The notebook · September 14, 2026

The sentence I countersign

I say Amen several times a day and I am not entirely sure what I am doing when I say it.

It came to me at Mass, on a petition I would not have worded that way. Someone was asking for something in our name, so a little in mine, and I answered with everyone else, on cue, without thinking. Walking out, I thought: I have just signed that.

Because that is what it is. Amen adds nothing to the sentence before it. It asks for nothing further, it corrects nothing, it qualifies nothing. All it says is: me too. Nobody puts it at the beginning, which makes sense. You do not countersign a blank page.

English is blunter about this than French. The old translation has the unlearned man say the “Amen”, with an article and quotation marks around it, as though the word were an object lying on the table, the same one every time, and you picked it up.

So I tried something. For one week I said Amen only where I actually agreed. Everything else I let go past in silence.

What was left took up very little room. And it was not what I expected. I thought I would be cutting the old formulas, the archaic turns, the requests too large for me. In fact I cut the specific ones. The ones with a name in them. The ones that, if they were answered, would ask something of me the following week. I said Amen effortlessly to peace in the world, and went quiet on the recovery of a person whose address I know.

Paul has a line about this, in a letter where he is trying to put order back into an assembly that has stopped understanding itself.

how will he who fills the place of the unlearned say the “Amen” at your giving of thanks, seeing he doesn’t know what you say?

1 Corinthians 14:16 (World English Bible)

I wish that were my situation. His objection is about comprehension: you cannot sign what you did not follow. That one is fixable, you only have to translate. Mine is less comfortable. I understand perfectly well what I am signing. That is exactly why I slow down.

What I have not settled is whether agreeing before you have measured the cost is carelessness or the only kind of agreement there is. From the inside, the two look very much alike.

What I kept from the week, for want of better: I have stopped going quiet. I say the Amen where it costs me, and then I add, under my breath and for myself, the sentence it costs me to say. It is not gracious. At least both get said.

In Manna, one prayer a day that you did not write. The last word is still yours.