In my novel, The Weeping Key, a modern-day woman named Katie Thorne is transported backward in time by the archangel Raphael to Biblical Galilee to heal her depression following the death of her father. Through interactions with Jesus, his mother, and many others, Katie begins to understand the mysteries of her life and comes to terms with her own suffering.
The journey comes to a conclusion as Katie walks the Stations of the Cross with Mary, (called Miriam in our story to differentiate between the multiple women named Mary), and she watches as Jesus meets his Earthly end.
I formatted this section in my novel by using Mary’s Way of the Cross by Richard Furey. From this perspective, we see the death of Jesus from the eyes of his mother.
I am sharing this entire section of my novel in full today, on Good Friday, in hopes you’ll read it and feel called to learn more about God, Jesus, Mary, the archangels, or anything that makes you question life. I’ve spent most of my marketing of this book going after Christian’s, and I think that was the wrong approach. I didn’t write this book specifically for Christians. I wrote this book for people like me, who question how the actions of others that hurt us can be reconciled with a God of ‘love’. How to feel ‘love’ from God, when you’ve never felt love from your own mother. How to deal with the unknown when a loved one passes and we don’t know where they go, especially when it goes against church teaching.
The Weeping Key was my fictionalized way of stepping into the waters with John the Baptist and other Biblical characters so we could connect to their more human side. I feel like we sometimes read and hear Bible stories, and it’s like watching a cartoon, we see them in 2D, and we hear the stories so much that while we grow fond of the characters, we don’t truly know them like we know our fellow humans who walk the Earth with us now.
These characters were real, they weren’t robots. They had feelings and thoughts, anxieties, and real experiences in life, just like we do. To tear them down into rigid figures does a disservice to the sacrifices they made to become iconic figures still talked about thousands of years later.
My novel doesn’t speak for Christianity, or a particular denomination. My novel is fiction, it’s entertaining, and it was written to plant a seed that might make someone dive deeper into something they don’t know a lot about.
So, having said that, here is “Lully Lulla Lullay”, from The Weeping Key, by Ames Pointer. The name “Lully Lulla Lullay” comes from a song with that title that is a lullaby sang from the perspective of the mothers whose children were killed by Herod when Jesus was born. I could think of nothing more fitting while writing this than to impose the story of those women, who lost their children, over the story of the woman who is losing hers now.
Lully Lulla Lullay
Katie descended into the living space and found herself in between Mary Mary and Miriram. They seemed to be in a standoff, staring at each other in an angry silence that radiated through the air around them and did the speaking for them.
“What’s going on?”
Mary Mary sighed as Miriam looked away from both of them, pushing her chin up in an air of defiance.
“We are going to Jerusalem,” Mary Mary said calmly and kindly. It rose suspicion in Katie, for both the calmness, but especially the kindness.
“I’m not going,” Miriam said firmly, slapping her thighs and gathering her apron in her hands. She began to clean her palms, but they didn’t appear dirty in the first place.
Mary Mary rolled her eyes.
“We’re going,” she said to Katie.
Miriam grunted.
“Is this because of Jesus?” Katie asked, probing for information. After John’s death, the women hadn’t seen him, or Mags and Myra. “Did he come back?”
The women nodded.
“He’s going to Jerusalem for Passover,” Miriam said softly.
It began to dawn on Katie what going to Jerusalem meant. His end was nearing. Katie watched Miriam carefully. Did she know? Miriam looked up at Katie, her eyes pained.
“I don’t want to go,” she said, hoping Katie would listen since her friend would not.
“Then I’ll stay here with you,” Katie responded. Miriam nodded.
Mary Mary wasn’t having it.
“We are going to Jerusalem,” she said in a way that indicated it was going to be the final time she was saying it. “All of us, together, and we are going soon. Now get ready or we’ll end up going alone.”
“I said I’m not going!” Miriam shouted. She had her eyes closed and her fists knotted still holding her skirt. “I don’t want to go!”
“Why?” Mary Mary shouted back, meeting her energy.
“Because,” Miriam shook her head. “Because I don’t want to go.”
Katie took a breath and a pause, unable to decide if she should encourage Miriam to follow her son to his death, which she knew she eventually would, or if she should simply support her in her struggle of emotions. Before she could choose a path of support, Mary Mary surprised her with a thoughtful observation.
