I catch up on the latest episode of the Walking Dead on Monday mornings.

I was excited to see new episodes again. I was surprised when the season began that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I anticipated. The first few episodes were depressing.

Any normal observer would say “Of course they are! You have a group of incredibly traumatized people struggling to survive the zombie apocalypse under constant threat. Did you think it would be cheery?”

(Spoilers Ahead)

Now that the human threat from “the Governor” is gone from last season, what’s left continues to survive in a cleared out prison. There’s almost no color in the show except red for blood. Almost everything else is drab. Now there is a plague hitting the people in the prison. They have managed to keep the constant threat of zombies manageable but once again older, more common threats, illness and human nature stress the survivors, their relationships, and those of us foolish enough to watch such a show.

If Breaking Bad reminded us of the monster within each of us, the Walking Dead reminds us of the condition of the world.

On TV, the communal mirror we use to make pictures of ourselves we want to see, most of us are young, healthy, reasonably moral and enough trouble to be interesting but not terminal.

We have known for a long time that media shapes us in subtle ways, it tweaks and re-calibrates our expectations of the world, our relationships and ourselves. It is an enormously powerful tool.

What struck me in watching the plague roll through the prison was how in its strange way The Walking Dead tries to reminded us what “normal” really is.

The Walking Dead was a “graphic novel” before it was a TV show and in the introduction the creator tells us exactly why he wrote it. It wasn’t to scare us, or show us gore. He says “With the Walking Dead I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these situations CHANGE them.”

I think our society is built around attempting to limit unintended extreme situations and keep them to a minimum. This is, of course, an impossible challenge, but the culture continues to keep whispering to us that it can be done.

Real life of course is different. Because of our ability to reduce infant mortality rates, to effectively treat a great many illnesses that can be survived by the young and the healthy, and if we as a society can continue to afford subsidizing the lives of the disabled and elderly so that they don’t have to live with us or beg in the streets, we can continue to tell each other that things are under control.

The truth is of course that they aren’t as under control as we imagine. We segregate reminders of our lack of control by national borders and by neighborhoods. We do it subtly by managing our relational networks so that we are around happy, healthy, easy to be with people. We have the power to shape the experience of our lives to create the world the way we want to believe it is.

We can all do this or a while, some off us are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to do it for a very long while but it will, given enough time, all come crashing down. The Age of Decay will break in quietly, subtly and destroy our bodies of the bodies of our loved ones. It will ravage our relationships and the work of our hands. It will inform us one way or another that life is short, fragile and painful. The world is not as we want it to be.

We learn about ourselves when we are at our limits. We discover truth, life, pleasure and sorrow in these places.

One criticism I have about The Walking Dead is that doesn’t really deal enough with religion. Hershel was the character who dabbled in it the most, along with some others no longer alive in the show. Religion is a big part of how humanity has always dealt with our limitations. There are too many practical atheists in the show.

One of the great things about the book of Acts is that it shows that the disciples learn two contradictory things. They are filled with power to do amazing things, but their power isn’t used or useful to help them escape the bondage to the age of decay. This is precisely the same mystery we see in Jesus’ life. He could heal and raise and multiply but when disaster came to him in the form of temple guards and Roman soldiers he lifts not a miraculous finger. This is the path of the power of the age to come (your wellbeing at my expense) in the midst of the age of decay. Jesus’ mockers are only mostly right: he saved others but he WILL NOT save himself because he saved them by NOT saving himself.

Peter and Paul will bear witness to this strange inconsistency unevenly. Paul will sing songs of praise on the floor of the Philippian prison but he will also fall into despair in reaching Corinth. Peter will welcome Cornelius but fall back in the face of the Judaisers. People will line up so that even their shadow will heal them but the thorn in the flesh will remain.