Blood, Guts, and Faith

In our first-world, bourgeoisified context, I sometimes wonder if part of the problem of the propogation of the faith stems from our forgeting (even amongst the most fervent believer) about how gross the faith is.

For we worship an executed man. The symbol for the faith is was designed to ensure that those who hung on it died from asphyxiation, and for some expressions, the symbol also includes the man being suffocated. In most expressions of the faith, the centrepiece for the faith is the remembrance of that death by eating what is purported to be His flesh, and drinking what is purported to be His blood (1 Cor 11:23-28).

Somewhere in this sea of blood and flesh, there lies our salvation. This is part of the scandal of the Christian faith, and a scandal that seems lost in a large part of the Church, including those who part-take of this eating and drinking in sacramental form.

And yet, when zombies and vampires eat flesh and drink blood, Christians recoil in horror at what they do (and do so for entertainment), and not at our own immersion in the blood and guts of the Saviour. All the pity, for our ignorance of the faith’s relationship to flesh and blood in a way facilitates our ignorance at the relationship between the rise of the monsters before, and our understanding of our own bodies, becoming more liquified as they become more sanitised.

This was the sense I felt as I read the latest article in Church Life Journal by Angela Franks, who is a professor in theology at St John’s Seminary in Boston. Franks has written a series of article on the liquification of self on the Journal, and her latest focuses exactly on the place of vampires and zombies not only in the literary (and sometimes literal) imagination, but also in the context of a broader cultural shift towards a destabilisation of self. Franks’ articles highlight the ironic relationship whereby the entrenchment of a scientistic cultural footing coincides when an increasing fluidisation of our desires and sense of who we are.

In her latest article, Franks looks at vampires at around the very time that scientists identified certain “naturally promiscuous” properties in blood that made blood transferable from one person to another, thereby transferring life from one to another. The body is rendered permeable, and the distance between self and other starts to blur.

As this blurring between self and other intensifies, the self starts to become devoid of any essential anchor and begins to hollow out. Beginning with T.S. Eliot’s poetry, Franks’ highlights the degree to which modern liquification of self gives way to a postmodern death-in-life, which is epitomised in the zombie. In this context, I was pleased to see my little book Redeeming Flesh being cited, in particular my point concerning the blurring of the distinction between the mindless consumption of flesh by zombies, and our own mindless consumption of goods and services in postmodernity.

A fascinating final point is Franks’ observation that “The perhaps unintended result is that Dracula [and we can argue zombies as well] portrays religion, and Catholicism in particular, as operating at the level of the grotesque”. I think her essay highlights the degree to which the sacramentality of the Christian faith should properly situate Christians in this zone of the grotesque. The extent to which we ignore or avoid it, is the extent to which we limit both the cultural vocabulary of the faith, and the faith’s capacities to engage a culture that is becoming more fascinated by blood and guts, if only because it is itself becoming simultaneously sanitised and gross.

Nota bene: I have my own essay on the liturgy of flesh in the Church Life Journal here.

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