ZOMBIES ARE REAL

Okay, that title feels a little sensational, but my guess is that this will be one of my more popular blogs simply because of the title.  We are a zombie-obsessed society.

A quick Internet search revealed that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of zombie movies.  One site has a “list of zombie featured films or list of zombie movies with non low-budget.”  There are 841!  I’m guessing there are hundreds, maybe even thousands more, if we include the low budget films.  There are also TV series, video games, books, comics and songs about them, lots of them.  We even have an annual Mall Crawl where people dress up and act like zombies.

Why are we so fascinated by zombies?  That question has baffled me, until now.  Laying here at 2:38 in the morning it hit me:

Zombies are real!

They don’t look like the zombies you see in popular media, but think about it.  What are the main traits of a zombie?  They are dead people (often called “the undead”) that are reanimated by some force.  They lack consciousness and self-awareness, yet are able to respond to surrounding stimuli.  And they are often depicted as having an appetite for un-undead people – especially their brains.

In his brilliant novel, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis paints an amazing word portrait of what the afterlife might look like.  It wasn’t intended to be an actual picture of what heaven or hell might look like.  I believe it was more an attempt to explore the devastating affects of sin on the human soul.  In the story some people take a bus ride to a sort of pre-heaven place.  Heaven is at the top of a mountain that is visible when they arrive, but in order to make the journey up the mountain, the passengers must go through a process of becoming more substantial because the terrain in heaven is as hard as diamonds to the newly arriving people.  Stepping on the grass is like walking on spikes.  If a raindrop fell it would go through them like a speeding bullet.  Now here’s the part that will help me get my idea of zombies flushed out: the reason these people are unsubstantial is because of the sin and deception they embraced in their earthly lives.  As they rejected truth they would become less substantial; they began to disappear.  As they embraced truth and let go of their vices they become more solid and opaque and were able to make the journey up the mountain.  This is powerful imagery, and it is similar to the point I am trying to make with my zombie metaphor: the deception of sin drains life from us.  In Lewis’ allegory we become like ghosts.  In mine we become like the walking dead.

Deception knocks at our door early on in life.  We begin to wrestle with the temptation to redefine the rules to suit our own desires.  If we don’t set things right, we find ourselves having increasing difficulty identifying reality.  The lies become our ethos.

Here is an over simplified example: Jonny’s parents tell him not to eat too many sweets because it is not good for him.  He begins to push the line of how “sweets” are defined because at this point he is not outright rebellious.  He just finds ways to explain to himself why certain foods really aren’t that bad.  Before long he is sneaking junk food into his room on a daily basis and he develops an appetite that is only satisfied with the least healthy foods.  By the time Jonny is a teenager he is very overweight and it affects every part of his life.  He begins to realize for a moment what his obsession with junk food is costing him, but he explains it away and continues to embrace his addiction.  In his twenties he begins to have serious health issues as his weight exceeds what a normal scale is capable of measuring.  By the time he reaches his thirties his entire existence is defined by his eating habits.  Nothing else seems to matter.  He learns how to manipulate those around him to get the food he craves, thus destroying all of his relationships.  Angry and hopeless he can choose to repent of his deception, or he can continue on his current path, and there will be nothing left of the real Jonny; the young boy that his parents loved and tried to guide.  There will only remain an animated shell; a self-centered rebel left with his appetite for human brains, I mean junk food.  He lacks self-awareness because the deception he embraced is now his reality.  He is a zombie.

I do not believe that all people that are obese are zombies, or even in sin.  That is not the message I am trying to communicate here.  This is merely an example of how rebellion and deception can take over our life.  This story can be played out with many other vices.  It could be obvious ones like substance addiction or sexual sin, or the less obvious ones that I believe can be even more destructive, like arrogance, hate, power hunger or self-sufficiency.  They all have the potential to steal our life and identity by consuming all of our attention and energy.  Our entire existence can be swallowed up into our vice.  That is what I mean by “becoming a zombie”.

The bottom line is that anything that takes the place of God in our lives is an idol.  It becomes our god, and there is only one God that is good.  All the others lead to destruction.

I think there are levels of zombification.  I also believe the zombie disease comes on very slowly in most cases.  It’s much easier to identify it in others than it is in ourselves.  For example, have you ever had a phone conversation with someone and they barely even knew that you’re there?  You could set the phone down and walk away, come back in 40 minutes and they are still talking.  Do you know someone that says or does things that shock others, but they have no clue how disconnected they are?  Have you tried to have a conversation with someone and they just don’t seem to be all there?  Do you know someone that is so caught up in something that all of the rest of the world is looked at through the context of that thing?  (a sex addict looks at everything else from the lens of sex)

You may think that these are just signs of self-centeredness, but self- centeredness is the very thing that makes us susceptible to becoming a zombie.  Life was intended to be relational, because the meaning of life is love, and agape love cannot exist without relationship (see my blog titled “…about suffering” and the section “Made For Love” for more on this).  That is why God is a Trinity.  Even within Himself, God has relationship.  God is love.  I call on C.S. Lewis again to help make my point.  In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis writes this about the Trinity:

And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.

I did an Internet search for “how to prepare for the zombie apocalypse” and 811,000 pages came up.  wow… 

The bad news is, we are all infected with the zombie virus.  It is in our sinful nature.  The book of Romans has a lot to say about it, way more wisdom than I can give.  However, I will give some culturally relevant thoughts.

The best preparation is prevention.  Here are a few tips on how to inoculate yourself against this deadly pandemic:

·      The First Commandment is: “You shall have no other gods before me.”  This is the only real way of staying human.  Don’t let anything take the place of God; keep Him at the center and His grace will see you through.

·      When you have moments of clarity about what your vice is doing to you, like Jonny did, act on it.  Get whatever help you need.  Listen to those around you that love you and want you to be free. 

·      I often say that reality is a brutal teacher.  Embrace the lessons it teaches you.  “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)  No more excuses or blame.

·      Don’t hang around other zombies.  You will get infected.

Maybe next time I’ll write about our fascination with vampires.