Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason

Rev. Meredith Garmon, "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason," part 3

When zombie stories spread and began to be told and modified by the middle and upper classes, zombies represented a different sort of horror. These stories featured zombies terrorizing the oppressors -- which is to say, normal middle-class Westerners like you and me. Middle- and upper-class people in the developed world maintain a lifestyle that is possible only through considerable oppression, often tantamount to slavery, of large parts of the world who labor to feed our voracious, insatiable appetite for stuff.

In modern zombie stories, the zombie is still the living dead, as in the Haitian original,

"but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias....The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea." (Amy Wilentz, NY Times)

We push this uncomfortable fact out of our minds as much as we can, yet we who are the oppressor fear what we have oppressed and enslaved. These perfect workers we exploit and deny autonomy to may yet come after us. We have forced others, for our material gain, into a state of unthinkingness, yet we recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that that very unthinkingness puts them out of relationship with us, gives them a certain power to threaten us unconstrained by the mores our class takes for granted, the mores we call "rationality."

What began as stories expressing the fears of oppressed people have now become stories expressing the fears of the oppressors. Our own consuming appetite, we project upon the zombies. In our fearful imaginings, they come to consume us -- just as providing for our material comforts and conveniences has consumed so many of them. They want to eat our brains, for independent thought is exactly what we have sought to strip them of.

Can it be coincidence that the contemporary boom in tales of zombie apocalypse coincides with alarming income inequalities that have been worsening since 1980? We know our world is out of balance. We sense it even if we don't say it. We are afraid of what that imbalance will lead to, and our zombie movies and tales express that fear.

The story of reanimation of the dead from 2000 years ago is very different. Jesus was no zombie. His resurrection represented the opposite: a liberation of mind and spirit. He comes into his full power as a spirit-being who can appear and disappear in our material world at will. Freed of the need to calculate – to solve problems, to advance and defend ideas any more – the resurrected Jesus is freer than ever to just be and to love. There are no more sermons on the mount or on the plain, no more parables and teachings to try to persuade, no more money-changers to chase out of the temple, no more exasperation over "ye of little faith."

The resurrected Jesus mostly simply appears to people. He shows his wounds to Thomas. He has a meal with the disciples. He tells Peter to “tend my sheep.” Mostly it’s just appearing: just being there, and shining a light of love. That’s not the activity of reason and rationality. It represents instead the liberation from the insatiable need to figure out this, and then figure out that, develop a strategy for accomplishing some purpose – all the things that reason is good for. The resurrected Jesus simply sees, and is seen, and his being itself blesses.

Zombies represent the loss of reason. Jesus' resurrected state represents the transcendence of reason.

Zombies are pulled out of the half-way house of reason into complete enslavement. Jesus transcends the half-way house of reason into complete liberation.

For zombies, death and reanimation represents the loss of the autonomy that comes with reasoning ability. For Jesus, death and resurrection represents the loss of the ego, that oh-so-rational part of us that marshals concepts, advances claims, and works so hard to preserve its self-identity.

Living in the rational mind is a half-way house, for, again, reason does liberate us from many of the chains of the mind. The zombie stories, told first by oppressed and then by oppressor, illustrate the ways that without autonomy, without being able to think for ourselves, to reason for ourselves about what to do, and the freedom to act on our rational decision-making, we are undead: alive yet not alive, the living dead. And forces of oppression that deprive others of that freedom risk triggering unreasoning, brain-eating reprisal.

Yet life in the rational mind is what I call a half-way house – which is a term from our correctional system. A half-way house is not as constraining as prison, but isn’t fully free either. Rationality cannot get us the rest of the way to freedom. We use rational concepts to cut through certain chains, but then we become attached to those concepts, and end up bound and limited by them.

Only love gets us the rest of the way to liberation: unreasoning, uncalculating, unstrategic love. Without reason, we are undead. Without love, we are also undead, alive yet not alive, the living dead.

May we, too, be risen. Maybe, as the Easter story suggests, it takes a kind of death -- a death of the ego, a death of the identified self with all its attachments, a death of what we thought our life was all about, a crumbling away of all the rational reasons we have constructed for living the kind of life we've been living. With that death, a resurrection into a liberated, liberating life of love becomes possible. May we be risen indeed.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason"
See also:
Part 1: Unitarians, Universalists, Reason, and Love
Part 2: Can We Talk About Zombies for Easter?

