i stole it from charlie, he stole it from a priest.

Sunday, August 30, 2026

One of the prerequisites for being a writer is that you have to be a sucker for a good phrase. I’m sure that non-writing humans also love good phrases, but for those of us who feel the most alive when we sit down and exteriorize the interiors of our lives, a good phrase is like a catchy melody. Your mind won’t let it go, and it follows you around until you address it.

The simplest way to address these mind-sticking phrases is by creating a list. Pithier phrases often become titles, and I’m a sucker for a good title, too. I have kept a list of these for years. This list is sometimes in a notebook, or sometimes in a single note in a notes app, or sometimes it’s individual notes in a notes app that are tagged or categorized as “Titles.” Here’s some of those phrases/titles that I’ve been hoarding over the years:

10,000 Destinies, After Hours, All Now Mysterious Shall Be Bright At Last, Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea, American Prophets, An Axe to the Frozen Sea, And It Echoed Across the Island, The Anthologized World, The Apocryphal Stories of…, The Bitter Contrary, The Birth of Light, The Cloud Farm, Dark Cycle, David the King, Death Princess X, Deus Ex Machina, Do Not Exaggerate the World!, The Ebony Bone, Ecstatic Utterances of Light, The Electric Guest, The Esoterics of Time, Evolutionary History, Father, Son, Ghost, Flesh of the Gods, Franco + Margene, Gabriel, Who Calms the Waters, Ghost Life, Ghosts in the Shape of Months, Girl Across the Sea, Giving Up The Ghost: Life as a Consequence of Death, The Gods of Modern Luxury, The Golden Age, Haversham’s Ghost, The Ice Tree, Inter Alia, Junebug, The Lake Witch, The Late Hours, The Lazarus Blues, A Leaky Interlude, The Lord of Stories, A March of Lights, Midrash, Midwar, Minor Prophets of Lesser Gods, A Modern Ghost, A Misshapen Clock, My Demon Friend, My Funny Family, Neon Soldiers Club, Notes Concerning a Helpless Endeavor, O Light!, On Purchasing a Box of Prophylactics Late at Night From Your Local 24 Hour Pharmacy, Order of the Legendaries, Perils and Pitfalls of Friendships, A Piano Filled With Souls, Pitch Black Fictions, Practical Mysticism, or, the Everyday Demiurge, The Quiet Metaphysics of Eleanor Rooney, Ragnorak, Readings in American Vandalism, The Rotting Garden, Sam and Sara, Sister Savage, The Sky, As Seen Between Latitudes, Some Time Later…, Songs for Imaginary People, Teeth, These Are the Bells, The Undaunted Firsts, Under Shafts of Melancholy Light, When Constructing A World, Vocational Holiness, A Whistler in the Dark, Winter of the Whale, Working Title, World Without End (…that ends), The Yesterblades

Some of these are phrases that popped into my head; most of them are phrases I stole from books, movies, conversations, posters, etc. If you happen to be a writer and you like any of these, feel free to take them. You can’t apparently copyright a title, so if we both end up publishing “On Purchasing a Box of Prophylactics Late at Night From Your Local 24 Hour Pharmacy”, we’re both covered and will make our fortunes.

But the theft element of these titles is important, because I stole the phrase The Bright Sadness from a Christian worship artist named Charlie Hall.

Shortly after I became a Christian in high school, my friend Lara, who had grown up in the church, let me borrow a DVD called OneDay033. This was a documentary about a Passion event in this large field in Texas. (I’m an elder Millennial, so that link will take you to Passion’s Wikipedia page if you want to learn more about them.) I remember Beth Moore asking us if we were ready to inhale God’s scripture since God breathed it. John Piper told us that God is most glorified in us when we’re most satisfied in him. Kirk Cameron was there for some reason, probably aruging that since humans can hold a banana, evolution isn’t real, or something like that. I could look it up, but Kirk Cameron only deserves my time if I’ve taken a couple of gummies and want to watch Family Ties.

The music is what caught my attention, though. Amongst the sermons, Chris Tomlin, David Crowder Band, and Charlie Hall (amongst others) played their acoustic guitars while their lead guitarists cosplayed as The Edge. There were others, but these were the standouts to me. What really made Charlie Hall stand out amongst this milieu was that he was unafraid of being verbose or using more obscure Scripture references.

To compare what I mean, here’s a breakdown:

(For the record, David Crowder Band was the most sonically diverse and artistically-oriented of these dudes. I still listen to their albums from time to time - I don’t with any of the others.)

This has been my long-ass way of contextualizing how I came across the phrase The Bright Sadness: Charlie Hall used it for the title of his 2008 album. In this short blurb about the album from 2008, Charlie said the biggest theme running through the songs was the brokenness of humanity/the world and the redemption/hope he found in Jesus. As a devout and serious Evangelical, I found the paradox beautifully encapsulated in the phrase. And all these years later, even though I no longer believe in original sin or the need for redemption, this phrase still deeply resonates with me.

Every day I wake up and the I experience the beauty and brutality of being alive: I get to watch my boys grow into each phase of their childhoods while my government murders Iranian and Palestinian children who are their same age. I DoorDash sushi for dinner while others are going to bed with their stomachs begging for something to fill them. I have had a life of relative ease, love, and joy while others live lives of struggle, indifference, and desperation.

There’s one core question that has been haunting me for as long as I can remember: what the fuck is all this? “This” referring to everything: existence, sounds, shapes, colors, my ability to ask the question, “What the fuck is all this?” And I find that saying it’s a bright sadness makes sense. Not at a logical level, or a conscious level, but it’s like a forgotten phrase in a half-remembered dream that you spend your whole day trying to recall. And then, when you’re washing dishes, it bubbles into your consciousness, and it feels like being in middle school and you’ve successfully unlocked your locker.

A few years ago, feeling nostalgic, I plugged the phrase into Google, and much to my surprise, Charlie Hall’s album wasn’t the first hit: it was a blog post from the Orthodox Church of America discussing the phrase. It turns out that the phrase originates in a Lenten devotional by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, who refers to the “sad brightness” of his life very similarly to how Charlie Hall explained his: the sadness of his brokenness, the brightness of God’s redeeming work. But Fr. John Breck in the linked essay flips the phrase into the bright sadness, and says the following:

“It expresses what the Fathers of the Church call an “antinomy,” a truth that defies normal logic. The word is an oxymoron of sorts, which describes a paradoxical spiritual state characterized by a profound mingling of joy and grief.”

I stole the phrase from Charlie Hall, Charlie Hall stole the phrase from Fr. John Breck who sideways stole it from Fr. Alexander Schmemann who stole it from the Bible (basically.) The wisdom of religious traditions belong to all of us, even if we don’t believe, practice, or identify with it. Normally, “do not steal” is one of those pieces of wisdom, but it doesn’t work when you’re talking about wisdom itself.

I love Fr. Breck’s phrase: “…a profound mingling of joy and grief.” The beauty and the brutality of existence, all at once. I’m using the phrase for this project because that’s what life has felt like to me: a bright sadness. Every amazing experience in life will end. But so will the painful ones. And learning how to navigate the tension between those realities is where life really blooms.