One more

on body/soul.

Erin at Bearing Blog did some thinking about Christ’s humanity, about embodied-ness, and about being limited in understanding. Of particular interest to me, she gets there by meditating on the experience of having a panic attack:

… 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?

…

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. …