The notion of being alive and yet dead sounds pretty strange at first. Some might think of the image of the zombie… the undead… alive but not alive.
If we think about it for a moment, there are probably plenty of times in our own experience when we can identify closely with the concept of being the living dead. Those times when life has become a meaningless drudgery. When we are neither focused nor confused but just… well… a bit nothing.
St Paul refers to being dead in trespasses and sins (missteps and failures). He is expressing the idea that we do not satisfy even our own variable sense of what we should be and do. We live with the never ending burden of dissatisfaction.
But then God reaches out to us in Christ. Here is the invitation for everything to change!