As a Catholic, I find there is much to be critical about with the various television shows available today with the crude language, shocking sexual situations, violence and the way there is nothing left to the imagination – it is all there in your face. There are few shows proudly teaching Christian values and one must carefully scrutinize what we allow to enter our mind as it can have a major impact on choices you make in life and influence views you hold.
But sometimes you can stumble across Catholic teachings in a TV series not due to any intentions of the writers and producers but simply by having a theocentric view of the world, looking for the ways everything can lead you closer to God. I experienced this the other night. I walked into our TV room and saw these grotesque creatures with blank, emotionless faces and visible signs of decay and emaciation staring at me making guttural sounds and then suddenly there was a feeding frenzy and they all started to groan loud. To me it was horrible but it was a show about zombies my husband enjoys, and which he tells me is extremely popular, called The Walking Dead. After being given a brief summary of the plot by my husband, I walked away grossed out. I have not continued watching and cannot name any of the characters so there is no need for a spoiler alert but, thinking about this show, an analogy came to me.
Though these are fictional characters, if we deny God or push Him into the periphery of our lives, we are not much different than the zombies and can rightly be described as ‘the walking dead’.
A Dreadful Affliction
In the show, because of a horrific infection, people have become zombies – a state in which people have lost their humanity though neither fully dead nor fully alive. Outside of this fictional world, we too suffer various afflictions in our lives which can result in us becoming less of the person God calls us to be. Since the Fall – when Adam and Eve lost trust in God and disobeyed Him – all human beings have been born into this world with original sin – the state of unrighteousness, without sanctifying grace in the soul and not being in communion with God.
We also have a wounded human nature. Throughout our lives temptations surround us and without God’s assistance, our will lack the strength to always do the right thing. Additionally, our intellect is prone to err and deception, and too often our desires are unchecked by reason. And finally, when we freely choose to disobey or reject God, we commit personal sin, the most serious thing that plagues us. As St. John Vianney describes in The Little Catechism of the Cure of Ars, sin is an outrage against God and “when we are in sin our soul is diseased, all rotten; it is pitiful” (Chapter 14: Catechism on Sin).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is a failure of genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity” (1849). Sin is an offense against God and, though there are varying degrees of gravity, our hearts turn away from Him. Sin is disordered and is an attempt to gain happiness on our own apart from God, inevitably leading to total dissatisfaction. If not addressed, sin leads to more sin and we spiral downward, further away from God and the person God calls us to be. We also become blinded to goodness and truth, our judgments are clouded and we rationalize even to the point of denying immoral acts are sinful.
Driven by Urges
Just as these zombies walk around led by mere instincts simply looking for their next meal, too often we allow our fleshly desires to drive us. We look to physical pleasures, ambition, material wealth, druginduced euphoria, power and entertainment as the primary influences for our will and as the means to our happiness. Though potentially providing some sense of fulfillment or pleasure, these worldly things will always leave us wanting as they can never fully satisfy our desires for infinite beatitude. Directed by our lower appetites, we also turn inward to the ego, emphasizing the pursuit of personal wellbeing with a predominate attitude of selfishness and selfassertion, setting ourselves against others at whatever cost, even to the point of losing respect for the dignity of every human person.
St. Francis de Sales, in Introduction to the Devout Life, cautions us about this propensity to be directed by natural goods rather than supernatural:
Therefore, my child, I say that although it is lawful to amuse yourself…at the same time, if you are much addicted to these things, they will hinder your devotion, and become extremely hurtful and dangerous to you. The harm lies, not in doing them, but in the degree to which you care for them… and so the human heart which is cumbered with useless, superfluous, dangerous clingings becomes incapacitated for that earnestfollowing after God which is the true life of devotion (part I, chapter 23).
Walking Around Without a Purpose
Like zombies, who are mindless creatures with no goal or meaning to their existence, too many people today do not have a relationship with God and walk around aimlessly, even devitalized –filled with hopelessness, despair, pessimism, discontent, listlessness and unhappiness. As a result, men may look to worldly pleasures, science and technological inventions and various forms of entertainment as ways to distract themselves from this reality, keeping the mind preoccupied in order to not deal with the root problem. Another alternative reaction is described by Bishop Fulton Sheen:
Life is monotonous if it has no goal or purpose. When we do not know why we are hereor where we are going, then life is full of frustrations and unhappiness. When there is no goal or overall purpose, people generally concentrate on motion. Instead of working toward an ideal, they keep changing the ideal and calling it ‘progress’. They do not know where they are going, but they are certainly ‘on their way’ (Life is Worth Living, p. 15).
