Buffy, Sookie, and Who Wants to Live Forver?
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
September 20, 2009

Message: Buffy, Sookie, and Who Wants to Live Forever?

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2009.

For Halloween – maybe a few days before –
when I was in College,
the Activities Committee sponsored a showing of Nosferatu.
They showed the movie in the large, 1200 seat auditorium,
which had an enormous pipe organ –
as big as this wall behind me.
And one of the music professors played the organ
during the movie – Nosferatu is a silent film,
made in 1922. Not the first vampire movie,
but the trend setter,
the one that made the genre.
How many of you have seen this movie?
It is a spooky film –
and when you sit in a large theater with the organ being played,
the hokeness of it disappears,
and chills go up and down your arm.

The actor, Max Schreck, who plays Dracula –
although, for copyright reasons,
the character is called Count Orlock,
is downright frightening;
in fact another movie has been made,
with Willem Dafoe playing Schreck as if he really was a vampire,
not just an actor playing one.

Our cultural fascination with Vampires comes and goes.
We’re riding a high at the moment;
and since I’m kinda into Vampires, too,
I thought it’d be fun to think out loud about it.

Vampires are an old idea. They make for great stories –
folklore, novels, movies and television.
Dracula has been a character in more movies than any other character,
except Sherlock Holmes –
I thought that was pretty interesting.

The ideas about vampires have evolved a great deal
over the last three hundred years –
and it is only about three hundred years ago
that the vampire became a major figure in our cultural imagination.

Why is that? Unlike witchcraft, for example,
which is known throughout human history,
vampires emerge only in the modern period,
in the world of Victorian morality, industrial development,
capitalism, and the age of reason.
It is, I think, a reaction from these things,
a counterpoint:
Vampires don’t abide by moral codes, especially Victorian ones:
particularly in our modern era,
vampires are hyper sexualized –
this is true across the literature, but especially in
the books by Charlene Harris, featuring Sookie Stackhouse,
which are the materials for the HBO series, True Blood:
when the vampires in this version of the myth drink blood,
it is a sexual high for themselves
and the humans who volunteer to be the meal;
moreover, in this series, almost all the vampires are omni-sexual:
men, women, human, vampire – they don’t really care.
In a world with rules, vampires break them.

Vampires, dark and brooding,
without compassion but with much passion,
both enact and betray the puritan moral codes
which live in the American DNA.
Puritans believed that God chose some for grace –
predestination;
and they believed in moral uprightness,
temperance, restraint, and the like.
Vampires know they aren’t the chosen ones,
so why bother pretending to abide by any rules?
And yet, rules are supernaturally enforced:
Vampires can kill you,
but they can’t enter your house unless you,
like a good Victorian host, invite them in.

In countering the Victorian order,
the puritan restraints,
our fascination with vampires reveals the hold
that these systems of morality still claim on our imagination.

Vampires also reject the industrial order.
They do things in an old-fashioned way.
They don’t work the factory floor.
They live forever, so they don’t have to plead:
slow me down lord –
they have all the time in the world.
Part of the attraction to immortality,
an attraction largely unique to our modern era,
is the sense that if we lived forever,
we would have more vacation time.

There is a question here about what our life is about,
what it is for:
the industrial order, the modern order,
says: you grow up, you work, you retire for a few years,
and then you die.
But vampires don’t grow up,
after they are turned they stay the same age forever;
vampires don’t work – they steal and con,
or live off the compound interest;
and vampires don’t die.
The come out at night, when workers sleep,
and sleep at day, when the inexorable processes of production
dominate the world.

But Vampires also represent the capitalist order:
the sense that some people – the elite, wealthy, powerful –
get to suck the life out of everyone else.
That the elites live a secret life,
that they have secret powers,
that they have sold their soul for their powers.

There is even a term of art:
vampire politics –
which can refer to the notion that the elite suck life
from the middle and working classes,

but can also refer to the idea –
somewhat well circulated in my generation –
that our parents’ generation will consume all the resources –
the wealth, the natural world, the water and air and rainforests and ice sheets –
and leave us for dead.

Jonathan Harker stands on the stoop of the castle –
a solicitor’s clerk,
at the mercy of the wealthy count.

In the spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
the show Angel,
a wealthy and powerful law firm,
Wolf, Ram, and Hart,
uses supernatural powers to defend the class interests
of the wealthy and powerful:
senators, industrialists, moguls –
some of who are human, but most of whom are demons.

The idea of vampires reflects the popular and understandable notion
that our lives are tools for others,
that we are means instead of ends,
indeed, that we are meals instead of ends.

And vampires are a kind of revolt against the rationalism
of the age of reason.
Vampire lore – this is certainly true of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and the Sookie Stackhouse southern vampire mysteries,
and the Twilight series, too –
involves more than vampires.
These worlds include witches, werewolves, shape-shifters,
other dimensions, minor gods, and the like.
There is a whole constellation of supernatural, occultish, stuff here:
things that are fun, and silly, and totally outlawed
by the modern scientific worldview:
Maybe the fascination with these fantasies is easier
because we know it isn’t real;
maybe it is our way of subverting an order
that seems to have all the answers.

The other thing that is true about the Buffy series and the Sookie series –
and where they get their names –
is that the main characters are supernatural, but human, young women.
Buffy starts in her late teens,
Sookie’s in her mid-twenties.
Buffy has supernatural strength -- because she is a vampire slayer;
Sookie is a telepath – she can hear other people’s thoughts.
Although she doesn’t have supernatural powers,
the Twilight series also stars a young human women – a high school student.
In each series,
these heroines all fall in love with a vampire. Or two.

