Peter, this story is your story.
Monumental truth, from an unlikely perspective.
Light Upon You is a narrative history of the tomb of the apostle Peter, told from the perspective of a church mouse.
An exhaustively researched account, the events and characters of the story are knit from dozens of historical sources, spanning from second century Pagan funerary inscriptions, the Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), and a seventh century Roman travel guide, to the obscure writings of medieval scholars, Papal correspondence, newspaper articles, Vatican archeological reports and modern academic papers.
Weaving historical facts into a rich tapestry of imagery, Light Upon You is not just about the bones of a fisherman, but a spellbinding story about tradition and reason, and about finding companionship and solitude in the most unlikely of places.
Some infinities have beginnings.
Mine did. My infinity was preceded by nothing. An endless arrow, but tipped with only a single arrowhead.
I remember only the very end of the nothing, but in truth, to recall its finish is to recall its entirety, for it ended the same way it existed: with a deep, roiling, patchy Eigengrau gray, untextured and infuriatingly featureless, but somehow teeming with tiny points if you were to focus hard into the corners of it.
How firmly I now grasp all that has come since then! How many vast tendrils have stretched out from this tiny place, so far out into time, and even the weight of the Great Dome, standing for centuries, cracking and almost buckling, plummeting, under the heaviness of its own existence – all sixty six million pounds of masonry – is nothing – nothing! compared to the profound, singular, undeniably human weight of what has occurred in this place.
Peter, this story is your story. The part that you remember as the end, what you felt and lived, is really the beginning.
Now comes the rest.