The truth is, if a man without God contemplates his life, seeing the emptiness can potentially lead him to do a host of destructive things. This sad perspective on life is one that reads only the torments of Lamentations chapter 3 while ignoring the hope God gives us in the same text:
I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light…he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation…My soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is… (Lamentations 3:12, 5, 17).
Destruction
For the zombies, without a cure for the infection, the end result is destruction – either they will be killed or they will kill others – yet these creatures lack any perception of the devastation being caused. For humanity, the loss of the transcendent, the rejection of God and sin itself blind us –we become caught up in an illusion. Allowing the great rebellion of our passions against our reason to rise up within us, we are deceived, calling evil good and good evil. We fall prey to the godless philosophies of the world and are led further away from reality. Believing we do not need God and His religion, we deny our status as creatures and try to design our own beatitude in this life based on personal needs and wants, disregarding not only the cares and concerns of others but also the will of God. In all of this, we hurl ourselves deeper and deeper into spiritual death.
There is a Cure for the Walking Dead
Even though the TV series has not yet found an answer for the zombie infection, fortunately, for us, God, in His love, has reached down to man through revelation, to give us the cure for what ails humanity.
God first addresses the obstacles to healing. One important hindrance is blindness to the true meaning and purpose of our lives. God has revealed we were created by love for love. Frank Sheed, in Theology and Sanity, explained this reality in these words, “We have nothing as our origin, but eternity is our destiny” (p.372). Sheed continues, “Man is insufficient without God because without God he would not even be” (p. 383). A life centered on God will be filled with hope because He offers us eternal life in heaven where our longings for infinite happiness, joy and peace can be fulfilled. God shows us He is the sure compass of our lives and, in the midst of our afflictions, allows us to embrace the comforts given in Lamentations chapter 3:
But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness…The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him…(3:2123, 25).
Then, God points out the fact we do have a problem – disobedience, pride, selfassertion and rebellion from God. Sin intensifies disorder and destruction in our lives – the revolt of the creatures against the Creator and His love. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, listening to God’s revelations “clarifies the reality of sin” so we do not try to explain sin as “merely a developmental flaw, psychological weakness, a mistake or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc” (387). God shows us the pain, suffering, ignorance, tendency to sin, weakness of the will and physical death humanity experiences have at their foundation the abuse of our gift of freedom – freely rejecting God and His love.
After revealing to us the foundational cause of our plight, in the fullness of time God sent the ultimate answer – Jesus Christ. God the Son, the second Divine Person of the Trinity, became man, freely laying down His life for our sins, dying on the cross. This once for all act of redemption restored the relationship between God and humanity. Christ also merited for each of us grace – God’s own divine life – the gift that revitalizes and regenerates us. Grace enables man to resist temptation and overtime transforms him, making him holy and able to overcome sin.
More than that, Jesus rose from the dead conquering sin and death, promising all those who unite themselves to Him a physical resurrection at the end of time and some share in His glory. This is the cure but not the end of the story. Now, God offers this gift of salvation to each one of us and awaits our response. As St. Augustine said, “God who made us without our will cannot save us without our will” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1847; Augustine Sermo 169, 11, 13: PL 38, 923). Love does not coerce but invites. God shows us the antidote to our ‘zombie apocalypse’ – first, Christ on the cross and then His summons: pick up your cross daily and come follow me (Matthew 16:24; Luke 9:23). Rather than be one of the ‘walking dead’, we are called to be alive in Christ. God calls each of us to humbly surrender our lives to Him and be moved by grace so we can have faith, be obedient and trust in God. In doing so, God promises He will not only heal us but bring us to perfection and eternal glory.
2 thoughts on “Zombies and the Cure for ‘The Walking Dead’”
“All dried up” was the Gospel verdict on the non-productive fig tree: living, but in essence, dead.
Zombies and Faith-who’d a thunk it? Very interesting article. You are spot on re most of US Tv. My wife and I have been pleasantly surprised at many shows esp dramas and crime shows, out of Great Britain. You need to be careful, there are many just as raunchy as US shows, but there are many many which are head and shoulders above all US Tv- eg New Tricks, A Touch of Frost, etc. I am not saying they ar perfect, but they are ever so much better than US shows. In every aspect – acting, music, writing, directing, cinematography, etc. First few seasons of Call the Midwife-great; more recent, nope. Death In Paradise-thumbs up; Kingdom-mostly but some few raunchy scenes. Foyle’s War: excellent excellent. Vera too! Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas