Among the Living Dead

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
-- Bertrand Russell

Meditation: a poem by Lucille Clifton entitled “the raising of lazarus”

the dead shall rise again
whoever say
dust must be dust
don’t see the trees
smell rain
remember Africa
everything that goes
can come
stand up
even the dead shall rise

Reading: by Walker Percy from The Moviegoer (1961, p. 83)

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However--" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.” 

Reading: by Craig Derksen and Darren Hudson Hick from an essay entitled “Your Zombie and You – Identity, Emotion, and the Undead” (from Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, 2011, edited by Cory J. Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman, p. 11)

Philosophy often deals in what are called “thought experiments” – imagined scenarios that help us to illuminate and test our theories and intuitions – and philosophers have regularly found inspiration for thought experiments in film an literary fiction. Given the sheer volume of fiction devoted to them, then, it is perhaps surprising that zombies have so far been largely overlooked as a source of philosophical discussion. It may be thought that zombies – fanciful movie monsters – have little or nothing to teach us, and that such discussion could only be non-serious at best. As we hope to show here, however, zombies have a great deal to teach us – about our emotions, and about ourselves.

Reading: by Marie Howe a poem entitled “My Dead Friends”

I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were —
it's green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I'll do.

Among the Living Dead

A Sermon Delivered on October 28, 2012

By

The Rev. Axel H. Gehrmann

On a memorable Friday night a few years ago, Elaine and I joined our teenage kids, and a bunch of their friends, at the Savoy 16 movie theater on the opening night of a new movie. It was called “Zombieland.”

“Zombieland” is a horror/comedy spoof of gory zombie movies, that got remarkably good reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes movie website offers a nice encapsulation of the plot: a cowardly shut in named Columbus (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is forced to join up with a seasoned zombie slayer named Tallahassee (played by Woody Harrelson) in order to survive the zombie apocalypse. As Tallahassee sets out on a mission to find the last Twinkie on Earth, the duo meets up with two young girls who have resorted to some rather unorthodox methods to survive amidst the chaos. The four of them become reluctant partners in the battle against the undead.

“Why was there a zombie apocalypse?” you may wonder. Well, according to Wikipedia, within a quick two months a mutated strain of mad cow disease had turned most humans on earth into cannibal zombies. If you are bitten by a zombie, you yourself will become a zombie.

Now, while the movie “Zombieland” might not be everyone’s cup of tea – I don’t recommend it to those of you who have a limited tolerance for gratuitous blood and gore – on that October evening three years ago, in a movie theater packed with laughing teenagers, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the past few years, it seems, zombies have become a growing presence in popular culture. In brushing up on zombie scholarship in preparation for this sermon, I discovered that within the last three years the Urbana Library acquired 193 new titles – that’s books, movies and music – about zombies. Most of these are fiction. A few books offer a funny perspective on history, for instance “A Zombie’s History of the United States – From the Massacre at Plymouth Rock to the CIA’s Secret War on the Undead,” or self –help, for instance, “Now You’re a Zombie – A Handbook for the Newly Undead.”

* * *

Zombie is a word we use to describe people who are dead, and yet strangely alive. Or people who are alive, and yet strangely dead.

In his novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy describes the experience of being among people who seem to be dead. The protagonist of the story, a young man named Binx,  talks about those polite social interactions, in which we may often find ourselves. In the midst of the casual small-talk and banter, he gets the distinct sense that those around him aren’t really there. Though physically present, their souls seem to be missing. They sound like automatons, their voices hollow. The conversation is little more than a series of sound-bites tossed back and forth, devoid of relevance or meaning.

A friend of his steps up to him and starts talking about a celebrated novel she just read. She gushes about her grown children, the joys of having an empty nest, the latest philosophy class she is taking, and how happy her marriage is. Binx politely listens to all she has to say, but inwardly he wonders, “why does she talk as if she were dead?”

What makes The Moviegoer, such an intriguing novel is not that Binx is surrounded by people who seem dead, detached from life, but rather that in the tone of the narrator’s voice, it becomes clear to the reader that Binx himself is detached. Living within his own world of daydreams and movie trivia, he himself is the one who seems unable to engage with others. He is the one who is not fully alive.

* * *

The rise of zombies in American popular imagination can be traced back to George Romero’s movie “Night of the Living Dead,” which was released in 1968, and was followed by a series of sequels, spoofs and imitations.

According to David Flint, it was not a coincidence that Romero’s image of the zombie – the person slowly shuffling along with arms outstretched  - caught on. In 1968 we were ready for some new monsters.

In his book Zombie Holocaust – How the Living Dead Devoured Pop Culture, Flint writes,

“1968 was, after all, the year of revolution – student uprisings in Paris and anti-war protests in the USA and UK as ascendant youth culture began to sweep away old attitudes. The spate of political assassinations in America (both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered in 1968), the brutal Vietnam War being beamed into homes across the world… made the old monsters seem dated… The zombie rose to prominence during these turbulent years because zombies – at least Romero’s zombies – represented modern fears. A truly 20^th century horror figure, the zombie… spoke directly to audiences who felt civilization was collapsing around them.” (p. 7)

* * *

Before zombies became famous as movie monsters, the notion of zombies existed in West African traditions. Zombies could be a wide variety of monsters. Bratty children were sometimes called zombies, or they might be frightened into behaving by threats of zombies under the bed. Spirits of the dead, people transformed into animals, and tiny fairy folk, all might be called zombies.

