They Dynamics of a Godly Relationship, Part Five

Hello, and welcome to my last in our series on relationship dynamics between man and God. I’ve enjoyed writing these for the past month as they’ve caused me to think not only about what kind of human-divine relationships there are, but how exactly my own fellowship with God operates. Do I see God as a best friend, a parent, a lord or an alien? In truth, I feel like I often vacillate between these, but more often than not, I see a vassalage (Lord-Servant dynamic) relationship focused on duty and honor. After all, a daily prayer that I never even realized became a habit was “Lord, please make me honorable today, and help me to honor you.”

But how do these four dynamics function together? In truth, they present a sort of spectrum, varying from closeness to distance.

Best Friend <————— Parent ————— Lord —————> Alien

Closest ————————————————————– Most Distant

From this, it might be a natural impulse to say that the Best Friend dynamic is automatically the best because it fosters the closest intimacy between God and humanity. Now while intimacy is very important, and a goal worth striving for, we cannot forget the benefits of the Alien dynamic, which causes us to rethink our preconceived notions of God and recognize that there are aspects of his character that we, as mortal men doomed to die, will never truly understood.

So does that mean we should strike for the middle ground, trying to hit some sort of “sweet spot” between the Parent and Lord dynamics? Nay, I say. Instead, I think it would be good for us to try and find the important aspects to emulate from each paradigm.

From the Best Friend dynamic, we enjoy a closeness with God as the Holy Spirit, feeling his presence all around us. By recognizing that power, the force of God, we can do mighty things for God, so long as we don’t take the closeness of that relationship for granted.

From the Parent dynamic, we can recognize that God is helping us to mature, and realize that the trials we face are there to make us a better person. In addition, seeing God in this way ensures us that we have someone divine looking out for us, so we needn’t fear the dark spiritual forces of this world. After all, the great Lord of Lights is shining his light on us, and the sacrifice he made for us has rescued us from that very threatening darkness. But we needn’t forget that God is more than a parent, and the family dynamic must not be overemphasized as the only proper method for viewing God.

From the Lord dynamic, we recognize our own duty to God, and we seek to honor him with our servitude. Recognizing our own responsibility to the Cosmic Creator pushes us to effect real change in the world, reaching out to do his will in place of our own. Missionaries have struggled in the deepest recesses of our planet in servitude to their Lord, and we should be willing to do whatever he asks of us. But we must remember that God is not a distant lord, but a merciful, caring one. He is no distant despot but a king who invites you to his table for the feast, and we enjoy his presence in our reverence.

And from the Alien dynamic, we recognize that our search is never fully complete. God can never be fully understood, encapsulated or contained within a heart, a book or the universe itself. Part of him will always remain unknown to humanity. But that need not be discouraging; on the contrary, it should fuel our search, pushing us to learn more, to seek more, to press onward on our journey of discovery. And we must never look down upon those who are unsatisfied in their search, but instead try to join the search alongside them.

I love that God is so dynamic. There is no perfect template that can be laid across him, no perfect description of his relationship with the people of our planet. His reality is multi-faceted, ever-changing, putting us outside of our comfort zones only to call us back into his warm embrace, giving us a Spirit to rely on while causing us to look just a little bit deeper, to go just a little bit further, to never become complacent but to conform our spirits to his own will for us. In so doing, this alien Lord we serve will become both our parent and our friend.

Until next time, friends…

A History of Zombiism, Part Three

Last week, I described how “zombie” was translated from a Voodoo term – referring to people who’ve been drugged and enslaved by someone called a bokor – into cannibalistic corpses that we’ve seen filling our movies and television shows. Richard Matheson wrote what could be considered the transitional book, but while his monsters were more vampiric, his post-apocalyptic scenario inspired George A. Romero, the Godfather of the Zombie Genre, to create his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. When fans altered the names of his monsters from “ghouls” to “zombies,” history was set and the zombies have become the standard totem in post-apocalyptic works ever since.

Now while that’s all good and fun, we can’t simply set aside the zombie flick as mere entertainment. On the contrary, the zombie genre has had a much deeper influence, I maintain, than we even realize.  After all, Romero’s first zombie film was eventually inducted into the Library of Congress’s national film registry, an honor that is reserved only for films deemed “culturally or historically significant.” So let us, therefore, begin with the film that started it all.

