The notebook · July 20, 2026

The night workshop

There is a strangeness in the way we work, and I am putting words to it for the first time: the prayers Manna offers in the morning are prepared while everyone sleeps. The workshop keeps watch when the readers have switched off. On waking, the prayer is there, laid out, as if it had always been ready.

For a long time, this troubled me. A prayer written in the night, far from the one who will read it — is that not a prayer made in absence? I would have wanted every word passed from hand to hand, still warm. The night seemed to me a poor bakehouse: no one to taste, no one to say whether the bread is rising.

Then I reread, in the book of Exodus, how the manna came. It fell with the dew, during the night. No one saw it come down. In the morning the camp woke and it was there, fine as frost, already given. God’s work, in that story, is done almost entirely without witness — and perhaps on purpose. If the manna had fallen in broad daylight, people would have watched the spectacle. Because it fell by night, all they could do was gather it.

So I look at our night workshop differently. What counts is not the hour when the bread is kneaded, but the hand that holds it out — and that hand is not ours. We prepare, we weigh every word, we reread; but between the prayer laid down in the night and the heart that receives it in the morning, something happens that does not belong to us. That is the dew’s part. No craftsman makes it.

One thing remains that the night has taught me, and I write it down so as not to forget it: working without witness forces you to work for God alone. No applause at the hour when the workshop keeps watch, no counter climbing. Just words adjusted in silence, in the hope that they will hold in an unknown hand. I believe that is the most honest definition of our craft.

Tomorrow morning, someone I do not know will open their eyes, and the prayer will be there, already given. In Manna it waits for you too — fallen while you slept, like a thing of the night that is only of use in the morning.