Resurrection

I am writing this on Easter Sunday. I don’t celebrate this holiday, or any religious observance, but the spirit of the day has me thinking about resurrection. As the term is used in the religious/Christian context, it literally means to rise up from the dead. This is the ultimate final-boss moment, and it’s no wonder we constructed an entire religion around the one guy said to have beaten the game.

We come pre-wired with a healthy desire to avoid dying; obviously, those with that desire tended to survive longer than those who rested their heads for a nappy-poo in the jaws of the saber-tooth tiger. So, we evolutionarily selected that death is kind of a dick and it’s generally better, if you can, to steer clear.

So impossible a task is it to defeat death, that the belief that one person had peace-outed from death and went sky-surfing forever, crystallized that person’s legacy among some as not just a dude, but THE dude, eternally.

What I’ve been thinking about, though, is not literal resurrection. For better or worse, we get our one dance and then clear out for the next contestant. That’s the way of nature and there’s poetry in the steely certainty of it.

I’ve been thinking about spiritual resurrection.

The word “resurrection” only came to its current zombie-adjacent meaning in the 14th century or so. Before then, its Latin root—the one we get the word resurgence from—meant something closer to “to stand up again after reclining” or “to spring up again after being cut,” as plants do.

I like both of these meanings. They are much more attainable than the hope that we’ll respawn later, filled with either wisdom or other people’s digested brains. It makes resurrection available to the average consumer.

If you’ve read this column, you’ve heard me refer to “death in life.” I generally mean it as: is something we are doing (or being) “killing” some part of us that has plenty of time to be dead later? If so, then we have an obligation to eradicate it. Otherwise, we’re like the people who go to movies and treat the whole place like they’re still at home. Why bother being there at all? Move over and leave the seats for someone who wants to watch Marvel’s 134th version of the same movie on a big screen with a sticky floor and squeaky seats, for $97, and a ding on your car door from the parking lot.

Carrying deaths around in us is, to use the word we’ve all been talking about recently, a tariff on life. It makes everything we do cost more, spiritually speaking. It’s taxing.

For better or worse, I’ve had my share of resurgences. I was verrrrrrry nearly killed by a drunk driver when I was in my ’20s. As the parent of children closing in on the same age, the fragility of our sustained presence here really lands when I think about that one.

A building tried to take me out, too. Two of them, really. That one changed the course of my personal river forever. The “spring up again” part took quite some time after the “being cut” part.

I’ve had some others as well, as I’m sure you have. Rebuilds after broken relationships, resets after false friendships, rebirths after pursuits were sidetracked, regenerations after grief and loss, rediscovery and reexamination after pandemics, and so on. Throughout, my personal mantra—sometimes effective, sometimes an enervating nag—has been: no death in life.

And these are just the big tariffs. Every day, we encounter opportunities for resurgence, for resurrection: the mood we started the day in that we have the choice to talk ourselves out of; the misunderstanding we have the chance to forgive; the litany of libels we keep stored away like wood for a future fire, that we have the option to abandon and forget at will.

These are all deaths of spirit, small and large. Taxes. Tariffs. When our spirit dies, we contain death within us, and it costs us more to operate this machinery we’re all made up of.

We cannot beat the final level. It’s fun to think of angels and harps, or coming back as the world’s most angsty golden retriever, but these beliefs are coping mechanisms against the internal awareness that there are no respawns for the mortal.

However, we can still transcend the end credits in our own way. If we start thinking of resurrection not as a once-every-two-thousand-year deity-level rarity, but rather as a daily chance to resurge—to get up after falling down, to spring up again after being cut—we get to respawn endlessly before the game is over. Every time we slice off these deaths, these spiritual tariffs, we generate new life for ourselves.

The Easter-style, final boss-level version may be out of reach for us mere mortals. But these small extra lives are well within our grasp if we look for them. We have the power to become eternal, in our own human way.

Is there something I should offer unsolicited advice about in future columns? Shoot me a line via the contact form at joshweinstein.com and let me know.