith; it’s one of the faithful things you can do. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number now; in the US you can dial or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Light the candle, and make the call. They were never rivals.

Take these prayers with you

You won’t have a screen open at the table on Sunday evening, or sitting alone in front of the wreath at midnight — and those are exactly the moments you’ll want the words already made.

Free: The Stilling Waves Library is a small collection of contemplative prayer and reflection guides you can download at no cost — gentle, unhurried, and well suited to a slow Advent: short prayers, breath practices, and ways to keep a still point in a loud season. It’s an easy thing to keep near the wreath. Get the free library →

And if you’d like a quiet, daily place to keep Advent this year — a companion to sit with each evening as the candles increase, somewhere to bring the worry and the grief and the waiting and watch your heart slowly turn toward the coming light — that’s what we make at Stilling Waves. Our prayer-and-reflection journals are built for exactly this kind of unhurried, expectant season. See the Stilling Waves prayer journals →

Keep reading in this series

Frequently asked questions

What do you pray when you light the second Advent candle?
You pray a prayer of peace, because the second candle of the Advent wreath is the peace candle, pointing to Christ as the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). A simple one to say as the flame catches: “Lord of the coming light, we light this second flame for peace. As this small fire pushes back a little of the dark, push back the dark in us, and make us ready. Come, Prince of Peace. Amen.” The family liturgy near the top of this page gives a fuller call-and-response version for the table or the congregation.

Why is the second Advent candle the candle of peace?
In the most common arrangement, the four Advent candles stand for hope, peace, joy, and love, lit one per Sunday as Christmas approaches and the light increases. The second is peace because Advent looks toward the birth of the child Isaiah called “the Prince of Peace,” and the angels’ song at His birth announced “on earth peace” (Luke 2:14). Lighting it turns the family’s attention toward the peace that is coming with Him.

Is there a Bible verse for the Advent peace candle?
Yes — the central one is Isaiah 9:6 (KJV): “For unto us a child is born… and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Luke 2:14 (“on earth peace, good will toward men”) and John 14:27 (“Peace I leave with you… not as the world giveth”) are the other two the peace candle most often leans on. All three are quoted in full, with honest notes, above.

What if I don’t feel peaceful when I light it?
That’s not a problem, and it doesn’t mean you did Advent wrong. The candle is a sign you turn toward, not a switch that fills the room with calm. The whole logic of Advent is that you light it because you can’t manufacture peace yourself, and you turn — frayed, behind, unready — toward the One who can. A distracted, tired family lighting the candle and praying a true prayer over it has kept Advent rightly. Sometimes the peace comes as calm; sometimes only as the strength to keep waiting in a hard season. Both are real.

Can the whole family pray the Advent candle prayer together?
Yes — that’s what the family liturgy on this page is built for. One person reads the leader’s lines and lights the candle; everyone answers “Come, Lord Jesus. Be our peace.” The responses are short enough for young children to learn within a week or two and say from memory by the fourth Sunday. You don’t need a reverent hush for it to count — saying the words together, even a little chaotically, is exactly the point.

By Hayley Louisa Mark. These prayers are offered as companionship and encouragement, not as a substitute for professional help. The holiday season is genuinely hard for many people; where grief, depression, or anxiety goes beyond the ordinary December weight, please consider a doctor, counsellor, or crisis line alongside your prayers.