The notebook · August 19, 2026

The order I would not have chosen

I ran a slightly silly experiment this week. For six days I wrote down the first sentence of my prayers, without tidying anything up afterwards.

Six times out of six it began with a request, and six times out of six the request was about me. Help me. Let it be that. Give me the strength to. I had hoped for a little more variety.

What bothered me was not the asking. It was the order. In the Lord’s Prayer, the thing I say first arrives fourth, after three sentences that are not about me at all. I have known that text since childhood, I have said it thousands of times, and I had never noticed that it makes me wait.

I tried starting the way it starts, one evening. “May your name be kept holy.” I stopped there, because I did not know what I had just said. I can explain it if someone asks me to. But in my own mouth, in my kitchen, after the day I had just had, the sentence did not land.

Part of me would like to conclude that I need to learn to decentre my prayer. I do not quite believe it. That would mean swapping a sincere sentence for a presentable one, and I am very good at that. It is the kind of progress that does not last a week.

What I have been trying for three evenings is more modest. I say my sentence, the one that comes, the one about me. Then I wait a little, and I say the other three afterwards. Backwards, in other words.

I do not know whether that counts. Perhaps the order of the text is not an instruction but a description, and nobody can honestly say “let your will be done” before admitting what they would have preferred. Or perhaps I am simply negotiating with the part that costs me something. Both explanations suit me, which is not a good sign.

In the meantime I say the text as it stands, in its own order, understanding it no better than yesterday. It seems to hold without me.

In Manna, the prayer of the day arrives before I have had time to choose what to start with.