Mrs. BH is keenly familiar with a question I ask often, perhaps in her view, too often. It's a variation really of the question used at the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan. That haunting flick comes back to me often as a reminder of what our men and women in uniform face but also because I question consistently whether I'm living a worthy life. Hence the reference to that ending scene where Private Ryan, now an old man kneeling at the grave of the Captain who saved his life, turns to his wife and pleads "Tell me I have led a good life. Tell me I'm a good man."
Perusing the blogroll today while attempting to get over a nasty cold/flu, I came across The Lotus and his piece he called simply Zombie!. In it, he deals with the question in a different, dare I say, more effective way:
I’m afraid of zombies because they are the living dead. They are “alive,” but they are dead. They move around. They consume people. They do their thing, but really they are dead. That is what I fear the most. Thinking that I am alive, doing my thing, but really I’m just another walking dead, consuming others in my path. Perhaps the fiends of my nightmares are a mirror for my own soul screaming out what I fear most.
Thoreau in Walden puts it this way:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
First reading this quote was a pivotal moment in my life. At that moment, I saw so many people just existing. They slept, ate, consumed, went to a job to earn money, and they repeated that day after day. Marriages, children, and friendships were neglected. The true treasure of life itself seemed lost to so many. Here we are consuming while being consumed.
What could be more zombie? What could be more terrifying?
Indeed, I find it terrifying. Perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing with it's focus on guilt. Perhaps it's my exposure later in life to evangelical Christianity and it's focus on being saved. Or perhaps it's simply something I focus on in case this whole notion of God's mercy and grace, where I live and hope today, are in error.
Not really sure at this point in life but Mark's post brought it all home again.
Go and read the whole thing and ponder it's meaning and then ponder whether your existence is Zombie-like.
I'm hoping that answer is no. For me and for you.
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