One thing to notice about Night of the Living Dead is its cast: a group of white people led by one black man, portrayed by actor Duane Jones. While Romero himself denied that race was a factor in the casting, the idea of having a black character leading a cast of whites resonated strongly in a decade of racial turmoil. After all, the movie was released only six months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. But if we take race a little deeper, we’ll see that relations are critiqued in the film, highlighted by the lead actor’s death at the hand of “rednecks.” I almost wonder if the writers for The Walking Dead had this in mind when they had Merle (a redneck) attack T-Dog (a black man), with the latter taking the more reasonable role.

Indeed, we can see that many zombie films portray social turmoil with a sort of “inner plot” while the zombie-infested post-apocalypse forms a kind of “outer plot.” By this, I mean that most zombie films tend to portray characters barricading themselves in some safe place, then working out their interpersonal issues on the inside of the walls, outside of which the real dangers prowl. Inside that safe place, the inner plot takes the form of personality and culture clashes deeply engrained with racial and gender discussions. Ultimately, the group will find a way to overcome their issues and escape or succumb to them and become overwhelmed by the outer plot of the zombies beyond the walls.

So the inner plot of a zombie film centers on interpersonal relations and how people can get past their prejudices and work together. Outside of this is the outer plot, which is usually more of a social critique, fostering differing views toward the government: either the government is responsible and, hence, not to be trusted; it is ineffective and, hence, not to be trusted; or it ultimately leads the triumph over the zombie horde and is to be trusted with our allegiance. In the overwhelming majority of zombie films, the first two options are taken, and even in the rare occurrences when the third option is taken, the government is often portrayed as an authoritarian dictatorship (as in 28 Days Later), sometimes even breeding a dystopia (like Woodbury in The Walking Dead). So it seems that, ultimately, the zombie films critique the government itself, encouraging our leaders not to disappear into an inhuman or ineffective system, or else the apocalypse will come and leave their people defenseless.

On a last note, there’s one thing I seem to notice about zombie films: an ever-feared thing called the “swarm.” The swarm, or horde, is an overwhelming herd of zombies that the protagonists cannot defeat. They are rare in films, and they usually signal the end with their approach. But as I watch them in zombie films, I find myself wondering if that very swarm is us. Do we lose ourselves in the crowd, with the ultimate result of destroying our fellow man? Do we find righteousness in anonymity? Personally, I think we should each examine ourselves to see what role we would play in such a film. I think it might be best if we could reconcile the inner plot and the outer plot and save as many souls as possible.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore why we, as Christians, need no longer obey the strict commands of Leviticus!

A History of Zombiism, Part Two

Good day, good year and welcome to the year 2015! Can you believe it’s been over two years since everyone thought the world was going to end? I have to say, I’m glad those people were wrong, although I did enjoy the 2009 film it inspired. Now about a month ago, I began a series exploring the origins of the zombie myth. In part one, I laid out the Haitian Voodoo origins of the “zombie” term. Essentially, a zombie is a person who is poisoned into a near-death state by a bokor (Voodoo witch doctor) and then revived, then kept under the influence of cognitive-inhibiting drugs in order to be retained as a slave. Now the question becomes: how did we go from a poisoned-revived-drugged slave of a Voodoo bokor to the flesh- or brain-eating reanimated dead that fill our silver screens today (sometimes done well, sometimes done very poorly)?

On the surface, the “reanimating of the dead” is a clue as to the connection. After all, a bokor who is reviving a person would appear to be “raising the dead.” And furthermore, a victim kept drugged and enslaved certainly tends to possess the diminished mental prowess that we see in the zombies in film. But then there’s the big kicker: the cannibalism. Where did that part of the myth come from?

One of the earliest original precursors to today’s zombies appears in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Although the creatures in his novel are referred to as vampires and bear many similar characteristics to vampires (aversion to light and holy objects, as well as the protagonist’s choice to kill them with stakes through the heart), the behavior of Matheson’s vampires are closer to the rabid zombies that showed up in fiction later on. But the more far-reaching effect of I Am Legend was its influence upon the father of the zombie genre: George A. Romero.

Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, can truly be considered the film that transformed the zombie myth into what it is today. In this movie, the dead are brought back to life presumably as a result of a space probe exploding in the atmosphere, dispersing a strange type of radiation that it picked up from Venus (that came from the movie, so don’t get mad at me for the scientific issues there). These reanimated dead – referred to in the movie simply as ghouls – are cannibalistic in nature, appear in swarms and spread their infection through biting.

