There is a reason I still self-identify as a Pentecostal, even though my life bears little resemblance to the culture in which I first learned that word.It is not because I believe Pentecostalism possesses the truth in any exclusive sense. Like every religious tradition, it has produced both extraordinary beauty and extraordinary harm. Institutions, almost without exception, eventually become preoccupied with preserving themselves.What has remained with me is something older than the institutions.Jesus compares the Spirit to the wind. It cannot be predicted. It cannot be controlled. It cannot be summoned on command. It cannot be domesticated. That intuition—that reality is more mysterious than our systems, that grace refuses to be contained by our categories—has never left me.Perhaps that is why Resurrection moved me so profoundly.On its surface, the film tells a deceptively simple story. After surviving the car accident that kills her husband, Edna Mae McCauley (Ellen Burstyn) returns to her small Midwestern hometown only to discover that she possesses an inexplicable gift for healing. People recover after she touches them. News spreads. Crowds gather. Religious leaders become suspicious. Doctors become curious. Researchers arrive. Reporters descend.Most films would make that premise into a story "about" miracles.Resurrection does something far more interesting. It is less concerned with miracles than with healing—which is not quite the same thing. More specifically, it becomes a story about what happens whenever people encounter something they cannot explain.Almost immediately, everyone responds in exactly the same way.They try to possess it.The doctors want to medicalize it. The researchers want to study it. The media wants to sensationalize it. The religious community wants to determine whether it belongs to God or to the devil. Even those closest to Edna begin searching for language that can finally contain what has happened.Everyone wants an explanation. Everyone wants authority over the mystery.Edna simply keeps healing people. That, I think, is the miracle. Not the healings themselves. The miracle is that she refuses to possess them.She never attempts to build an identity around her gift. She refuses to become either prophet or celebrity. She resists every effort—religious, scientific, psychological, or commercial—to turn what she has received into something she owns.She simply does the thing.Watching the film, I found myself returning again and again to a single thought:The deepest realities cannot be possessed. They can only be received.That feels true not only of healing, but of love. Of grace. Of death. Of the Spirit herself.Every attempt to explain mystery eventually becomes another attempt to possess it. And possession, paradoxically, is often what destroys the very thing we hope to preserve.AuthorityThere has always been another current running through Christianity alongside its institutions. One thinks of the Desert Fathers, of Francis of Assisi, of the great Christian mystics, even of the earliest impulses of Pentecostalism before they, too, hardened into institutions. These movements differ enormously from one another, but they share an intuition that has always felt deeply true to me. They have generally been less interested in mastering mystery than in yielding to it; less interested in defining God than in becoming available to God.The Spirit cannot be credentialed. The Spirit cannot be domesticated. The Spirit refuses to belong to those who imagine they own God.That is the intuition Resurrection understands so deeply.It is also why the film quietly becomes a story about authority.Who has the authority to name what healing is? Who has the authority to speak? Who has the authority to mediate grace? Religion has often imagined those questions are answered by office, ordination, education, or institutional approval.Resurrection proposes something far more unsettling.Perhaps authority simply appears wherever healing does.That possibility threatens everyone because it cannot be managed. If someone begins bringing wholeness into the world without permission from the proper authorities, those authorities immediately face a choice. They can receive what is happening, or they can attempt to explain it away.Throughout the film, almost no one chooses simple receptivity.Edna does.That may be the most beautiful thing about Ellen Burstyn's extraordinary performance—and I don't think the film works without it. She gives Edna an almost impossible combination of qualities: humility without passivity, strength without self-importance, conviction without certainty. A lesser performance would have turned her into either a mystic, a saint, or a fraud. Burstyn somehow allows her simply to remain human.She grounds every extraordinary moment in recognizable human experience, and because she does, the film is able to venture into spiritual territory that would otherwise collapse under its own weight. She is helped immeasurably by Eva Le Gallienne's wonderfully gentle, quietly luminous final Oscar-nominated performance, which gives the film another deeply human center of gravity.It struck me that this is one of the few films I have ever seen in which healing feels fundamentally relational rather than spectacular. She does not have the camp and theatricality of a TV faith healer. Presence—not power—is the miracle.That, for me, is where the film becomes profoundly Christian while consciously resisting becoming conventionally religious.Edna refuses to become an object lesson. She rejects every attempt to turn herself into evidence for someone else's theology. She declines the role of prophet, celebrity, or living saint.And yet, almost despite herself, she begins walking a path that feels remarkably familiar.Not because the film is secretly preaching Christianity (it doesn't), but because the Gospel stories themselves are animated by this same tension. Jesus does not spend his ministry establishing institutional authority. He goes about healing, restoring, eating with outcasts, touching those everyone else avoids. The conflict comes afterward. Genuine healing always rearranges the structures built upon sickness.That is why I find Edna less a symbolic "Christ figure" per se than someone inhabiting the same Christ pattern. She is not looking to become a martyr. She is simply doing good in a world that cannot bear goodness unless it first explains it.DeathWhat surprised me most, however, was that the film is as interested in death as it is healing. It begins with death, of course. Edna's gift only appears after the car accident that claims her husband's life. But the film never treats that tragedy as though it somehow had to happen in order for something good to emerge. That would flatten grief into a lesson, and Resurrection is wiser than that.Trauma is not redemption. Loss is not secretly "a blessing". But trauma does change us; trauma is change. Death changes us.Sometimes it breaks us. Sometimes it breaks us open.As the story unfolds and another