Please call me Y'all
There's a Choir of Souls Inside Me
Y'all
When I came home and my family asked, “How are y’all doing?” I thought they were seeing me as a stand-in for the choir. I assumed they were asking about the choir as a whole. But then I realized they we asking about me. And somehow, y’all was the right word.
They were using y'all in the second-person singular as a way of appreciating my individualized complexity. Because I wasn’t just bringing home the choir’s performance. I was bringing home my roles, my voices, my weariness, my joy. I was bringing home the whole layered version of myself that had shown up to sing.
Their question named something true. I’m not just one thing; I’m many. Like Whitman says, I contain multitudes. That Southern colloquialism carries a metaphysical truth: each of us is a y’all.
Truth be told, I think even God—the living being in whom the universe unfolds—is a y’all, too. I think we can address God as a y'all, not because, as Christians say, God is three persons in one, but because God's very existence includes all the y'alls of the universe: other humans, to be sure, but also other animals and living cells and maybe even molecules and atoms.
The whole idea that individuals are sealed off from their worlds by the boundaries of their skin is not exactly right. Yes, we are individuals—but none of us are cut off in that way. For good and ill, we are porous. Our privacy includes the world. We are all y’alls
They were using y'all in the second-person singular as a way of appreciating my individualized complexity. Because I wasn’t just bringing home the choir’s performance. I was bringing home my roles, my voices, my weariness, my joy. I was bringing home the whole layered version of myself that had shown up to sing.
Their question named something true. I’m not just one thing; I’m many. Like Whitman says, I contain multitudes. That Southern colloquialism carries a metaphysical truth: each of us is a y’all.
Truth be told, I think even God—the living being in whom the universe unfolds—is a y’all, too. I think we can address God as a y'all, not because, as Christians say, God is three persons in one, but because God's very existence includes all the y'alls of the universe: other humans, to be sure, but also other animals and living cells and maybe even molecules and atoms.
The whole idea that individuals are sealed off from their worlds by the boundaries of their skin is not exactly right. Yes, we are individuals—but none of us are cut off in that way. For good and ill, we are porous. Our privacy includes the world. We are all y’alls
Varieties of Y'allness
- Her y’allness showed in the way she held space for everyone—mother, daughter, friend, and elder—all present in her at once.
- Y’allness isn’t just about community; it’s about the truth that even when you’re alone, you carry others inside you.
- The y’allness of God, in process theology, is not just Trinitarian—it’s the divine inclusion of all things, all joys, all wounds.
- There’s a kind of cosmic y’allness in the night sky: stars burning in silence, yet somehow all in conversation.
- He spoke with a soft y’allness, as if each word carried generations, griefs, and gentle hopes braided together.
A Theology of Y'allness
“Y’all” is heard in countless everyday moments across the American South, in African American English, and throughout the Caribbean:
“Y’all coming over for supper?”
“Y’all did a great job on the choir this morning.”
“Y’all got any more peaches?” (to a store clerk)
“Y’all okay back there?” (to one person in a car, possibly representing others)
In these moments, “y’all” typically serves its most familiar function: a plural “you”, used to address or refer to two or more people. But its usage is more nuanced than it first appears.
Over time, “y’all” has also come to be used to address a single person, especially in friendly or polite contexts. While some American speakers consider this singular use to be nonstandard, it often functions as shorthand for a group addressed through one individual. For example, a customer might say to a cashier, “Y’all open late tonight?” referring to the whole store or staff. Or to a pastor after worship: “Y’all did a beautiful job with the service.” Or to a neighbor: “Y’all taking a trip for the holidays?” In each case, the listener is addressed not just as themselves, but as part of something larger—a household, a workplace, a community. The grammar gestures toward affiliation and belonging.
But there is another, deeper possibility. Beyond simply standing in for others, “y’all” can be used to address a single person whose very being is plural—not because they represent others, but because they are others-in-one, or, as Whitehead puts it, many becoming one.
In this usage, “y’all” honors the composite nature of selfhood: the parent who is also a child, the artist who is also a healer, the individual whose past and present selves still speak within them. It may address the one who carries the burdens of a lineage, who embodies a community's memory, or who lives out multiple roles at once. It can also be a quiet act of resistance to reduction—a way of honoring someone as irreducible to stereotype, category, or role. In saying “y’all” to a person, we may be signaling that we see them not as a flattened type, but as a whole world in motion, full of contradictions, histories, and aspirations. Here, “y’all” becomes a gesture of recognition and reverence, naming the layered, relational self—never solitary, always plural.