“We have to go,” Mary Mary said stepping past Katie and holding Miriam by the shoulders. “You know we have to. It’s time.”
Miriam remained silent but listened to her friend.
“This is what he wants to do,” Mary Mary said. “And I know you are scared. They’re noticing him, he’s making sure of that, and this…”
She hesitated and looked upward, searching for the right words.
“I don’t agree with it,” she said with a huff. “And I wish he’d just come back here and stay put and keep making his sturdy tables, but he’s not going to do that. And I’m afraid if we don’t go with him, we might never see him again. So, Miriam, please. We are going to Jerusalem, and we are going to stay with him until he decides to come home.”
Miriam looked miserable, her eyes full of tears, lips trembling.
“He won’t come home,” she shook her head. “Not here.”
Mary Mary hugged her.
“He’ll come home,” she repeated.
Katie threw herself against the women, arms wrapped around both of them.
“I’ll go wherever you go,” she mumbled. Miriam was stiff as aboard, and her tears were turning into laughter as she fought gravity not to fall over under the weight of the women.
“Fine,” she yelled. “Let go of me!”
“We’re going to Jerusalem?” Katie asked one last time. She looked from one woman to the other. She had a sliver of hope that they weren’t and that the pain that would come with the trip might magically be erased from history if only this one decision were to go differently.
“Yes,” she said finally releasing her apron and smoothing it out. “Yes, we are. And we’re all coming home.”
One way or another, Katie thought to herself.
They followed Jesus into Jerusalem, as close as they could, to a reasonable degree. They followed him as he taught; they traveled with him as he preached, and they walked with him through the gardens. Now, they followed him on the path to his death, and Katie did so with the resolve to stay with his mother, as she had promised.
*
“Crucify him!”
The gyrating mob that lashed out in anger at Jesus threw Katie off balance. He stood beside Pilate at the top of a set of stairs, his chin level, his eyes swollen but focused straight ahead as the hate hurled at him. His body was bruised, bleeding, and beaten. Katie looked for Miriam. She had become separated from Miriam and Mary Mary the instant they had entered the courtyard to head to the sentencing.
“Miriam,” she called. She found her standing near the edge of the crowd, her eyes fixed on her son. Mary Mary stood beside her; her head was bent down as she focused on her feet. At Katie’s call, Mary Mary jerked her head up and motioned for Katie to join them.
“Where have you been?” Mary Mary admonished. “We told you to stay close. It isn’t safe for us here.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I couldn’t help it. It was like I got stuck in a current. They’re almost…”
“Rabid?” Mary Mary tried to finish.
Katie nodded. She’d expected it. It was just odder than she’d pictured. The frothing rage that wrapped itself around those set to condemn him. It felt…
“Demonic,” Katie said aloud.
Miriam looked at her sharply.
“This isn’t the work of demons. This is them” she motioned to the men who lurked in the crowd with smirks of satisfaction. They were holy men who had worked their way through the hoard, creating a mass hysteria among those gathered. “They don’t care about him, they just care about proving him wrong…”
She broke off and held her chin firm, almost defiant.
“It is what must be,” she sighed, her new mantra to get her through this. Katie had heard Jesus say it the night before. Miriam’s eyes glistened, but she swallowed her tears, pushing forward a front of strength for her son.
“We can stop this,” Mary Mary whispered in her way of thinking she could fix anything. Katie looked at her, and for the briefest moment, wondered if they could.
“No,” Miriam answered as Pilate gave the people a third chance to change their mind from convicting their savior to his death, which they denied. “It must be. He told us so.”
The women no longer questioned or spoke. They watched helplessly as he was pushed away again, this time bound for death.
*
The women made their way to the square, where the crucifixion would start. Two men were dragging heavy wooden beams past them, and as they turned to watch them, a door opened, and Jesus appeared. They threw him down onto the ground. Katie got a closer look at him than she’d had at the trial. He was swollen, a large dark wound on his forehead bled freely down his face, obscuring any other marks that she would have expected from the thorns. His tunic was red from blood, and it fell off his shoulders, revealing flesh torn down into the muscle. She flinched when he tried to rise, as if she could feel his pain, and he met her eyes. She wanted to look away from the gore, but she couldn’t turn away from those brown eyes who had listened to her, and spoke to her so kindly, and who had more compassion than she’d ever experienced before, and she remembered all little black holes in her mind of which he guarded her from. He would want her to watch, so she could remember, even if it was hard. It was his purpose.