death gradually moves toward the center of the film, I realized that Resurrection is asking a question I have quietly carried for years: What becomes possible when we stop living as though death were the great interruption of life and begin seeing it as the thing that strips away our illusions?Years ago, one of the books that most profoundly shaped me was Catherine Dowling Singh's The Grace in Dying. Singh spent decades accompanying people through the dying process, and what fascinated her was not primarily what people believed about death, but what death itself seemed to do to them. Again and again she observed that, if people were given time, something remarkable often happened. After the anger and fear, after the bargaining, after the exhausting effort to remain who they had always been, many arrived at a surprising freedom. They became less interested in defending themselves, less anxious about appearances, and less attached to identities they had spent a lifetime constructing. Whether they described the experience with or without religious language at all, many seemed to discover the same strange serenity.The question her work left me with has never gone away. Is it possible to live with the qualities of the dying while we are still alive?To live with less grasping. Less self-protection. Less need to control outcomes, defend identities, and explain mysteries. Whatever Jesus meant by "losing your life to find it" surely must look something like this. Watching Resurrection, I realized that this is precisely the quality Ellen Burstyn gives to Edna. She moves through the world as someone who has already surrendered the illusion that life can ultimately be possessed. That surrender does not make her passive. Quite the opposite. It makes her radically available—to suffering, to interruption, to grace. The healing she offers never feels like something she owns. It feels like the natural fruit of a life no longer organized around ownership at all.That transformation becomes most visible in Edna's relationship with her father. He is perhaps the film's clearest portrait of religion emptied of compassion—stern, self-righteous, emotionally unavailable, and deeply wounding to the daughter standing before him. Yet as death strips away his certainty, Edna responds with something that feels almost impossible. She sees not merely the man who hurt her, but the wounded man beneath him. She offers a tenderness she herself was never given.I want to be careful here. I would never want to turn forgiveness into another burden people carry or another obligation imposed upon those who have already suffered abuse. There are wounds that require distance, boundaries, and years of healing. That is precisely why this moment affected me so deeply. The film never presents forgiveness as moral performance. It presents it as the fruit of a life that has gradually surrendered the need to possess even its own pain.That, too, feels profoundly Christian to me. Not because the film preaches forgiveness, but because it imagines what kind of person might actually be capable of it.That is another reason why the film's title feels so exactly right.Resurrection is not presented here as an escape from death, but as a different way of living because death has already been faced.Not denial. Not triumph. Transformation.ResurrectionThere is one place where the film gives me pause.Late in the story, it briefly gestures toward an explanation for why some people are healed while others are not, suggesting that perhaps some people somehow "need" their illnesses. I don't think anything about the film is proposed as "doctrine." Any film that takes healing seriously eventually has to reckon with the painful reality that healing remains uneven, mysterious, and heartbreakingly incomplete.For me, however, that is the one moment Resurrection risks becoming less wise than it has been everywhere else.I have seen too much suffering to believe that mystery can be solved so easily. I have seen too many parents bury children, too many faithful people die young, and too many gentle souls carry burdens they never chose. I have also seen the terrible damage done whenever religious movements begin explaining suffering instead of accompanying it. Whether it comes from prosperity theology ("name it and claim it"), certain forms of charismatic spirituality, or more fashionable versions of therapeutic optimism, the result is often the same. The burden quietly shifts back onto the sufferer. If only you had believed more. If only you had wanted healing enough. If only you had surrendered a little further.That, to me, is simply another way of trying to possess mystery.One of the great achievements of Resurrection is that it spends nearly its entire running time resisting precisely that temptation. It understands that the deepest realities cannot be possessed. They can only be received. I only wish it had trusted that intuition all the way to the end.Fortunately, that brief misstep is not what lingers.What lingers is Edna.She does not build a movement. She does not construct a platform. She does not turn her gift into an institution. She simply returns to ordinary life. I found that unexpectedly moving.We live in a culture that assumes every gift must become a platform, every vocation an institution, every meaningful experience something to be scaled until everyone can see it. Resurrection imagines something gentler.Perhaps fidelity matters more than visibility.Perhaps the greatest gifts are not the ones that gather the largest crowds, but the ones that continue showing up for whoever happens to be standing in front of them.The older I get, the more compelling that vision becomes.There is a line that has echoed through Christian history ever since a young woman from Nazareth answered an impossible invitation: "Let it be."I have always heard those words less as submission than as surrender. Not resignation. Not passivity. A willingness to become available to something larger than oneself.That, finally, is what I see in Edna. She does not cling to certainty. She does not cling to power. She does not even cling to the gift itself. She simply remains available.That is ultimately why Resurrection moved me so deeply. Not because it convinced me that miraculous healing exists. Not because it answered my questions about God.But because it reminded me that there is another way of being in the world—one that holds its convictions with open hands, refuses to confuse explanation with understanding, and believes that the deepest realities cannot be possessed.Only received.* I cannot thank my friend @RobertVaughan enough for insisting that I "MUST" drop everything else and watch this, given the themes and trajectory my writing has been exploring lately. He could not have been more right. I needed to see this movie. I hope you see it too.If this review resonates with you, I also wrote at length about Catherine Dowling Singh's The Grace in Dying in my own book How to Survive a Shipwreck.Watched via Prime Video streaming.
