I.
Jesus told his Roman executioners, “After three days I am to rise again,” and, as if dared, they set, over his tomb, a wax seal with rope. The price of breaking that seal was death. Three days later, his disciples found the stone covering the tomb rolled away, and nothing inside except the linens that had wrapped his body, bearing the shape of a body, but with no body. They concluded that he had, indeed, resurrected.
II.
At the end of Ordet, Dreyer frames the deceased Inger in beatific light. Throughout the film, she has been the heart of the Borgensgaard farm: tending to piglets, rolling out dough, rearing two daughters. But now, her hands are clasped upon her torso, dead after a harrowing medical procedure. Her resurrection starts at her extremities. Her fingers twitch. Her eyelids flutter. As she revives, she kisses her husband’s cheek with gentle nibbles, though I somewhat expected her to rip, zombie-style, a bloody chunk out of his face. Thomas Beltzer points out that the scene is purposefully uncomfortable: Inger has been granted not a spiritual resurrection, but a physical one. “The bodily resurrection,” he writes, “means that God loves our bodies as well as our souls and that he wants to be fully involved in our material lives as well as our spiritual lives.”
III.
When I watched Ordet, a month ago, around Easter, I was in a dark place. I had, like others, sealed myself into a tomb of my own making. I had trouble sleeping. I tried to relax by crossing my hands upon my chest, but beset by uncertainty and fear, was left imagining what it would be like to be dead—a holdover from my teenage years, when I thought about death with the romantic curiosity of someone far from it. But, with its possibility close, I thought it might be nice—like an endless night of sleep. When it came time to wake up, to rejoin the living, I resisted. I felt, not like Inger, but like Johannes, who, driven mad by Kierkregaard, believes he is Jesus: “You must rot, because the times are rotten.”
IV.
Leonid Andreyev, in his story “Lazarus,” questions what happens after resurrection. Before his death, the character of Lazarus takes sybaritic joy in living, but after his resurrection, these former pleasures fall by the wayside. Only emptiness remains. As the rich and curious seek him out to uncover what it means to die, they come away without answers, and haunted. I read that story in middle-school, trying to discover what it meant to die but came away without answers, and haunted.
V.
A nearby church bears a banner reading “WE ARE EASTER PEOPLE”; it’s been flying for almost two months. What does resurrection look like? Buds on trees have brought forth blossoms; ferns curled into themselves have unfurled fronds; shoots scraping their way out of the ground have grown dark foliage. Elsewhere: streets await the spill of traffic; strip malls await the switch of dusty OPEN signs; skies await screaming airplane engines. We await the moment we can roll the rock from the cave entrance of self-isolation to see how world has changed. I urge myself, wake up. Wake up.