The modern vampire genre is all about overturning old codes:
the women are the strongest;
the outcasts are the heroes;
the secret is the true.
there is a reason these shows and novels are particular popular
with young people, especially but not only women,
who have been outcasts at some point in their lives.

The modern vampire genre responds to particularly modern conditions:
exploitation,
the absence of mystery,
Victorian and puritan moral codes.
But it also responds and answers an ancient human puzzle:
who wants to live forever?

For there are two sentiments in conflict in the human heart.

On one hand – everyone wants to live forever.
The lawyer who queries Jesus asks:
what I must do to have eternal life?
Death is a curse – the result of the serpent’s treachery,
Eve’s curiosity, and Adam’s credulity.
It isn’t supposed to be like this.
If everyone lived forever,
we tell ourselves,
we would have less grief, less loss, less pain in our lives.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay puts it in her poem
Dirge Without Music,
“we are not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.”
So it is, we know,
but we, like her, do not approve.

More than that, the fact of mortality is a problem.
When we confront it,
it causes, as the philosopher Paul Tillich argued,
existential anxiety.
We tremble before this mystery.
Why do we exist at all, if one day we won’t?

On the other hand . . .
on the other hand,
recall the words of the choral introit this morning:
“from too much love of living,
from hope and fear set free,

we thank with brief thanksgiving
whatever gods may be
that no life lives forever
that dead men rise up never
that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.”

This is an ancient puzzle.

The Buddha lives in a culture with a different assumption than the west:
they take the idea of reincarnation for granted.
Some might take this as a source of comfort:
we do, in this sense, live forever.
But the Buddha: “after he had recalled his own births and deaths
in all these various lives of his, the Sage, full of pity,
turned his compassionate mind towards other beings . . .
it became clear to him that no security can be found in this flood
of Samsaric existence, . . .
creatures can find no resting place.”

The Buddha’s answer to Tillich’s question of existential anxiety
(why do we exist, if one day we won’t)
is simple and brilliant:
we never did exist.
“From the summit of the world downwards he could detect no self anywhere.”
The doctrine of no-self is central to Buddhism,
and after you grasp this doctrine,
you are like fire when its fuel is burned up:
and this is called Nirvana,
a word that implies a candle being blown out:
release,
from the cycle of ever and ever.

The knight sits in the cave, waiting,
for seven hundred years.
Sure, you can drink from the chalice of eternal life,
from the holy grail,
but then you can’t pass the seal on the floor.

Sure, you can become a vampire,
and live forever –
but then you can’t come out during the day,
and you have to drink blood,
and, oh yeah, you lose your soul.

But in a soulless world, even that isn’t enough:
It is boredom that is the true downside to immortality;
at least, that is the concept behind the decision of Godric,
a two-thousand year old vampire
in the Sookie Stackhouse novels and True Blood series,
to “greet the sun” –
to end an existence of which he has tired.

Who wants to live forever?
Not the Buddha, not Godric, or Buffy or Sookie.
Both of these heroines turn away
from the option to become a vampire themselves –
for they know the cost of immortality
is far greater than the cost of mortality.

but let us not hurry from this desire:
for we live in need of comfort and hope.

The inscription on the music for the choral introit reads:
for Cindy (1951-1968).
She was seventeen.
I have no idea the story behind this piece of music,
but I imagine it is heartbreaking.

and yet, the river winds somewhere safe to sea.
somewhere safe to sea.

This is the commitment of religion:
between the soulless eternity of the vampire,
or the endless cycle of birth and rebirth,
on one hand,
and the putting away of loving hearts in cold ground,
on the other.
There is something other than evil or nothingness.
There is the river than runs into the sea.

There is the release and tranquility
of enlightenment, of being one with everything.
And though it is true that
eternity is hard to ken
and harder still is this:
a human life when truly seen is briefer than a kiss;
this is true, but we remain able,
able to celebrate life’s mystery and even death’s truth.
There is the river that runs into the sea.

Dona Nobis Pacem:
give us peace.
Give us peace.

Not easy answers, not immortal but soulless life,
peace.
give us peace.

This is the Buddha’s quest,
and Godric, who meets the sun,
it is Buffy’s quest –
peace not by running away from her destiny,
but by transcending the limits of that destiny,
it is Sookie’s quest, too:
the quest to understand herself,
to find a connection that is real, trustworthy –
the deep peace which comes not from power
but from knowledge of self.
The peace which causes us to leave the chalice in the cave,
and return to the world.

Peace, meaning, hope, love, friendship:
these are the things that are worthy.
Some folks think that if they could live forever,
they would have these things.


But vampire lore – which is, after all, a way of putting in story
what we already know in our heart –
vampire lore teaches us that living forever
is mutually exclusive with those things we ought to cherish:
peace, hope, real love, real friendship.
A soul.

This world,
with all its trouble –
and it has plenty –
this life,
which is in the view of eternity briefer than a kiss,
this life,
is precious because it is precious –
brief, tenuous, fragile.
This is how we know we are not demons –
nor are we angels –
we are human beings,
capable of both passion and compassion,
equipped with the critical mind and a sense of humor,
loving, hoping, changing persons.
I don’t know how it is supposed to be,
but this is how it is.

There are no such thing as vampires:
not in the world.
But vampires are real and true in our hearts and minds,
they are the warning and the temptation –
to trade our souls for absence of death.

Religion is the other way:
the good life is the other way.
For, though dead men rise never,
the immortal dead live again –
not with fangs and paleness,
but in minds made better by their presence in life,
in deeds of daring rectitude
and scorn for miserable aims that end with self.

Let our prayer and our lives be this:
that we might read that purest heaven,
to be to other souls
a cup of strength in some great agony,
be a living holy grail of healing,
be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
the choir invisible,
whose music is the gladness of the world.

May it be so.

Amen.