Zombie Apocalyspe, Emotion and Sin

It is no secret that zombies are very popular today.  What is it about swarms of grotesque, walking dead creatures that appeals to people.  I would like to offer a reflection why this might be based on a dream I had last night.  But first a little background on what I have been thinking about the last few days since my dreams seem to come from recent experiences.  

First, the last few days I discovered that the adoration chapel in Los Alamos has a book from Magnificant called "Praying with St Paul."  Now for most of my life St Paul has been one of my least favorite Saints and I did not care for him on a personal basis.  However in the last year or so he is now one of my most favorite Saints and I have wanted to learn more about him so I have been going in and reading the book.   So far one reflection I found very thought provoking and that is the shocking nature of the crucifix.  We do not think about it much but we are literally wearing recklessness of a guy being executed around our necks.  Imagine what people thought about that 2000 years ago.  Apparently St Paul was a big proponent of the Crucifix.  The modern equivalent would be to wear a t-shirt of a guy in an electric chair.  If you think about it this really is not that different than many of the heavy metal t-shirts out there.  It is not a very pleasant symbol.  We have just been sensitized to it. 


Second, 5 years ago I came across a situation that forced me to realize my view of the world might be incomplete.  I am naturally a very rational person and am not influenced much by emotion in comparison to most people.  However I came across a person who forced me to rethink my stance.  I began studying emotion and forgiveness in earnest.  Both it's strengths and weaknesses.  One person I came across during this study was Kina Grannis.  She is an independent musician from Los Angeles who gained a world-wide following on YouTube for her emotionally honest music.  I think personality wise we are in many ways opposites so I found it interesting to see her point of view of the world.  Every couple of months I might look and see what she is up to on her YouTube channel.  I did so last night and I came across.  Some collaboration she was doing with some former UCSD students.  Here it is.  It is called "The Last":





Now when I saw this I was impressed by their ability to use emotion to tell a story.  Now I went to UCSD for graduate school and in my experience it has a culture that is somewhat emotional and mellow in nature.  I can connect with some of the videos because they film them at apartment complexes I am familiar with.  It was not like my prior undergraduate experience at Colorado State which was much more rough.  I am not surprised these guys came out of this kind of ecosystem.  However a few things bothered me.  First, I have noticed that over the years Kina has subtly shed innocence.  She never claimed innocense as a trademark but as time has gone on it has happened.  She has subtly implied through her music that she is comfortable with not practicing chastity and this particular video reinforces that observation.  It is clear to me that we have different values systems.  It makes me sad, but I am not surprised.  Most people accept a non-chaste values system.  I am used to it.  That is also why though I am typically quite impressed when I come across the rare person who does.  Personally I am a big fan of innocence.  If you ever met me you might not think so but I am.  For instance I HATE swearing.  I hate it especially when I hear my brothers swear.  It makes me sad because they are eroding their dignity away when they do it.  Second, the story itself while heartwarming is not realistic.  If you talk to most people they will not have fond memories of may prior love interests.  Most of the time these stories are marked by betrayal and brokenness.  Sure you can learn something from them but at a very great cost.  It is debatable to me if the cost is even worth it.  My personal opinion is that it is important to guard your heart.  In reality emotion cannot heal these pains so I felt as if the movie was in some sense lying.  Kina and the other guy are in some sense lying to one another even because they have not made any kind of real commitment to one another.  I looked through comments on the video and I saw other people shared my point of view.  One of the most mysteries I spend the most time trying to gain more insight into justice, mercy and forgiveness and how this works in relationships.  Christianity seems to add a super-rational element to the discussion that is beyond understanding.  "Beyond I make all things new."  I am trying to find ways to understand this better in my own life.  For instance there have even been Saints you have made the claim that certain types of damage that can be engaged in during relationships that cannot even be healed by God.  God's justice and mercy are quite interesting for me to think about it is baffling. 

Anyways - let's get to the matter at hand...  Zombie's, now keep in mind this was a dream so it is a little hazy so please forgive ambiguity. 