Can We Talk About Zombies for Easter?

Rev. Meredith Garmon, "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason," part 2

Love has subversive power, and I prefer subversion to open battle. I prefer, and recommend, for the sake of our own emotional and spiritual well-being, looking for ways to make connection with people of more traditional Christian faith. Let us connect rather than denounce and vilify.

Reason is very good at denouncing and vilifying. However, when it comes to my inner demons, the better strategy is to embrace, befriend, and then re-direct that energy -- and, likewise, when it comes to outer demons -- who are not demons at all, but people whose cognitive rational functioning is typically as high as mine is -- the better strategy is embracing and befriending.

A wise life recognizes the limitations of reason. A full life honors and celebrates all of who we are, including all our nonrational tendencies. Enjoying music, delighting in beauty and poetry, enjoying good food, falling in love -- these are not rational things. If those of us who do not identify as Christians can connect better with those who do, then we’re part of the conversation. We can introduce various alternative directions that those stories point. But we have no chance of subverting the dangerous ways of interpreting the gospels if we refuse to talk about the gospels at all. So, let Unitarian Universalists not be shy about knowing and referencing gospel stories.

Like Easter. There are four Easter stories – a different one in each of the four gospels. (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – which I mention for you just so you’ll know, because surveys are showing that only about half of Americans today can name even one of the gospels. Indeed, one article noted, "Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition.") Jesus, a charismatic teacher and healer was executed by crucifixion on a Friday. By the time his body was brought down from the cross it was late in the afternoon – with Sabbath beginning at sundown. Since there’s no burying allowed on Sabbath, his body was placed in a temporary tomb, a cave, until it could be buried on Sunday. Mary Magdalene, either alone or with other women, went to the tomb carrying spices to prepare the body for burial. At that point the four stories become quite different.

If we are interested in historically what actually happened, we don’t have much to go on. In the Gospel of Matthew, there’s a tantalizing clue. Some of Jerusalem's rulers, says Matthew, bribed the guards to affirm, “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep” (Matt 28:13). So maybe some disciples really did come by night and steal away the body. Maybe Matthew was trying to discredit the guards’ inconvenient testimony by saying the guards had been bribed to lie.

But historical accuracy is not the point. It doesn’t matter. The point is that each of the four different stories – whether they are history or fiction -- have something to tell us about loss and death. The dead are with us. Those who are gone continue to live in memory, where they are not merely stored but also grow and change, for every time the brain recalls a memory, the memory is changed through association with the situation in which it is recalled. Those who are gone from us are not merely entombed in memory, they are actually growing and changing there – living, we can say.

I do think this is funny. But, no,
Jesus was not a zombie.

So I was thinking about the Easter story, and how it’s a story about reanimation of the dead, and that reminded me of a very different sort of story about the reanimation of the dead: zombies. I am not comparing Jesus to a zombie. I am contrasting, because the contrast will illustrate how rationality is a half-way house.

Zombie stories, like the Easter story, come in many different versions. Zombies have become huge in popular culture – movies, and TV shows from World War Z to the Walking Dead to iZombie depict endless variations on the zombie concept. Zombie stories originated in Africa and were further developed in the voodoo culture in Haiti in the 19th century and probably earlier.

In the mainstream Haitian tradition, before Hollywood began making its modifications of the story, zombies are “undead” – animated, yet entirely under the control of the bokor, a sorcerer.

Zombie stories originated as an expression of the fears of an enslaved and oppressed people. Zombies represent a loss of cognition, of independent thought -- of rationality and of free will. As slavery and oppression led people to feel the loss of their minds, their freedom, their humanity, they told stories of zombies that represented what they felt like. It was a way for the enslaved and oppressed to depict what they feared they were becoming, and also a way to remind them that they weren’t quite zombies yet. Though their conditions deprived them, they could hold on to self-respect and dignity and refuse to be like zombies in the story.

Zombie scholar Amy Wilentz explains:

"In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery. For the slave under French rule in Haiti — then Saint-Domingue — in the 17th and 18th centuries, life was brutal: hunger, extreme overwork and cruel discipline were the rule....To become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand. It is thought that slave drivers on the plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes Voodoo priests, used this fear of zombification to keep recalcitrant slaves in order." (NY Times, 2012 Oct)

Zombies never get tired. For Haitian slaves, that was about the only kind of hell worse than the one they were living -- nothing but constant toil, without out even the possibility of death as respite.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason"
See also
Part 1: Unitarians, Universalists, Reason, and Love
Part 3: Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason

Unitarians, Universalists, Reason, and Love

Rev. Meredith Garmon, "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason," part 1

"He is risen! She is risen! They are risen! We are risen! OK, everybody up? Excellent. Now what?"

