fear.
What is fear of the supernatural? It isn’t a fear of the unnatural, but the terrifying experience of facing something that looks just like us and might kill us, or steal our souls, or take root in our bodies. It’s the fear that we might become consumed by it because it is more than us, from a realm incongruent with ours for the very fact of its similarity to it. The fear of the supernatural is the fear of ourselves, should we suddenly be loosed from the constraints of our own obsessive limitations— into transcendence, or ruin, heaven, or apocalypse.
I have previously written on ecstasy as a dual near-death/peak-life elixir. That unique moment in which one’s body mimics all the physiological signs of fatal distress. This danger is a required component of ecstasy in that the simulated stakes are precisely what makes it so euphoric. It seems one way to get to God is by cheating death, or at least playing at it. Yes, there is near-death, peak-life, but I seem to have missed a component. What about fear?
Jesus has a habit of bringing people back to life, or saving them from the brink just before the moment in which the soul exits the flesh. There’s usually a cut to: scene of gratitude, but resurrection must be horror as much as wonder.
Well, Paul, I am always working out my salvation with fear and trembling, because there is no other way. And salvation is its own terror, because salvation is surrender, and surrender is the act of working against every animal survival instinct we have in order to be at the mercy of another force, even at the promise of eternal bliss. That’s unnatural.
Lately I can’t sleep on my back because when I do I have a recurring nightmare that I’m plummeting into space. I jolt awake and it is the worst and most thrilling thing. Part of me longs for it again— fear and trembling, desire and dread. The adrenaline of survival, even if only in my subconscious.
There is a reason why, in paintings of religious ecstasy, the subjects’ faces are so deeply contorted. There’s a reason why, in Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, tenebrism casts everything in contrast. Dark and light.
My dear friend notes how difficult it is to distinguish the horrific from the divine, miracle from terror. One can’t exist without the other, maybe. I say. To be at the mercy of something so immense, to want to be.
In one way or another, through some other person or substance or God, we want to be.