Undead: Revived, Resuscitated, and Reborn by Clay Morgan

Author:Clay Morgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Spirituality
ISBN: 9781426753459
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2012-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

mine and willed him to squeeze as hard as he could if only to take a fraction of the fear away from whatever it was that was happening in his heart, mind, and soul.

When someone dies, we never forget the look on their face, color draining from their skin, mouth agape as it struggles to find one more breath. But the eyes stand out most of all. They seem to go somewhere distant. We call them the windows to our soul, so maybe that look at the time of death is like a window opening to let eternity in.

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A long time ago there was a cruel form of execution called immurement—the more common term is being walled. People condemned to immurement were stuck behind a wall that would be built over them. Victims would die of starvation or dehydration. It had to be as terrible as it sounds. It’s killing someone without having to actually kill them. Creepy.

An old television movie called Buried Alive told the tale of a bad wife and her doctor boyfriend, who came up with a plan to kill her husband. Their exotic murder weapon of choice was a fatal neurotoxin that can be extracted from a puffer fish. Poor Tim Matheson never saw it coming. He unwittingly drank the poison, died, and was buried. Alive.70

The poison, called tetrodotoxin, has actually been the secret ingredient of many Voodoo priests in Haiti, sort of the cradle of zom-



bie civilization.71 Just the right amount will make someone appear to be dead even though they’re actually paralyzed, with almost undetectable vital signs. So why would a Voodoo priest want to poison someone to make it look like they’re dead? To create mindless human pets. The community would believe said person was dead, and the sinister witchdoctor would hope to have control over a brain-damaged human. Almost all the people exposed to tetrodotoxin die, but if the bad guys try this enough they might eventually get a “real” zombie.

What does all this have to do with Tim Matheson? Well, he drank just enough to seem dead but not enough to really be dead, so of course he woke up inside a coffin in a macabre and very memorable scene. The not-so-murdered husband finds his way home to take his revenge.

Now. What does Tim Matheson have to do with spiritual death? Being immured, or buried alive, is pretty high up on the list of most terrifying ways to die. But we often suffer spiritual death in a similar way. Some people might turn abruptly, but most of us just slip away. It’s gradual. We don’t intend to make certain decisions that leave us empty and feeling alone; we just end up at that point. We look back, trying to figure out where God was and what path we were even on. It’s kind of like spiritual starvation or dehydration, which makes sense when we consider that Jesus called him-

self the bread of life and living water.

In Surprised by Joy, C. S.

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