Take this Brain and Eat it, for it is My Brain

Last night I dreamt that my family and I were wandering through a church filled with zombies, who followed us back to our Christmas-decorated home after we had stolen a set of bronze candlesticks from them. This is not the first time that I've dreamt of the coincidence of cathedrals and the undead, and there are certain reliquaries in the city that I prefer not to go into for fear that modern day Lazari will leap out and grab me like they did last time. It certainly gives a whole new meaning to the Resurrection. What was new about this dream however, was realizing that this conjunction of images really does go back to my childhood Catholicism. Usually in my dreams zombies represent not the undead but the not quite living, that is, masses of humanity blindly following their rote roles and expected behaviors. In this sense, the church of the zombies might be better appreciated by Marx, who said that religion was the opiate of the masses. As a child, watching the lines of people slowly walking up the aisle to have the host placed in their mouth always felt like a scene out of the twilight zone, and though I probably didn't wonder it as clearly at the time, mass always struck me as being a rather socially-enforced action.

Of course, my dream also might extend from having just finished reading José Saramago's "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," which is a masterfully told retelling of the Jesus mythology from Jesus's point of view, complete with the psychological upheaval of his inherited dreams and uncertainty whether he should really trust God's plan for him. In one of the most wonderful moments of the book, before accepting his fate, Jesus asks God to tell him the future that will occur because of his crucifixion, and then for the next handful of pages God lists every single person martyred in Christ's name, each torture, Crusade, and Inquisition, until the Devil, who is also part of their conversation, begs to be allowed to repent so that none of this bloodshed has to happen. Which of course, it does, but the reader is left with a sense that good and evil are rather more intertwined than we usually think, and often somewhat indistinguishable from each other. But while Saramago's Jesus realizes that overturning the the temples and raising the dead might be morally reprehensible acts, others want to cast Christ as a samurai stranger who fights killer robots in various Manga Bibles. Personally I am waiting for an adventure movie based on the return of the Last or Hidden Imam, al-Mahdi, who in some Shi'ite prophecies teams up with Isa (Jesus Christ) to fight evil throughout the world like superhuman action heroes.