Some say the term “zombie” comes from the West African word zumbi, which means fetish, or the word nzambi, which means spirit or god. (from “Race, Colonialism, and the Evolution of the ‘Zombie’” by Cory Rushton and Christopher Moreman)

Zombies entered the Western imagination by way of Haiti. In the 1500s, when Haiti was under the control of the Spanish Crown, the island was the hub of Caribbean slave trade. Thousands of West African men and women were brought to the shores of today’s Haiti, to provide slave labor in the “New World.”

Initially the Catholic Church tried to convert the Africans to Christianity. But despite slave laws that required forced baptism, doctrinal education, and outlawed African religious practices, many of the slaves maintained their traditional beliefs, rituals and practices. To avoid persecution, their observances were conducted in secret, or were blended with existing Catholic practices.

The religion of Vodou began when slaves of wide-ranging African background were brought together in Haiti. Members of many different tribes and cultures were forced to find common ground. Vodou was a fusion of the traditions of a people who were at once forced to accept, and yet collectively rejected, a colonial religion of oppression while they struggled to retain some sense of African identity and culture, some connection to their gods and their ancestors.

Around 1800, the slaves in Haiti rose up against their captors. The Haitian revolution was successful. Slavery was abolished, and the Haitian republic was founded. This was the first and only successful slave uprising in history that led to the creation of a new state. Today Haiti is ostensibly a Catholic country. And yet many of Haiti’s Catholics still observe some forms of voodoo practice.

In their book Race, Oppression and the Zombie, Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton offer a critical perspective on the way most Americans have come to understand voodoo. They write,

“Voodoo, which we might take as a term of derision, ought to be taken not to refer to the Haitian religion but rather applies to negative and racist constructions. Far from being the object of Hollywood horror, this perversion of Haitian religion, long proffered by fearful American slave-holders and Christian clergy alike, still appears today: evangelist Pat Robertson explained, in response to the massive earthquake that hit Haiti in January, 2010, that the island nation’s independence, and subsequent misery and poverty, were set in motion when the Haitian people “swore a pact to the Devil” during their successful revolution of 1791-1804.” (p. 2)

Actual voodoo practice is not about devil worship, black magic or zombies. Describing the voodoo philosophy that took shape on American soil in the 20^th century Richard Williams, a voodoo priest, writes, voodoo is the invisible power

“that created all things; it also means all visible things created by the invisible power… In Voodoo we do not separate the Creation from the Creator, nor do we separate the Creator from Creation. This is the reason why Voodooists believe there is power in trees, rocks, animals, birds; in the sea and rivers, thunder and lightening, and more importantly, in themselves. This is the philosophical translation of the word Voodoo….” (Pinn, p. 46)

Vodou practice seeks to bring the energies of the universe in harmony with human life. In his book Varieties of African American Religious Experience, Anthony Pinn writes, “the goal is to keep the natural forces in balance, to tap into these forces, and in this way to center oneself, one’s family and one’s community; in short, to live.”

* * *

Halloween, All Hallows Eve, is that day of the year, when the veil separating the world of living and world of the dead is thinnest. We find this ancient religious perspective played out in the costumes our children will wear this Wednesday night, as they go trick-or-treating, dressed up as ghosts or ghouls, as vampires or monsters of various kinds. They will walk up to houses, decorated with skeletons and jack-o-lanterns and other symbols of death… all of them meant not to instill a sense of fear in our children, but a sense of fun. The holiday observances that conjure up dreams of death, are designed to deepen our appreciation for life.

It makes a lot of sense to have a holiday like Halloween at this time of year, when the trees drop their leaves, expose their bare branches, and stand there like skeletons, with their arms and raised high. The twigs are like countless tiny fingers reaching for heaven.

Even without costumes and decorations, autumn is an annual reminder of death and decay. As we mulch the leaves in our yards, and help them along as they return to the earth, we are reminded that this is the fate of all living things. All of us, one day, will return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

But the mystery and wonder of this season, the message of the natural world at this time year, is not simply that death is inevitable. The trees don’t die. They cast off their leaves and look as if dead, but they remain very much alive. Life may lead to death. But death leads to more life.

To find life, more life, everywhere – this is one of the timeless themes of religious observance.

Appearances can be deceiving. Some things that look as if they were alive, may be inwardly dead. And some things that seem dead, are still very much alive.

This is the truth Walker Percy is able to express in his story of a man who feels surrounded by dead people, and yet who himself struggles to become more fully alive.

And as Marie Howe knows, even the dead themselves, are not gone, but still with us. They stand among us, and when we ask them for advice, they shake their heads and smile. They wish us whatever leads to joy. They wish us less worry. They wish us whatever leads to more life.

However we imagine the world of the living and the world of the dead, may all the stories we tell, whether scary or sad, whether frightening or fun – may our stories help us more firmly embrace the spirit of life. And may we learn to live our lives to the fullest.

Amen.