The men threw the cross onto his shoulder and he struggled to rise to his feet and carry it, but once he did, they shoved him away and down the path that would lead to Golgotha.
Katie wondered about all the people she knew in her time who spoke of carrying their own crosses. She couldn’t think of her own cross, she could only think of his, and in what ways she’s added to the weight of it. All the times she’d put the weight of the world on her own shoulders, the pain of her mothers challenges, the stress of life, and how she avoided a life with Christ simply out of spite because she thought she could handle it all on her own and that she was too smart, or too intelligent, or that she didn’t need him. She had seen how Miriam worked to lighten it for those around her, and she felt changed, because now she didn’t feel locked in her own head. She wanted to help others carry a cross, like he was doing to the world.
Katie looked at Miriam. Her face was tense, and she held Mary Mary’s hand in such a tight clasp that Mary’s fingers were turning white.
“Miriam,” Katie began, “Peter told us we can take another way. You don’t have to see this.”
Miriam shook her head.
“This is what must be,” she repeated, almost in a daze. “I’m not leaving him.”
And so they walked on silently with the crowd.
*
His tunic was ripped from one shoulder completely. The weight of the wood had dug through his skin and he grunted as he tried to push the cross away from his body. Each lift revealed the yellow and white tissue and bone that was now exposed. He struggled until he fell to the ground and landed straight on his face with the cross landing on his back.
Katie and the women stopped in their tracks. They each held their breath, as did a few that were around them, for they all thought for a moment that he was dead. Miriam began to shake, and Katie and Mary Mary each held her close between them.
The guards kicked him, spitting on him, and yelling at him to rise, and he tried. Ever so slowly, he rose again to his feet, took the cross upon his back again, and received a whip with every step he took, as if no one around him cared he had fallen.
How often had Katie seen people fall around her and not cared? Had she ever watched someone struggle, responding like those around her with no compassion? Like she could ignore it if she pretended she didn’t see it?
“I want to protect him,” Miriam said out of the blue, her eyes wide as she looked at Mary Mary.
“I know,” Mary nodded, placing her forehead against that of her friend.
Miriam took a breath, gathered herself, and they all walked on.
Miriam had broken away from Mary Mary and Katie and had lurched her way through the throng of people lining the streets. She walked with him, each step he took. She took one with him, calling to him through the shouting voices. He stopped for a second and looked at her, his eyes full of pain and confusion.
“Courage,” he said as his mouth dripped with blood. Miriam held her hands to her mouth, trying to hide her horror at what they were doing to her son. She didn’t want him to know how she was aching inside. How it felt like the weight of his pain was on her own soul, so she kept her face as placid as possible. “Courage,” he repeated to his mother, and he walked on.
She paused and waited for her friends, and when they had taken her by both of her arms, together, they followed him.
*
He looked like he was dying right in front of them. Every step seemed shakier. Every breath he took was louder than the previous. Katie wanted it to end. She wished it were over. He stumbled and fell.
The guards were smart enough to know that he needed help and would never make it to the crucifixion if he didn’t have help. They shoved their way through the crowds and came back into the street, dragging a man by the back of his hair. They pushed him down onto his knees beside Jesus, and the man looked up at them in confusion.
“Pick it up,” he prodded the man, smacking the cross with a whip. The man was still apprehensive.
“Why?”
A guard kicked him in the back between his shoulders, and he no longer questioned. He helped Jesus up, and placed the wood on his own back too, easing the load, and together they trudged on.
*
He couldn’t see.
It was bothering Katie that Jesus couldn’t see. The blood from his forehead was mixing with sweat, and it had to be hurting his eyes as it continuously poured the hot, salty liquid into his vision.
“He can’t see,” she said aloud, causing Miriam and Mary Mary to both look at her.
“I know, sweetie,” Miriam answered, doing her best to be motherly, even in her time of extreme grief.
Katie’s own grief was overpowering her.
“He can’t see,” she repeated. “His eyes, there’s so much blood in his eyes…”
Katie felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“This isn’t fair,” she said, looking around above her. Ralph, she thought.
“Where are you?” she asked for Ralph. “This is wrong.”
She let go of Miriam’s arm and stopped. Miriam and Mary Mary looked back at her, and then to Jesus.