In my dream I was transported back to my old house in San Diego.  Throughout the dream some friends and I were driving around town and I noticed that some of them were changing.  They were becoming agressive and they were hurting one another.  In particular they would tear at each other's skin especially around the face and mouth.  Generally with sharp objects such as knives and skewers. For all intended purposes they looked like zombies to me so that is how I will refer to them.  The people who were zombiefied were in various stages of zombification.  Some were only slightly zombies.  Others very much so and you could tell the difference based on how cut up they were.  The zombie's also really did not attack non-zombie's.  Only their own kind and it was proportional to how zombified the person was.  The most zombified person's were attacked the most.  The least zombified persons were attacked less so by other zombie's.  The zombie's sort of had a disease but not really. some of the zombies were able to get away from the lifestyle.  In fact some of my friends who had become zombified were able to get away from it and become normal again.  The zombies could not be described as mindless.  They had consciousness about them and the person they once were was still there.  It was more like they were totally enraged with hate.  Also, interestingly, the zombies did not really try to infect everyone to be zombies.  They mostly focused on their friends and family.  Effectively the zombies would form what were effectively family groups consisting of family and friends they had convinced to join them.  That is who they tried to pull down the most to live in the zombie life style.  They were not extremely violent about it.  It was more like a form of peer pressure they used to get people to join their group.  It is not really clear to me what exactly convinced people to decide to join a zombie family other than the fact they knew the other zombies as friends and family.  They did not hide the violence and torture they engaged in with each other and were quite open about it.  They actually seemed to convince others to join in.  Even though the zombies only recruited family and friends I could tell the epidemic was spreading across the city.    You just could not see it as you walked down the street unless you looked more closely and intimately.  In day to day life many of the zombies looked fairly normal.  The worst zombies looked only slightly cut up while they walked down the street.  You could particularly tell the home of a "zombie family."  When you did get into a house that was infected with zombiism the members of that family were in some sense literally torturng one another.  Their was typically one Alpha zombie in the house and a number of subservient zombies.  All the zombies would yell at each other and engage in tearing flesh off of each other's bodies and faces with knives and other sharp objects.

In particular one friend of mine (This person did not correspond to any person I actually know,  I just thought of him as close friend) was an alpha zombie.  As we were walking down the street together a rival group of zombies drove up in a white car and kidnapped my friend by throwing him in the car and driving off.  They wanted to make him a subservient zombie in their group.  They took him to the top of a building where the other zombies in their group were.  Myself and another friend were watching what was happing from the top of a neighboring building in hopes of rescuing him.  It turned out though that my friend was too strong a zombie for them and he took over as the head torturer of the group that kidnapped him.  I could watch him stab one of his kidnappers through the cheek with a knife and proceed to drag him around and take control of him.  I was worried he might be the worse zombie of all.  

The dream ended with me on the top of a metal roof where a zombie family was living.  In this particular home there were members in a much lower state of zombiism that did not participate in the torture or even hang out near it.  These persons would cook food and throw it to the more violent zombies to keep them in their state of death and their lifestyle of torture.  At this particular time we had just realized a particular chemical weakness of the zombies.  Unfortuntately the zombies realized it shortly after we did as well and had begun to take steps to work around it.  Basically the dream ended there.

Ordinarily I would just ignore a dream like this and think nothing of it, but I am kind of in a season of reflection right now so I decided to ponder it awhile and I asked God if there was anything worth learning from this.  Then I just zoned out and fell asleep again and when I woke up I had a thought. 

Zombies are essentially the "walking dead."  In some sense who else is the walking dead?  People not living in a state of grace.  I have often wondered what the world would look like if a person's state of grace were visible.  I wonder now if I have seen some glimpse of what that might look like.  So often I feel as though family/friends is either the ultimate conduit of virtue or vice.  Some family and friends just pull you down to a low common denominator and encourage sin.  This happens alot among people you would hope have your best interest at heart.  Think about all the unmarried couples living together or the friends who encourage others to steal or engage in various other things they should not be doing.  Sometimes even parents or aunts or uncles encourage sin at times.  No one is really innocent, and we have all led others to sin at some point.   It is not all bad though, sometimes family and friends do help get you out.  It goes both ways.  The low-order zombies throwing food to the worse zombies are kind of like enablers.  Somewhat involved but perhaps not to the same degree. In the end the worse zombies are only hurting themselves and those around them.  And the fact that people for no real reason joined the zombies was indicative of the irrational nature of sin.  There was hope and redemption too though.  As I said some zombie's left the zombie lifestyle.  I had friends in the dream that did this.  Even my friend who was one of the worst zombie's was trying to get out when he was more of his normal self on the street.   The thing is so many things look nice and friendly and sweet on the outside, but when you look closer things might not be so ordered. 

As time goes on I realize how much brokenness and hurt there is out there among people.  When you really try to follow a Christian lifestyle I have found you are shielded from alot of problems you may be totally ignorant of.  For instance I had a friend once tell me some problems he was having with his girlfriend.  I could not believe it because though I have had trouble with Catholic Ladies at times it was nothing like what he was describing.  After that I say give me the Catholic lady challenges any day thank you.  I definitely appreciated them more that day.  You don't appreciate this as much if you grow up Christian and hang out with Christian friends, but if you talk to people that have not had this benefit you can see real hurt.  Christians have their own hurt and challenges no doubt, but I would gladly take those problems over some of the more secular problems some people have shared with me.   Some people just seem somewhat hopeless.  That light of the world stuff is no joke. 

Ultimately what I cannot help but wonder is whether or not the appeal of the hordes of the "walking dead" resonates with some sense of spiritual death people are capable of feeling or want to avoid or see in others.  Do they feel they are spiritually dead and not realize that is what it is?   That is what I wonder.  It may be a stretch but maybe not.