This use of “y’all” gestures toward a relational ontology, where each being is understood not as a sealed-off unit, but as a gathering of relations, a site of convergence. And this same sensibility may extend to our address of God. To say, “Y’all be with me now, Lord,” is to name God not as a solitary monarch but as a community of presence—a Trinity if you are Christian, but if not that, then as a relational field, a multiplicity of manifestations: comforter, challenger, breath, silence. It is to speak to a singular life that is never not plural—the very ground of relationality, whose oneness is not the erasure of difference but the harmony of it.
To call God “y’all” is to speak to a being whose very life includes the world. God's identity is not sealed off from creation but is constituted through divine feeling of the world’s experiences—every joy, every sorrow, every creature’s becoming. When we say “y’all,” we may be addressing God-and-the-world, In this way, “y’all” functions as a stand-in for the whole living cosmos, gathered up into the heart of God.
One reason this may sound odd to English speakers is that we are accustomed to thinking of persons—human or divine—as self-contained substances, cut off from the world by the boundaries of the skin. We assume that only by imagining the person this way can we preserve their inwardness or private subjectivity. But process theology offers another possibility: the idea that a person is a concrescing subject, a moment of becoming in which the many of the past actual world become one in the privacy of the subject. The person is both many and one. Their singularity is not self-enclosure but relational integration. The many are not outside the person; they are inside, felt and taken up into who the person is. Thus, a person can be both inwardly private and relationally plural—making “y’all” a fitting term of address for those whose wholeness is woven from multiplicity.
Painful Plurality, Joyful Becoming
To say that each person, or even God, is a “y’all” is not to romanticize multiplicity. Plurality can be painful. The selves we have been may contradict the selves we long to be. The roles we carry—parent, worker, citizen, friend—can pull in different directions. The relationships that shape us can wound as well as nourish. And the emotions we carry—grief, shame, longing, rage—can be difficult to hold together in one becoming self.
In process thought, this tension is not a flaw but a fact of existence. Each moment of experience—the “concrescence” of an entity—is a creative integration of many past realities into a new act of becoming. This integration includes subjective aim: the felt lure toward wholeness, beauty, or harmony. But the path toward that aim is not guaranteed. It is fragile. Becoming is a labor, and sometimes it hurts.
Still, the very capacity to carry pain, to feel the dissonance of the many within, is itself a sign of depth. It means we are more than surfaces. It means we are capable of response. To be a “y’all” is to be open—to memory, to future, to contradiction, to love. And it is precisely in the tension, not outside it, that the possibility of joyful becoming arises.
This is as true for God as it is for us. In process theology, God also contains a multiplicity—not just internally (as in the Trinity or divine complexity) but relationally, as one who feels the world. God suffers with the world, feels its fractured y’all-ness, and yet continually lures it toward new harmony. The joy of God is not the absence of pain, but the weaving of pain into beauty—what Whitehead called “tragic beauty.”
Thus, when we say “y’all” to one another—or to God—we name not only plurality, but the honest vulnerability of becoming. We acknowledge that inside each “you” is a whole world, not yet finished. And that within each becoming, there is the possibility—not certainty, but possibility—of joy.
“Y’all coming over for supper?”
“Y’all did a great job on the choir this morning.”
“Y’all got any more peaches?” (to a store clerk)
“Y’all okay back there?” (to one person in a car, possibly representing others)
In these moments, “y’all” typically serves its most familiar function: a plural “you”, used to address or refer to two or more people. But its usage is more nuanced than it first appears.
Over time, “y’all” has also come to be used to address a single person, especially in friendly or polite contexts. While some American speakers consider this singular use to be nonstandard, it often functions as shorthand for a group addressed through one individual. For example, a customer might say to a cashier, “Y’all open late tonight?” referring to the whole store or staff. Or to a pastor after worship: “Y’all did a beautiful job with the service.” Or to a neighbor: “Y’all taking a trip for the holidays?” In each case, the listener is addressed not just as themselves, but as part of something larger—a household, a workplace, a community. The grammar gestures toward affiliation and belonging.
