The notebook · August 24, 2026

The ‘we’ I say alone

I noticed it at the sink one evening, saying a Hail Mary for someone. Pray for us sinners. Us. There was nobody in the kitchen, and I was speaking in the plural as though several of us were waiting on an answer.

It sent me back over my evening prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is like that from end to end, right through the petition about forgiveness. The Hail Mary has one request only, and it is plural too. For years I have been saying sentences in which I am never alone, in a room where I always am.

For a long time I took it for good manners. A way of not putting oneself forward, like the “we” of official letters. This week I am less sure, because the plural does not shelter me: it commits me. I cannot ask for my bread without asking for somebody else’s. And in that somebody else there are names I would not have put on my list.

Sinners is more awkward still. It is not a state I choose for myself, it is a group I file myself into, and there is one particular person in it I would rather leave outside. Saying it means asking the same thing for her and for me, in the same sentence, with no way to sort.

I tried the singular, to see. Pray for me, a sinner. It went down easily, and that is what bothers me: it was smoother, more honest even, and very much smaller. I heard myself asking on behalf of one person, and I knew at once I would not do it again, without being able to say why.

I don’t know whether the plural is company or a constraint. Both answers suit me, which is a bad sign. Company flatters me: I would be praying with an invisible crowd, which makes me someone spacious. The constraint flatters me differently: it would be no credit of mine, I would be obliged into breadth.

What I can report is that none of the prayers I was handed lets me say “I” at the place where the asking happens. They were all written by people who probably knew something I don’t know yet. I go on saying “us” in the empty kitchen, and I watch to see who turns up.

In Manna tonight, a prayer I won’t have had to word on my own.