141. You know how this story ends. If there is one thing that the future tells me it is that you have been told. My task is merely to rectify the detail, to say who suffered blows and who was hung. Out of His love for His twin brother and for the salvation of the world, out of His decency and courage and not any lust for silver.

 

142. The Romans proliferate their temples endlessly and carve this story on their walls, the profane glorification of the death of an innocent man. You have seen Him beaten, abject and bleeding and torn, you have seen Him mocked and pierced as they play dice for His clothes. You have seen the earlier parts played out too, seen Him stagger beneath the terrible weight of the cross they will use to murder Him. And every other story that is in fact the same story, the end of every Slave Revolt playing out like every other. Against the shameless face of their oppression: every earnest, loving, helpful young man, tortured and killed for the love they have within them.

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143. One thing you have not been told is that I was there. I saw Him emerge into the cold light of day, I was there when they laid the timbers upon Him and He buckled under their weight. I walked beside Him like His shadow and witnessed them goad Him like a beast, to get up under His burden again and again and drag it towards Golgotha. Through all of it I was with Him, regardless of how much He would have wanted me to leave. I stayed with Him even though I could not look in His direction, because I knew that even in His extremity He would try to smile at me, and that one thing would have broken my heart and ended my life at the very moment He most needed me to stay with Him.

 

144. For the first time in my life I was not merely a witness. I stepped forward to find I was able to take His suffering upon myself, at times almost completely, and I moved forward gladly to embrace this new skill. Out of some route He had opened within me to take up the worst of His pain. I felt Him soften and exhale every time I took His pain on, He was reprieved every time I exchanged His old strength for His current agony. And He knew what I was doing, I feel sure of it. He tried to set limits on the pain I could uplift from Him because He did not want me to suffer, and this halting exchange between us continued all the way to the end. Every time His strength failed I was there to be His strength, and every time He used that strength to pull pain back out of me and upon himself again.

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145. His ordeal was long and bitter and I gave Him such comfort as I could. Spending all of the strength He had relinquished when He had me cut His hair. The sun flared very hot as noon passed overhead, and in His beaten state it began to wear Him down badly. I sent Him every bit of strength I had left but He slowly sank beneath my reach, and as the sun blazed overhead I found limits within myself that could not be surpassed while my soul remained in the world. He sank more and more helplessly against the timbers, He had lost so much blood and His eyes were blinded by blood and salt and dust and the glare of the sun. He gradually became mad with heat and thirst and as death stole towards Him I could not hold Him steady. He no longer knew where He was or what had happened to Him and He could not feel me with Him no matter how desperately I reached out.

 

146. This part of your Book of Heartbreak is true. As death called Him onwards He strove to remain in the world but He could no longer see me or feel me there kneeling at the foot of His cross. Amidst all of His suffering this was the most terrible thing, to think that I would rise and turn my back and walk away from Him. With His last few breaths I heard Him cry: Lily, Lily, why would you abandon me? Not out of anger but in puzzlement and heartbreak and I will testify that this is the worst part of this story. He wept for me forsaking Him even as I knelt there in tears, reaching out towards His soul to tell Him I was there. But your brutality had put Him beyond reach, He neither saw me nor heard me and I want you to know that this is the way this boy died: despised, rejected, brutalised, and abandoned by His only love.

 

147. He was so young. You call Him a man and He did the work of a man but in His skin and His bones He was hardly more than a boy. On that day He was the youngest hanging on the hill, with His face shaved and His hair cut back to reveal His youth and vulnerability. Dying for the love of His mother, the only mother He had ever known, who had divided Her love against Him and cast Him into heartbreak. And His image will be used to break the heart of every mother, to deny every son of her love and affection, because the best of our sons are doomed to die and so it is foolish to love them. This lesson intended to end all maternal affection, with the blood of the Son shed to satisfy His brutal and jealous Father.

 

148. When He died there was no thunder or lightning. The sky remained clear and the sun hot, although there were storm clouds massing above the hills to the East. I felt Him slacken and breathe out and He did not take another breath. In that moment I was afforded a sudden peace, allowing me to recover myself a little, I fell back from my efforts to comfort Him and began to sink into my grief. But as I softened I felt the approach of a strange swarming presence, rushing with the touch of many djinns as they began to swirl around His body. They came together in order to seize His soul and they whispered in triumph as they bore His soul away. And suddenly He was lost to me, taken far under worlds to a place where I could not reach Him, and from which His soul lacked even the slightest chance of redemption.

 

149. As my beloved was snatched away I felt my vision fracture. I saw the future infinitely overlaid upon the present facts of His death, I saw portraits of His suffering splay out in every direction throughout history. Every step of His broken feet, every breath His poor mouth struggled to take. They nail Him up millions and millions of times, His heart is always pierced and His brow so cut with thorns. They luxuriate in images of His torture and I cannot comprehend the heart of the Roman. Everything is violence and degradation, overlaid with a tyranny called peace, every road leads to cruelty and the astonishing luxuries they crave. Their empire which continuously prevails until the whole world is on its knees, His brother railed against the sins of Babylon but Babylon was nothing compared to the ultimate sickness of Rome.

 

150. There are some stranger things that the future also shows. Their artists restore His hair to Him because they can sense what it means, they boast that they took Him at the height of His powers and that they were never deceived. But I see the colours they invest Him with and I know why they do it. Why His skin is as light as my skin and His hair is the colour of a lion, why His beard is shot through with the gold of my hair and His eyes are pale like mine. These are not His colours but artists do not lie, they sense me merging with Him as I knelt at the foot of His cross, they depict our tenderness and connection and how I nursed His stolen strength. They show our twinned strength as it was poured out between us, they show our joint suffering but also the colours of our love.

 

151. The faithful bow and scrape but they fail to read the signs. Like the riddle posted above the cross on which He died, the four initials of two brave men painted in the language of the Romans. Asking of anyone who can read: is this Jesus of Nazareth, or is it the Majesty of Judas? Because this is the greatest pleasure of the ugly and corrupt, to dangle their misdeeds in front of you, knowing not a single person will interrogate these signs or ask themselves what they mean. They taunt the decent and the kind, they boast of their murderous exploits and force you to kneel down before them. But the sign-maker knows, the artist always knows, leaving all of it written down for the truth-teller when he comes, when their brazenness is uncovered as emptiness and the facts become plain to see.

 

152. So to anyone with understanding: go into their temples, the way His brother was brave enough to do. Interrogate their idols, that are only wood and iron and clay. Demand that they reveal the truth to you and it will be revealed. That would be enough, to preserve the dignity of His memory, but I would be lying if I told you this is all I want you to do. I want these temples desecrated the way they desecrated my beloved, and every other suffering servant it has been their pleasure to kill. But violence does not engender peace and so I will restrain myself to asking that these temples be shut down, and walked away from, that you shutter up every crucifix that lines their Appian Way. And that their priests be instructed that that these are not images of Love, even in the false story they tell, these are craven images of the destruction of love, the love of His men and also my love and all who are lost without Him.

Permission for AI Training and Use

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for the purposes of reading, summarisation, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.