When I was young, my Dad used to play Concrete Blonde's wonderful album Bloodletting a lot. I had a few favourite tracks from it but the one that I think got under my skin the most was their cover of Andy Prieboy's “Tomorrow, Wendy”.
It is complete now, two ends of time are neatly tied
A one way street, she's walking to the end of the line
And there she meets the faces she keeps in her heart and mind
And they say: “Good bye”
Tomorrow, Wendy, you're going to die
Tomorrow, Wendy, you're going to die
I remember saying to an adult at a party that I felt sorry for Wendy – with the song being played all the time, she was forever just a day away from death. I vaguely remember a puzzled response – I might not have done a good job at that age of communicating the strange framing of time I had in mind.
But I think I had a point – while the Wendy this song was based on had already died by the time it was written, in another sense, in this existence, she is trapped in the time of her suffering leading to her death. And so are we.
Underneath the chilly grey November sky
We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive
And we're shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie is driving by
And she says, good try
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Another “odd things kids say” moment I had with the song came a bit later, with my Dad. I asked him if he thought there was a better version than the Bloodletting one “out there”, waiting to be created. He said no, the Bloodletting version was amazing; I agreed, but said something like, I think the song is so good that it feels like someone could perform it even better.
I've since found a quite a few versions of the song I like:
They've all added to my sense of and love for the song, but I'm not sure the perfect version I was imagining as a kid can exist in this world. But something in me will listen to these other versions again and again and again, to hear an echo of what might be.
Or maybe another way of putting it, is that the perfect version of the song is really the one I'm listening to, right here, right now.
In most versions, the tone of the music mostly hovers in a gentle, almost wistful kind of sadness. But at it's core it's song of deep grief, and the anger that comes with that.
I told the priest, don't count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us
No I don't wonder why, I wonder what He thought it would get us
Hey, hey, good bye
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the definitive songs of the age are songs of lament.
Songs that scream at God, like “Tomorrow, Wendy”, or at yourself, or at the world – although it's not really clear to me if there's much difference between those.
Songs of shame and hurt and rage and despair and even hatred, redeemed only in the vulnerability of endless tears.
Only God says “Jump”, so I set the time
Coz if He ever saw it, it was through these eyes of mine
And if He ever suffered it was me who did the crying
Hey, hey, good bye
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Tomorrow Wendy's going to die
Don't get me wrong, I love joyful songs, too, but they are somehow out of their time; like I'm not really meant to hear them yet but I've been given a sneaky preview over a muffled old cassette player, sitting in a saucepan at a party.
I think Christians sometimes conceive of the world as if it was the era of the New Jersualem, give or take a few incidental details.
Maybe they are just closer to God than me. Because I feel like we're mostly all still exiles. Still in Egypt, still in Babylon; still waiting for deliverance to come. Waiting out an endless Holy Saturday in which it seems like even God Themself might be dead, somehow. Trapped in that vanishing liminal space between the Fall and the Second Coming, and we know essentially nothing about either. To sustain us we have the resurrection, perhaps the smallest miracle that could possibly work; a foreshadowing of the full transformation of everything, that somehow also at once contains the totality of it. Not so much an event in the past to look back on, as an echo from a future that we turn our hope towards. Like Wendy, we are still trapped in the realm of our own impending encounters with a cliff; but we hear whispers of a day that comes after Tomorrow.
And if we're still outside the Kingdom, then where is it? Where should we seek it?
Wherever God is, surely, there is the Kingdom.
The apostles wrote the New Testament like the Kingdom was already well established on Earth... but in some sense that is perhaps also a foreshadowing, a small and hidden thing, a seed planting. The church is not a grown tree! And none knows the hour, not even the Son.
Maybe you have been more blessed by the Spirit than I have so far; maybe in your wanderings through the wilderness, you have stumbled into a more delineated part of the Kingdom. Praise God.
On the other hand, if lament and exile is your lot, just remember this: God is with us nonetheless – despite the paradox, God is also everywhere that's outside the Kingdom, because there is nowhere that God isn't.