For the last month, our oldest has been belting out Christmas carols. It is sweet even as the lyrics are often not entirely accurate. A few weeks ago, Jim busted out “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” which is one of his go-to standards this time of year. This isn’t an accident because I have been heavily dosing the holiday playlists with the soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas for as long as he’s been alive. He started singing:

Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king
Peace on earth and mercy wild

I chuckled a little and corrected him. It’s “mercy mild” not “mercy wild.” And then I immediately wished that I had not done that. A few minutes later I told Jim that I actually liked his version better.

There is little about the Christmas story that one can consider mild. It’s the story of God becoming incarnate as a helpless and vulnerable baby. The way I see it, the story reads like a desperate, last-ditch gambit to save the world. The co-conspirator with God is an unwed teenage girl who willingly agrees to this harebrained scheme even though her pregnancy could have cost Mary her life one way or another. She, an uncertain fiancé, and a ragtag group of shepherds stand on one side as the vengeful puppet king of the world’s foremost superpower stands on the other.

It is a story of refugees and late night escapes over borders. It is a story where Mary sings of God, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Per Wikipedia, Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville is designed in style of Egyptian Revival architecture. It is not a style you normally see especially for a church. But the good folks at Downtown Pres really went for it. The painted interiors, the oasis-in-the-desert stained glass windows, and even the crosses with Horus falcon-like wings evoked the banks of the northern Nile. As my brother and I sat in the pews staring at this church unlike any we’d ever seen, there was only one way that two kids born in the 1980s could compute it: “It’s like we’re in the desert world from Super Mario Bros. 3.”

The reason that my brother and I were crammed into a padded pew into downtown Nashville on a Friday night was we were attending The Liturgists Gathering, a two-day assemblage centered around the eponymous podcast on science, faith, and art. It was all kind of a head trip. I told Taylor as we walked back to our car the first night that I felt like I had just drank from a firehose. Not only was there myriad of interesting topics discussed, but the sheer diversity of the gathering—from conservative-leaning evangelicals to spiritually-inclined atheists to everything in-between—is unlike anything in which I have participated.

What is the common thread for such a motley assortment of people? As “Science” Mike McHargue, one of the podcast’s hosts, said on Saturday morning, it was rejection. Most of the people in that room had been turned away from or had to leave their church at some point. The reasons weren’t all the same nor was the intensity of that rejection. For some of us, we still felt comfortable in a church even if the type of church we attend is markedly different from our earlier homes. Yet for others that rejection was violent and there was no safe sanctuary to be found in a place of worship.

I don’t watch Doctor Who. It’s a show I’ve always intended to dive into, but the sheer volume of episodes is so overwhelming that I have done little more than sample. But I do read Doctor Who recaps on the internet because my siblings and their spouses are big Doctor Who fans and I want to be conversant with them.

None of this is really about the space and time traveling British hero. It’s about a random line in a recap of this past week’s episode (by Caroline Siede) which centered around a 17th century witch hunt:

Once you’ve murdered a couple dozen people under the auspices of doing God’s will, it’s hard to admit you may have made a mistake. So the only way forward is to double down, rope more people into your violent system, and do whatever you can to justify your twisted sense of morality—both to others and to yourself.

Reading that, I heard the click of an unlocking door. If you have known me for any period of time then you know that one of the things that has vexed and haunted me for so long is how people who claim to follow Jesus can commit all sorts of actions that are diametrically opposed to Jesus’ teachings.

After finishing my book at lunch yesterday, I went to Parnassus to get a new book (shout out to my seniors from last year for the gift certificate). After lingering among the shelves for as long as I could, I made my selection and headed to the cashier. After handing my book to the woman behind the counter, she noticed my Furman shirt.

“Did you go to Furman?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I spent some time there as a child. My father played football for VMI and growing up we used to go to all the games they played.”

We then had a nice little chat about her dad, how her father used to always encourage her that there would be a next year (VMI is traditionally not great at football), and I talked a little about my sons and the lessons we try to instill in them. It was a short conversation; maybe two minutes. It was not anything that is going to set the world on fire. We wished each other a good afternoon and I stepped out under the bright blue sky with my new book in hand.

Earlier today I found myself trying my hardest not to blubber like a baby in the middle of Shake Shack. I think crying is a good and healthy thing to do. But I was kind of mystified about why it was happening. I had set up camp at a table for lunch with two clear goals: to each a cheeseburger with crinkle fries and to sit there until I finished reading the Mister Rogers biography The Good Neighbor. I crushed both of those goals and it was wonderful.

Yet as I read author Maxwell King describing the death of Fred Rogers, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I took a deep breath, composed myself, and trudged forward. More tears. Why was this happening? King’s writing was fine, but it wasn’t particularly resonant emotionally. I knew that Mister Rogers had died. It happened a decade and a half ago. What was going on?

I grew up on Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They aired back to back on SCETV. If you had asked me which of the two had more of an impact on me, I probably would have said Sesame Street. It’s blinding creativity combined with education, the let’s-put-on-a-show ethos of the Muppets, and its sense of humor has always been something that aspire to as I teach today. I liked Mister Rogers, but it wasn’t the show that I was anxious to show my own children. Not that there has to be a competition between the two, but they are inextricably linked in my head: the binary stars of my earliest memories of media.

I have spent today stuck. I’m writing a sermon for Sunday. I’ve been excited about the text for a couple of weeks. But I can’t write a thing about it. I feel like I’m cracking up. Twelve people are dead in California. It has not even been two weeks since eleven people were killed in Pittsburgh. And nothing is happening. Nothing is going to change. It’s been normalized. And I am tired. I am numb. I want to scream and yell all of the cuss words.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve written something like this. That scares me. Right now, I do not like this world. It is full of hatred and vitriol. This country that is my home seems to love guns more than life itself. Or at the very least, the machine that holds guns to be America’s most sacred institution is too loud to let the cries of those mourning tens of thousands of dead be heard.

I want to run. I want to run because, where I sit right now, this is just the tip of a crappy iceberg. I want to take my sons and my wife and get away from here. Will this feeling pass? Probably. But the fact that this feeling is so suffocatingly strong right now concerns me. I’m tired of dead people. I’m tired of thoughts and prayers. I’m tired of the racists and the white nationalists. I’m tired of the Christians who either actively support this or merely stay silent. I’m tired and I want to run.

It is staggering sometimes to truly think about all the people that make us who we are. Sure there are the obvious sources: the ones who raised us, family members, teachers, mentors. But then you think about the people whose stories transformed your own journey. Or the ones who wrote a story or a song or created something that changed the trajectory of your life.

Though the celebration existed long before the American celebration of Thanksgiving, it is appropriate that All Saints’ Day kicks off this month of gratitude. It is a day when we celebrate those who have gone before us in faith and who are now part of that great cloud of witnesses urging us on as we journey forward.

Before this day comes to a close, I want to remember a few of those people who have been saints to my life. Some like my grandmother have had an exponentially larger impact on my life than others. This list is also by no means exhaustive, but simply those that came to mind as I meditated for a short amount of time. Nor are they all people I have met. And some of the names on here are not even people who were necessarily Christian, but people whose lives have in some way extended a grace to me that has enriched my faith.