It took another 17 years before Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 film, Return of the Dead, switched up the mythos, with the zombies specifically interested in brains, as opposed to simply flesh. While the brain-eating function of zombies (as well as government experimentation being the origin of the zombiism) are staples of the zombie genre, those two points appear to be dying out in recent years, with many good and terrible zombie films following more in line with the Romero conception.

So George A. Romero – under the influence of Richard Matheson’s novel – seems to have bridged the gap between the Voodoo bokor zombies and the flesh-eating living dead in film and television today. But interestingly enough, in his original 1968 film, Romero never actually used the word “zombie”; that name was applied by the fans afterward, and it stuck. Romero has since come to be identified as the “Godfather of the Zombie Genre,” though the contributions of Matheson and O’Bannon should not be overlooked.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore some of the deeper, cultural impacts of zombie films!

The 2 Future Worlds

Good day, my few but loyal readers! I apologize for being a few days late on this one, but the holidays have contained much madness. But alas, I promised a description of two literary futures, so here we shall proceed!

When you think of the future, in literary or in movie terms, there are often two very different scenarios that come to mind. There is, of course, a third option, in which the future is simply as it is today only with better technology, but for the time being, I will focus on the prominent two: Dystopic and Post-Apocalyptic. Both of these can be described mostly by the form of government that is around (or not around) within the world of the story.

The Dystopic – always a favorite for my fiancée – is defined by an overly-oppressive government, one which tends to dictate most, if not all, of the decisions that characters make in their lives. Common examples of this are George Orwell’s novel, 1984, the popular Hunger Games series and the upcoming film adaptation of Divergent (as well as the book it’s based on). Even The Matrix bears strong Dystopic qualities as the Matrix itself acts as an oppressive (albeit unknown) government controller. The characters in these works often possess very little free choice, though having grown up in that environment, they tend not to notice. But delving deeper, the controlling government is often in possession of some dastardly dangerous secret, some event or fact that they are hiding from the general population. Typically, it is the job of the protagonist to discover what this secret is, expose it to society, and bring about a radical revolution that, more often than not, ends up tearing down the whole government.

Now on the other hand, my personal favorite is the Post-Apocalyptic. Defined here by an almost complete lack of government, the Post-Apocalyptic world always takes place after some enormous, apocalyptic event (hence Post-Apocalyptic). The event could be nuclear war, terrorist attacks, an alien invasion, a plague-virus outbreak, or anything else that drastically reduces the human population to the point that most or all governments are rendered extinct. As such, lawlessness reigns as roving bands of humans or humanoids constantly threaten the life of the protagonist and anyone who travels (travel is an important plot element) with him/her. While Post-Apocalyptic works currently tend not to be as popular as Dystopic works, they are more prone to the slow development of cult followings. Some popular Post-Apocalyptic works are The Book of Eli, Mad Max, Falling Skies and virtually anything zombie-related (the zombie genre is essentially the poster-boy for the Post-Apocalyptic genre). However, in my opinion, the most important work in showing this worldview is Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, a novel that is essentially the dictionary definition of Post-Apocalypticism. Sometimes it is the job of the protagonist to determine what happened, but often it falls on him/her to establish a new society that will eventually evolve into a new world order many generations later.

There is an oddly unique relationship between the two worldviews of Dystopic and Post-Apocalyptic. While the Dystopic hero tries to discern the truth against the vast resources of the antagonistic government, the Post-Apocalyptic hero simply fights for survival against a seemingly endless horde of often cannibalistic enemies. Truth is the goal of the oppressed Dystopic while survival is the hope for the threatened Post-Apocalyptic. The Dystopic is reassured by worldly control, while the Post-Apocalyptic is assured of complete freedom. But more interesting is the temporal relationship between the two, for the societal collapse in Dystopic literature’s climax is often the Apocalypse that precedes the Post-Apocalyptic scenario. In the film, Cloud Atlas, for example, the Dystopic world of New Seoul in the 2140s precedes the Post-Apocalyptic world of the hero, Zach’ry, who lives “106 Winters After the Fall,” the “Fall” undoubtedly being the Apocalyptic event between the two.

But who knows, perhaps the society established by the Post-Apocalyptic hero is destined to evolve into a new governmental Dystopia, which is destined for another fall after its time has ended. Perhaps these worldviews are simply reflections of our own history, moving from strong government, to collapse, to lawlessness, to the establishment of a new government destined to overstep its bounds before falling once again in an endless cycle. In reading of our future, perhaps we are actually reading of our past as well.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I share some of my comic strip, Day 7, which covers the comedic interactions between a Sasquatch, a snail, a snake and a giant squid!