Sufjan Stevens is one of our great modern songwriters, capable of combining a wide range of sounds and styles (Steve Reich, Vince Guaraldi, folk, electronica) with such ease, it’s almost whimsical. But even with all of its bells and whistles, Stevens’ music is deeply affecting, employing fanciful and intricate arrangements to tell heartbreaking stories of faith, love, and humanity.

“Casimir Pulaski Day” is one of the best examples of that, a gentle yet searing story about maintaining faith in the midst of death that’s full of striking details and imagery. Stevens revels in the mundane (e.g., experiences of young love and lust, the way someone tucks in their shirt, a nurse’s behavior), which grounds his story of grief in a deeply human and relatable manner. And unlike so many other Christian songwriters, Stevens never tries to be positive and encouraging or wrap things up all neat and tidy, because after all, death is never neat and tidy.

When he sings “Tuesday night at the Bible study/We lift our hands and pray over your body/But nothing ever happens” or “All the glory that the Lord has made/And the complications when I see his face” in his wisp of a voice, it’s a reminder that we’ll never have all of the answers — not on this side of eternity, anyway. Instead, Stevens encourages us to sit with life’s mysteries and complexities, painful and uncomfortable as they may be, and to be honest about our own anxieties and doubts. To do anything else would be to deny our very humanity.