The Place of the Skull

Believe.

At this point it was many years ago. Many things have happened since. I was a young man. We were all young.

I was in search of the truth. I guess we all are, and we find our various answers, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much they contradict each other, and how divisive the results, how we can come to hate each other because of them. I found my truth at the Sea of Galilee, from a man who bellowed his every word. Such a man was difficult for some to appreciate, but those who did found him captivating.

The curious thing about him was how he spent all his time talking about someone else. “Someone else” was a common theme in those days. Ours after all was a religion of the future, the belief that some day everything would be better, that we were waiting for that one miracle, the man who would fix everything. 

When the man in the Sea of Galilee spoke like that, however, it sounded different. He spoke of hope, but also of the present day. He didn’t know when it would happen, but he spoke with such confidence, it was difficult not to get caught up in it.

So one day a man appeared, and some of us were quickly convinced that he was exactly who we were waiting for. He spoke with authority, too, but he mostly spoke of impossible ideals, not the established ones, but the kind you’d have to be a saint to embody. We realized the best way to have even conceived of them was to be something greater than even a saint. Some were brave enough to understand the truth of it without even being told.

Well. It’s the kind of truth that sounds impossible. In those days even the Romans were trading faith on the shoulders of their predecessors, a mere act of fealty, a gesture of respect. We had Zealots, and even our band had one of those, fanatics who didn’t believe in compromise, and prepared for every sacrifice.

I say “we” when in fact I was never courageous enough to be included in the closest of circles. Later I consoled myself by saying, this was something of a ripple, and the ripple journeys outward, and it journeys inward.

I was always at the fringes. I was kind of the first of the secondhand. 

Such was the moment of my most famous infamy, what I never talked about with anyone. I was there, you see, at the place of the skull. I saw it happen.

Most of our number had fled like cowards. We reasoned, we would have been executed, too, and the whole thing would have been lost. We had of course abandoned him in his hour of greatest need. He would have said such a sin had been necessary, but we had never been good enough to understand him, when he was living. Not really.

I was there. I saw him hanging. 

I saw from a distance. That was the point of those things, a highly visible phenomenon to act as a warning, so that you maybe thought better of your actions. Later, they did it as entertainment, a different kind of spectacle, to discourage, so you would avoid such a fate, or to humiliate you, cause you to recant in the hour of your death.

They didn’t seem to care if it failed. Eventually, they thought, it would. The candle would snuff itself. The movement would end. 

Ours never fanned, not in the way they so feared. We never took up the sword, the only thing they understood. Our king died, never having claimed his throne. That’s all they saw. I saw it the same way they did. I saw it on the hill. I saw it as the moment all was lost. I saw it as my failure. I saw it as the moment I drifted permanently into obscurity, a name that no one would remember, as if nothing at all had been accomplished.

As if I had never believed at all.

The day after it happened, when the body had already been taken down and laid in the tomb, I had already distanced myself. I saw none of my friends. As far as I was concerned, I no longer counted in their number. I was no better than a stranger. Everyone had done what I did, but I thought I was worse. I hadn’t been strong enough when he was alive, and no better when he was dying.

Then the next day a few of us saw him alive.

I heard about it from idle gossip. Much was made of the paranoid talk, from those who thought we would try to fulfill a prophecy, as if we were clever enough, even from the Romans who with irony went along with the conspiracies. I heard the gossip of tramps, of beggars. Just like those he had done so much, casually, in his revolutionary manner, to see themselves as worth something.

That was what I had become, perhaps what I had always been.

And when I heard, I sought my friends again. I was accepted back as if nothing at all had changed. In fact, I was accepted as a brother. I became counted. 

I can’t really explain any of it. I’m not good enough. But here I say, Believe. Don’t believe me. I’m nothing. Believe what I say. Believe in him. Believe his consequential life, his message. 

Believe.