“It’s fine,” Katie said breathlessly, motioning to the Lord. “Follow him. I just need a minute.”
She walked in circles, trying to get her lungs to operate properly.
“Where are you?” she asked for Ralph again. “Where are you?”
She was talking to God, too.
“Where are you?” she asked. She felt a wail rising in her stomach and it moved through her chest until it blacked out her senses and she let out an involuntary moan.
She bent over and cried.
“He can’t see,” she whispered. “Isn’t this bad enough? But you must blind him, too?”
“It’s so unfair.”
She stiffened upright and wiped her nose and looked around as her breathing normalized to a point she wasn’t so dizzy.
“Well, if you won’t help him, I will,” she muttered to the angels.
She ran into the street and up the path until she reached Jesus and the man from the crowd.
“Wait,” she called. She stopped next to him, hoping the guards wouldn’t whip her, but if they did, she wouldn’t care. “Wait…”
Jesus looked at her as best he could with his swollen, bloody face. She tore her white scarf off of her head and held it to him, carefully cleaning off as much of the blood as she could.
“I’m so sorry they are doing this to you,” she said, holding her crumpled scarf. “I’m sorry.”
She felt a searing pain tear through her back as a guard smacked her with his whip, but she didn’t care. It was minimal to his pain. Jesus turned from her, and carried on, but Katie waited in the road until they carried her off and threw her onto the sidewalk, leaving her lying with her bloody scarf and her tears.
*
Katie ran down the hill, away from everything related to God. She looked up just in time to see Ralph kneeling before her, his arms open wide, his four wings stretched outward. As she collided with him, he embraced her in the warmth of heaven.
“It’s okay,” he whispered into her ear as he clung to her tightly in their cocoon. “It’s okay.”
She shook her head, burying it into his shoulder.
“It’s not okay,” she said. “I don’t want to see this anymore. I don’t want to be here.”
Ralph pushed her off him and held her in front of him.
“Do you want to go home?” he asked.
She thought about Miriam, following her son up to his death, and though she looked brave, Katie knew she was breaking inside. She contemplated how easy it would be for her to say yes and leave this place, and leave these people, because staying wouldn’t change a single thing. She pushed back from Raphael and looked around. In her angelic embraced, resting under the wings of a healer, she saw that the world was full of sparkles.
Katie turned and looked back at the parade of people following Jesus up the hill. The sky above them glittered with spots of light. It looked as if the aurora borealis had fallen to the earth and was undulating over everything. She turned to Ralph, and he smiled.
“This is what I see,” he said softly. “Spirits, of all kinds, are always everywhere.” He closed his eyes and pulled her toward him, pressing his forehead against hers, and when he did, she could see it in a flash: her whole life, chased by the sparkles, consoled by the colors, wrapped in an embrace of spirit in all forms. “This is what we are,” he said to her, “we are always here.” She grasped for words, but didn’t speak them. Her mind followed the lights through her life until they came together into one bright beacon, and then it faded into a white glow. In that glow, she felt Jesus and his mother, and she knew they had always been with her working in the background.
She could leave right now, she thought. She’d seen it all, she’d found love in Miriam and Jesus, she had answers, she knew she had never been alone, and she had what she’d needed to find in this realm, but she couldn’t let it go yet. There was something holding her back from wanting to leave, even though her journey was complete.
It was Miriam.
“I don’t want to leave her,” Katie said tearfully. “Not now. Not yet.”
Ralph nodded, his face full of compassion.
“I know.”
“I have to finish this,” Katie said, taking a deep breath and wiping the tears off her face. “I have to finish this. I need to be here, for her.”
She looked back over her shoulder up the hill, and she could barely see them anymore.
She turned to Ralph.
“I have to go,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’m proud of you, Katie,” he said. She believed him, and she turned and ran, and went to find Miriam and Mary Mary.
*
When Katie reached them, Jesus was on the ground again, this time just shy from the top of the hill. The soldiers were screaming at him and kicking him, as if further abuse would cause him to rise. Miriam and Mary Mary were there, among the others mentioned in scripture, standing near him. The people who had been following the procession were diminishing away. The women stood, hand in hand, watching as the soldiers drug him towards his final destination.
“Katie,” Mary Mary called with no hint of chastisement. She motioned to the other side of Miriam, and Katie instinctively knew she needed her support, so she stood at her side and held Miriam’s arm and hand.
The soldiers pulled Jesus to his feet and ripped off his clothes. Katie turned to Miriam, looking away, but Miriam held firm in her gaze, aimed directly at her son. Katie looked back to him, mirroring the other women. Watching in defiance.
They took him by the arms, both limp, muscles ripped, skin inflamed and broken, and they threw him down onto the cross. He closed his eyes. They tied his arms down. His mouth opened, gasping, as they drove long nails through his wrists. Each bang of the hammer caused the women to jump in unison, and it would have been easy to close their eyes and wait for it to end, but that would be leaving him, so they watched in silence.
They tied his legs, one over the other, and smashed a nail through the bone.
They lifted him up, with the other criminals, hanging them in a row.
He hung in silence for a while, and the women kept their eyes on him the entire time, as if their gaze could bring him comfort. Finally, he looked up with his head shaking, all of his earthly strength going into this final effort, and he looked at his mother. Katie felt Miriam tighten her grip on her arm.
“Woman,” he said, his voice weak and shaking. “Behold your son.”
Miriam nodded to him, her mouth in a firm line and her eyes filled with strength. Katie heard her whisper, in the faintest of tones, ‘my son’.
He looked over at the others, his eyes stopping on Katie.
“Behold,” he said, seemingly speaking to her. “Your mother.”
Katie understood. She finally understood love. She looked at Miriam and thought of all the ways she had supported her and blessed her, and how she wanted to give that back to her in any way she could. Love wasn’t about filling a set role given to you by birth. Love was a choice. A choice that had to be made every moment, of every day, to forgive and to support, to learn from and to teach, to meet people where they are and not for what you want them to be, and to be there, no matter what. Katie loved Miriam, but more so, she allowed herself to be loved by her.
He looked up at the sky.
“I thirst,” he choked. A soldier took a sponge, stabbed it to the end of a spear, and held it up to Jesus’ mouth. When he had received it, he sighed.
“It is finished,” he said with relief. He closed his eyes, and he quietly died, alone on a cross, with his mother watching from below.
*
Everyone was gone. The noise from earlier in the day was now silence. His mother and his friends stood quietly near him and looked up at his dead body.
Two men took him from the cross, and Miriam broke free of the grasp of Mary Mary and Katie and went to him, taking him into her arms. She held him in her lap like a child. She inspected his face, ran her hands over his bloody wounds, and finally, she wept. She cried, a tear for each piece of torn flesh.
“It must be,” she said to him, tracing the turn of his nose with her finger. “It must be,” she repeated as she placed her finger on his lips.
Katie wanted to lunge forward and comfort her, but Mary Mary stopped her.
“No,” she said, crying. “Let her be.”
Miriam pulled him to her chest, his arms falling down behind him, and she cried, covered in his blood. Everyone stood still, weeping. They let her grieve and simultaneously praise the Lord. Miriam praised him, even in her pain, because she knew it was needed to fulfill all that had been promised in the old times before, even if it hurt her almost more than she could bear.
When she had calmed, she looked up to his friends, and they took him to the tomb that had been arranged, and she came back to Mary Mary and Katie.
“Miriam,” Mary Mary began. Miriam stopped her and hugged her, leaving a streak of her son’s blood on Mary’s cheek.
“It is finished,” Miriam whispered. “It is over. Help them.”
Mary Mary went to work, in her way of showing love, guiding the men and women on what they needed to do. Miriam turned to Katie, who stood alone in the same spot she’d been in for hours.
Miriam embraced her, holding her tightly to her chest. Katie felt Miriam’s face dig into her neck as she kissed her cheek through her exposed, rumpled hair.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” Katie said as she hugged her back.
“I know,” Miriam said. She held Katie by the shoulders and searched Katie’s face with her eyes. She pulled her closer and held her forehead against Katie’s, leaving a patch of Christ’s blood. Katie began to cry. She’d tried so hard to keep it in, and to be strong for Miriam, but she couldn’t do it any longer. She mourned for her, and with her.
“Thank you,” Miriam whispered to Katie. “Thank you for staying with me. I’ll always be with you. I promise.”
Katie nodded through her tears.
“It is finished,” Miriam said, kissing her Katie on the forehead. “It is finished.”
“Go home, my child.”
And with that, Katie was gone.
Nicheless Wonder 