I don’t know if I can say enough good things about Wake Up Dead Man. Yes, it is another twisty Knives Out mystery with Rian Johnson and his stellar cast taking the series in a darker, more gothic direction. This whodunnit—set in a remote parish in upstate New York—is particularly in my wheelhouse because it creates the space for this to be a story about faith and skepticism.

Far from being a didactic, both sides are given virtuous, fully drawn characters which allows the film to be a genuine conversation between the ideas. Wake Up Dead Man also delves into the ways in which faith is twisted by fear, power, and the love of wealth into something that can cripple personal lives and poison communities on a larger scale. It is entertaining, mysterious, funny, and takes seriously grace, forgiveness, calling, and doubt.

Yet a couple of days after watching the film with my family, what lingers with me most is a particular scene about midway through the movie. I will try to tiptoe around spoilers as I provide some context. Detective Benoit Blanc (played by series mainstay Daniel Craig) and a young priest named Jud Duplenticy (an excellent Josh O’Connor) have teamed up to figure out a seemingly impossible crime for which Jud is a person of interest.

Usually my Christmas season listening is a steady diet of A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio and a curated list of merry favorites. But this year there has also been a steady dose of the album Getting Killed by Geese. I saw the album on numerous end-of-the-year “Best of” lists and figured that I should give it a listen. I almost didn’t make it past the album opener “Trinidad,” which features a cacophony of drums and guitars as frontman Cameron Winter wails, “There’s a bomb in my car!” This ain’t Christmas music. But it might just be Advent music.

I am not going to sit here and tell you what any of these lyrics mean. Sure, I can posit what a hundred horses dancing in times of war and conversations with Joan of Arc convey but it would all be shots in the dark. But how does the album feel? In the chaos, noise, anxiety, and brief moments of grace, it sounds like now. Both now in the sense of this time and place in history and now as in Advent. This is a season of waiting, expectation, and hoping for some light to come into a dark world.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
—Matthew 5:9

What does it mean for someone to be a peacemaker in the world today? For a long time, I thought that I knew. I am a textbook Enneagram 9 aka “The Peacemaker.” I crave peace in the deepest parts of my spirit. Yet for a long time, I confused peace with an absence of conflict. This approach can work in the short term, but it doesn’t often lead to any lasting peace. To make peace, to try to create some sort of place where there is flourishing for everyone involved requires more than being nice, sending good thoughts, or offering up prayers.

Niceness, thoughts, and prayers are good things. Yet to make peace out of strife requires something more from each of us. We have to be honest about where hurt lies and humble enough to listen to those who disagree with us. I have not figured this out, but this is my good faith albeit flawed effort.

No one should lose their life for what they believe or say in public. Full stop. It is a tragedy any time a person is a victim of gun violence. People lose their loved ones or, at best, watch them go through needless suffering. Lives that could go in all sorts of directions are cut short. What happened to Charlie Kirk, what happened to the students impacted by the shooting in Colorado, what happens all too often every day is a tragedy that we have gotten way too familiar with in this country.

If you follow me on Instagram, you likely noticed a trend on Tuesday nights this past year. At some point I would post a photo of a stuffed animal somewhere in the vicinity of a hospital. When I began my chaplain residency at Vanderbilt, my youngest son was anxious about what I would face while working at a hospital. He was especially concerned about my weekly overnight shifts. So each Tuesday morning, my son would select a stuffed animal to be my Overnight Shift Companion to keep me company. And I would take a picture of that friend at the hospital to let Liam know all was well.

The truth of the matter was a little more complicated. All was well, but there were many nights when I would sit with the dead, dying, and grieving. These are moments that are sacred and a natural part of life yet they are still incredibly difficult. As the year went on, I became more comfortable sharing appropriate glimpses of these hard moments with my boys. And I still kept taking fun pictures of plush friends every Tuesday night. There was room for both.

Our residency cohort—which included a Black Baptist pastor, a Methodist, an Episcopalian from Massachusetts, a Muslim Imam, and a Catholic priest from India—witnessed a great deal of turmoil both inside and outside the hospital. We had many discussions about the various dumpster fires that were going on in our country. Not to be overdramatic, but there was sometimes a foreboding sense that the world was coming crashing down.

This post contains some spoilers for the movie Superman. If you haven’t seen it, what are you doing? Go see it. It’s good!

The tagline for the original Superman movie in 1978 was “You’ll believe a man can fly.” And, sure, since I was 9 years old, Superman has been cool to me because he could fly, move at superspeed, hoist a car, and shoot lasers from his eyes (technically heat vision). Yet it has long been true that the aspect of this strange visitor from another planet has been his goodness. Despite having abilities far beyond mortal men, Superman always sought to make the world a better place for every man, woman, child, and squirrel.

I’m less concerned with whether a man can be powerful. But to make me believe a powerful man can be kind? That is something extraordinary.

So let’s cut to the chase. Superman, written and directed by James Gunn, did just that. It is a fun and fantastic comic book come to life with bright colors, kaiju, pocket universes, and all sorts of superhero shenanigans. I had a goofy grin on my face for most of my two viewings of the movie in theaters. Yet even more than the fun, the film captured the essence of Superman and even made it work in a present day context.

Last night—the night before you turned 15—I spent way too much time trying to figure out what we needed to do for you to get your Learner’s Permit. Besides the fact that the State of Tennessee unsurprisingly has woefully inefficient websites, I was struck by the fact that sometime in the next few weeks I will be sitting next to you as you drive a car.

Now I completely trust you. Although you did recently say something to the effect of “How hard could driving be? I do it in Mario Kart all the time.” That terrified me slightly. Then we had one of our conversations where I came at you with logic, you doubled down with stubbornness, I pivoted into absurdity, and that finally made you crack a smile. We have a lot of conversations like that and I enjoy them. But I digress. Once you learn the basics of driving, I have no doubt that you are going to be a safe and responsible young man behind the wheel. I’m just having more trouble with the fact that you are going to be a young man behind the wheel.

Fifteen. As that number has approached, you have dangled this upcoming age out there in some sort of attempt to make mine and your mom’s head explode. Every kid probably does that when they sense they are getting to an age that once seemed impossible to their parents. Your mom has usually responded by denying that it was going to happen. I usually look you square in the eye and stoically assert that I know how the math works. But the truth is it is kind of hard to believe you are fifteen. It is here that I am starting to hear the clock tick on you one day going off to college.