I posted that on Facebook early this morning, as I have every Easter morning for the last five or six years. This year, the first comment I got was: “Dance party!”

The second comment I got was: “Now we get to work healing this messed up world.” Which made me think: “Before or after the dance party?”

But then I thought, “Duh! The dance party is part of the healing.”

I’m thinking about Easter this morning, of course. What does Easter mean for Unitarian Universalists? I’m thinking about our Unitarian tradition of rationality.

The 1819 sermon by William Ellery Channing called “Unitarian Christianity” served as the manifesto of Unitarianism – a declaration of independence as a new American denomination. Channing emphasized the use of reason in Biblical interpretation. A generation later, Theodore Parker’s sermon, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity,” expressed doubt about the miracles Jesus was supposed to have performed. It was the teachings that mattered, said Parker, not the magic tricks. Our form of Christianity was following the road of reason.

In the 1920s, Unitarian ministers John Dietrich and Curtis Reese followed that road of reason and began dispensing with everything that was supernatural – anything outside the well-ordered laws of nature and of logic – including God. The cross came down from the wall of Rev. Dietrich’s church, and of Rev. Reese’s. In the 1930s, the crosses came down from a few more Unitarian churches. In the 1940s, the rate of purifying our denomination’s temples of crosses had gained speed and momentum, and by the time our congregation moved into its current home in 1959, no cross was ever installed.

Unitarians and Universalists began as Christian Protestant denominations, but we followed the reason road to a different place. And that was good. It was necessary.

Religion, by and large, is so often irrational and actually harmful. Studies find that countries that measure higher on religiosity also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates. For all that we try to do to formally separate church from state, when magical thinking is encouraged on Sunday, people are somewhat more prone to magical thinking on social and political issues the rest of the week, and the consequences are disastrous.

We need rationality. We need the openness to data that doesn’t fit with our expectations and the willingness to follow where the facts lead, rather than where either our own ego needs lead or where prior ideological commitments lead. We need reason. As this campaign season reminds us almost every day: we badly need some reason.

So what does Easter mean for us rational Unitarian Universalists? When it comes to liberation (our theme of the month for March, which you have been exploring in your Journey Groups) much as we need reason, living in the rational mind is a half-way house. I call it a half-way house because reason does liberate us from many of the chains of the mind -- but not all of them. Rationality cannot get us the rest of the way to liberation. Only love gets us the rest of the way: unreasoning, uncalculating, unstrategic love.

That is my Easter message.

So I do particularly want to remember the Universalist side of our heritage. Our congregation here in White Plains was Unitarian. In 1961, when the two denominations consolidated, our congregation went from Unitarian to Unitarian Universalist, but we did not add Universalist to our name until just last June. So on this Easter Sunday, in the very first Easter sermon to the Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation at White Plains, let us remember our Universalist side.

The rising rationality I was talking about was a Unitarian phenomenon. The Universalists always had comparatively more emphasis on love and comparatively less emphasis on reason. The name “universalist” comes from the teaching of universal salvation, that there is no hell, that everyone goes to heaven, that a loving God would not condemn creatures of his own making to eternal damnation. God’s love saves all of us.

A few years ago Rob Bell, the influential pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan, had an epiphany and converted to a universalist theology. He no longer believed in hell. He wrote a book about it in 2011 titled, Love Wins.

Now, our progenitor, the great Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou, had written a book about this idea back in 1805. We beat Rob Bell to the punch by 206 years. Ballou’s book was titled A Treatise on the Atonement. Now, I ask you: which one are you more likely to pick up, A Treatise on the Atonement or Love wins?

We have never been good at catchy titles: If only Ballou had thought to title his book “Love Wins,” the popularity of Universalism might have been much greater. But whatever its popularity, the victory of love has always been the central message of the Universalist side of our heritage. We Unitarian Universalists today are, as I like to say, the children of the marriage of reason and love.

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This is Part 1 of 3 of "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason"
See also
Part 2: Can We Talk About Zombies for Easter?
Part 3: Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason