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| In a park near you |
I have long been intrigued by the strange attractiveness of the zombie meme—to me as much as anyone. It seems clear to me that it must reflect a common life experience. Indeed, I have long been aware that it reflects my own. Many people these days seem zombies, NPCs.
More recently, I have seen it confirmed that zombies have always been with us. They are in the Bible.
Matthew 8: 21-22
Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
Most people, the gospel is saying, are zombies. They move about, they die again in some sense, so as to occupy graves, but they are actually dead; dead in spirit, dead within.
And that to me seems exactly right. Many people seem to live lives no more significant than those of cockroaches: taking advantage of whatever the day offers, grabbing whatever is within reach, eating, mating, dying. They operate on instinct; the instinct for sex, the drive for power, or money, or prestige. All of which counts for nothing once you’re dead, and does nothing for future generations. They drink alcohol or take other drugs or seek purely escapist entertainment to dull whatever higher faculties they have. And then they die, and their life never mattered. Maybe to a small circle of friends and relatives; but then, if these friends and relatives in turn are doing nothing but operate on instinct, that only delays oblivion and meaninglessness for another generation or so.
This seems actually more true of highly “successful” people in most walks of life than of anyone else. They have generally wasted more, wasted more God-given potential, if they have accomplished nothing of eternal significance. It was my overwhelming sense at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg: that it was a wasted life.
So what’s the alternative?
According to this brief passage in the gospel, the alternative is to follow Jesus, and with full commitment—to drop everything else.
What does it mean to follow Jesus?
It is not enough to mouth the name. “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”
It is not enough just to be baptized. One has to be born again: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.”
Baptism is the water. But as the child is not yet fully self-aware, the rebirth of the spirit cannot yet occur. That must wait until past the age of reason.
This is the significance of the sacrament of confirmation in the Catholic tradition; in evangelical Protestantism, it is the experience they call “being born again.” But it does not happen automatically when the bishop anoints you with oil and slaps your cheek: the spirit, the will, must be engaged.
It is a moral commitment each of us makes, usually in early or mid-adolescence, of our lives either to gross self-interest or to the truth and the good as we perceive it. Christians call the truth and the good “Jesus.”
“I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the father except through me.”
Either one serves one’s instincts to sex, power, and prestige, or one serves truth, justice, and beauty. This is as true for pagans as for Christians; it has always and everywhere been true. But there is a second step for Christians: it is not just a commitment to truth in the abstract. That is not yet enough. We must see truth in personal terms, as a person and an independent will, and have a personal relationship with it—with him. Because, as Blake explained, no human can conceive of anything greater than a perfected human. Therefore, so long as our conception of truth, beauty, and justice does not have a personality and a human face, we do not sufficiently value or understand it. It remains, to us, mere abstraction, and subject to self-interested rationalization.
We must, in a sentence, love it: with our whole heart and mind. Blake again:
“Picture a cloud as holy: one cannot love it. But picture a holy man within the cloud: love springs up.”
We must have a personal relationship with Truth and Justice and Beauty, we must love him with an all-consuming love. We must speak to him as a person, at our rising and our lying down, with gratitude when our instincts are satisfied, and at random moments during the day. As we might text a lover.
Is it a terrible burden to do so?
Is it a terrible burden to be in love? In a sense, it is; yet we all crave it.
What proportion of mankind does this? What proportion has ever done this? It is surely a minority. Perhaps a small minority.
For the rest, zombies.
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