But there is another, deeper possibility. Beyond simply standing in for others, “y’all” can be used to address a single person whose very being is plural—not because they represent others, but because they are others-in-one, or, as Whitehead puts it, many becoming one.
In this usage, “y’all” honors the composite nature of selfhood: the parent who is also a child, the artist who is also a healer, the individual whose past and present selves still speak within them. It may address the one who carries the burdens of a lineage, who embodies a community's memory, or who lives out multiple roles at once. It can also be a quiet act of resistance to reduction—a way of honoring someone as irreducible to stereotype, category, or role. In saying “y’all” to a person, we may be signaling that we see them not as a flattened type, but as a whole world in motion, full of contradictions, histories, and aspirations. Here, “y’all” becomes a gesture of recognition and reverence, naming the layered, relational self—never solitary, always plural.
This use of “y’all” gestures toward a relational ontology, where each being is understood not as a sealed-off unit, but as a gathering of relations, a site of convergence. And this same sensibility may extend to our address of God. To say, “Y’all be with me now, Lord,” is to name God not as a solitary monarch but as a community of presence—a Trinity if you are Christian, but if not that, then as a relational field, a multiplicity of manifestations: comforter, challenger, breath, silence. It is to speak to a singular life that is never not plural—the very ground of relationality, whose oneness is not the erasure of difference but the harmony of it.
To call God “y’all” is to speak to a being whose very life includes the world. God's identity is not sealed off from creation but is constituted through divine feeling of the world’s experiences—every joy, every sorrow, every creature’s becoming. When we say “y’all,” we may be addressing God-and-the-world, In this way, “y’all” functions as a stand-in for the whole living cosmos, gathered up into the heart of God.
One reason this may sound odd to English speakers is that we are accustomed to thinking of persons—human or divine—as self-contained substances, cut off from the world by the boundaries of the skin. We assume that only by imagining the person this way can we preserve their inwardness or private subjectivity. But process theology offers another possibility: the idea that a person is a concrescing subject, a moment of becoming in which the many of the past actual world become one in the privacy of the subject. The person is both many and one. Their singularity is not self-enclosure but relational integration. The many are not outside the person; they are inside, felt and taken up into who the person is. Thus, a person can be both inwardly private and relationally plural—making “y’all” a fitting term of address for those whose wholeness is woven from multiplicity.
Painful Plurality, Joyful Becoming
To say that each person, or even God, is a “y’all” is not to romanticize multiplicity. Plurality can be painful. The selves we have been may contradict the selves we long to be. The roles we carry—parent, worker, citizen, friend—can pull in different directions. The relationships that shape us can wound as well as nourish. And the emotions we carry—grief, shame, longing, rage—can be difficult to hold together in one becoming self.
In process thought, this tension is not a flaw but a fact of existence. Each moment of experience—the “concrescence” of an entity—is a creative integration of many past realities into a new act of becoming. This integration includes subjective aim: the felt lure toward wholeness, beauty, or harmony. But the path toward that aim is not guaranteed. It is fragile. Becoming is a labor, and sometimes it hurts.
Still, the very capacity to carry pain, to feel the dissonance of the many within, is itself a sign of depth. It means we are more than surfaces. It means we are capable of response. To be a “y’all” is to be open—to memory, to future, to contradiction, to love. And it is precisely in the tension, not outside it, that the possibility of joyful becoming arises.
This is as true for God as it is for us. In process theology, God also contains a multiplicity—not just internally (as in the Trinity or divine complexity) but relationally, as one who feels the world. God suffers with the world, feels its fractured y’all-ness, and yet continually lures it toward new harmony. The joy of God is not the absence of pain, but the weaving of pain into beauty—what Whitehead called “tragic beauty.”
Thus, when we say “y’all” to one another—or to God—we name not only plurality, but the honest vulnerability of becoming. We acknowledge that inside each “you” is a whole world, not yet finished. And that within each becoming, there is the possibility—not certainty, but possibility—of joy.
Oxford English Dictionary
U.S. regional (chiefly south Midland and southern, and in African American usage) and Caribbean. Used to address or refer to two or more people; you. Also: used to address or refer to one person, esp. in polite or friendly statements.
Oxford English Dictionary, “y'all (pron.),” March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8086539139.
Oxford English Dictionary, “y'all (pron.),” March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8086539139.