I've never had trouble with the concept that Jesus felt physical pain, that He physically suffered. Seems obvious to me: If you have a body, it hurts sometimes. And that doesn't feel good, even if you know the pain is necessary and a sign of something good. Anybody who's given birth knows this. Pain is more bearable if you understand where it's coming from, but it is still pain and it would be nicer if there were less of it. Right?
But the fear? How does that work? How on earth can the omnipotent and omniscient and eternal "fear" his own willed temporal suffering? Fear comes from a lot of places — not knowing, for example. (But God knows all.) And being out of control. (But God is in control, even in the person of Jesus who submitted to others.) And the threat of annihilation. (But God is eternal.) Isn't fear something that is fixed by knowing, by control, by the promise of continued existence? Well?
I wasn't thinking about that when I began the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary yesterday, when I arrived at the story of Gethsemane. I was thinking about Amy Welborn's meditation on the resurrection of the body and her quote of a post by Fr. Longenecker , about the resurrected body being "the soul in every cell," that she said helped her feel relieved: "I could not begin to parse it philosophically or theologically, and nor did I have any desire to. Something within got it, and I was able to trust."
Of course, I took that to prayer thinking I would try to parse it philosophically or theologically. A lot of what Amy writes about difficult-to-grasp assertions of our faith resonates me. I have a very cerebral, historical approach to the Catholic faith, and aspects that can really only be approached so far with the intellect, further progress having to be made obliquely or with intuition, leave me with a permanent sense of unease. So that's what I was trying to understand.
What came to me was something that happened to me years ago. Have you ever had a genuine panic attack? I have. I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college. I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again — I've never had any since. I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.
It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me. I recognized the sensation as a panic attack. I knew I was, in fact, safe. I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response. And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger. My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.
I suffered. Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body. My physical response created an unbearable restlessness — my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight! And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight. And yet my body urged me to do something — I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night. But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee. I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last. In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed. I didn't feel wholly better until after I had fallen asleep (completely physically exhausted) and awoken hours later.
So I remembered that, and then it made a little bit more sense to me how Jesus could know all and yet suffer from His fear, as we believe He did in Gethsemane. I'm not saying that I know how it works, I just say that I see now a way that it could work. Because He could certainly have willed His body to yield the fear response, just as He could (and we know, did) will His body to experience pain, to send distress signals to His brain. If a panic attack can feel physically even worse to one who knows there's nothing to fear, because of the constant effort for the wiser mind to suppress and overrule the wild urges from the body, the urges of muscle and bone — then I don't doubt that the fear response generates real suffering even to the omniscient.
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That permanent sense of unease, about things that can be grasped only so closely by the intellect — it is not a bad thing. For me, "to trust God" means above all else to accept "I can not understand this except when You decide to gift me with insight." The habit grows easier with time, but the unease remains, part of that restlessness that belongs to this life. St. Augustine wrote: Our hearts are restless until they rest in you. It doesn't make sense — that's a kind of restlessness, an urge to do something, to find out something, to write and write to try to figure it out, to read and read, to argue and understand. And restlessness isn't always made easier by knowing that there's really nothing more that can be gained by action.
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