Allo Darlin', Resurrection, and Change

“And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen all my old friends, but I really love my new friends. It feels like I’ve known them a long while” 

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ve heard all the songs that’ll mean something”—Allo Darlin’ “Tallulah”

The word liminal is not usually on the tip of my tongue. But I feel it almost daily.

For the uninitiated, liminality refers to the threshold between two planes of existence. It’s the time of transition from one period to the next. It’s the space that is neither one place nor another. It is the dawn. It is the dusk. It’s not quite daylight or it’s quite night.

I first heard “Tallulah” at an Allo Darlin’ concert in October of 2010. While playing as a 4-piece popsmith extraordinaire, the band opened with a skeletal number. Elizabeth Darling stood alone on the short stage armed only with a ukulele and her voice. The next four minutes were a powerful witness to a liminal life, a life between stations. In “Tallulah” she chronicled the small joys of bumming around Europe with her new friends, yet feeling strangely nostalgic for a past slowly fading away. As she recalled these friends, she also remembered the power of music and its formative presence in her life. And now she cautiously wonders if this is it. Has she finally heard all the songs that will ever mean something to her life? For someone formed by the transforming power music, it was a bleak thought. The ambiguity of her old and new life threatened to tear her in two. But caught between nostalgia and optimism she was still strangely at peace with her present. Life was still pregnant with meaning.

In our liminal life, our past and our future are at odds. We can’t embrace our future without letting go of the past. But letting go of the past is letting go of your self.

Can this ambiguity be reconciled? Is there a way beyond this impasse?

To me, there is. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, he takes this liminal existence of ours, embraces it and makes it his own. He transforms it, brings it together, and makes it whole. In his resurrection from the dead, Jesus is the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead (i.e. you and me, once we die). In his resurrection, we rise with him.

And what rises with him is our whole self—all our yesterdays, all our todays, and all our tomorrows. In the resurrection of the dead our liminality is resolved once and for all. Who we have been and who we will become come together in a resurrected whole.

If we examine our present experiences in light of who we are becoming we recognize that our future doesn’t destroy our past, if completes and fulfills it. In anticipating the rising of our whole self we’re able to see and embrace our past, present, and future as something brought together and restored by God. It constitutes our very personhood. We’re free to cherish the past, move bravely into the future, and live in the vitality of the present.