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Zombies for ThanksgivingBy Doug Floyd11/21/12

I have a somewhat macabre picture in my mind of zombies stumbling to Thanksgiving

dinner. Theres a table full of zombies feasting on turkey, dressing, cranberries, andpumpkin pie. Once they finish the appetizers, they start looking to the host for the nextcourse.

Somehow a little bit Halloween has gotten into Thanksgiving and these walking deadkeep showing up unannounced with a ravenous hunger.

Zombies do seem to keep showing up everywhere nowaday s. Theyve broken free fromGeorge Romeros films and are now showing up in Jane Austen novels like the awfully

popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Theyre ambling through video games,comic books, social protests and even academic research.

In 2009, Carlton University and the University of Ottowa conducted a mathematicalmodeling analysis to determine the best plan of action in case of a zombie outbreak. TheCenter for Disease Control recently utilized zombies for an emergency preparednesscampaign. So why not have zombies over for Thanksgiving?

In the modern reinterpretation of the zombie myth, these staggering sleepwalkers wereonce normal humans. Some cataclysmic event or pandemic turned them into human flesheaters. They cannot stop consuming.

I think the zombies are already here. The walking dead dwell among us.

The Victorian author George MacDonald might say that the walking undead dwellamong us. In his novel Lillith, he suggests that those who selfishly cling to life areundead. The undead do not yet to know how to live. Only when they die, will they live.

With a deep dose of German Romanticism, the novel follows the dark adventures of theundead Mr. Vane as he wanders across the far side of the grave. At one point, heencounters two skeletons crumbling apart as they argue. His guide, the raven explainsthat the skeletons are husband and wife. Theyre damned to keep grumbling andcrumbling until they can fully love and finally dance.

Like those skeletons, we stumble and grumble through the world, dull to wonder andglory and the utter joy of existence. Weve been lulled into the sin of apetheia (sloth) bybusyness, by disappointment, by confusion, by suffering and oddly enough by prosperity.

We can only handle so many blessings before we become bored. The monotony of dailyblessings numbs us to the privilege of every breath. So we focus on our discontent whilelonging for more of the same. Many of us will literally stumble to Thanksgiving in stateof ravenous somnolence.

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Like Chesterton, we might be jolted awake from the sleep of the undead. We mightdiscover the unexplainable mystery of being alive. Instead of killing zombies orbecoming all consuming zombies this Thanksgiving, we might actually becomethanksgiving, pouring out the unquenchable life and love of our Living Lord to the world

around us.