22 JULY, 2021

Dear Harry,

(Another Freudian typo! I have corrected it, of course, but I first wrote “Fear Harry”! The F is next to the D on the qwerty keyboard, and I have never learned to type with any accuracy. So, yes, “Fear Harry!” So very true!)

As an aside in this quasi-narrative progression through the years, I want to pause to thank you properly and sincerely for the name you chose to give me: Peter. I am truly grateful for it, though I wonder if you ever knew how apt and meaningful it would prove to be. I have always loved the name, loved all of its associations, all my namesakes—Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, Peter the Great, Peter the Rock, Peter the Fisher of Men, and yes, even that slangy “peter” we men have slung between our legs! I love that I’m a Peter.

I have long known—and valued—the reason that you gave me the name: I was born on August 1st. In the Anglican calendar of saints of that time—has it since been changed? I have been unable to verify this anywhere online—this was the Feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Peter, of course, my namesake, Jesus’s disciple, was put in chains for the audacity of preaching the gospel in pagan Rome—and was released from those chains by the intervention of the Lord (or his angel?), who appeared in Peter’s jail cell to “burst them asunder.”

That same Peter was challenged by his long-dead Lord once again as he was fleeing Rome at the urging of his followers, who feared, justifiably, for his life. “Quo vadis, Domine?” he asked famously, in surprise and consternation: “Where are you going, Lord?” And when the Lord said he was returning to Rome to be crucified for a second time, Peter was shamed into turning around and high-tailing it back to Rome, where he was captured again, and himself crucified. He denied himself the honor of dying in the same manner as his Lord, however, and insisted instead on being crucified upside down, as memorably recorded in that great painting by Caravaggio.

I have written elsewhere about the moment of epiphany when I saw those chains the good Lord burst asunder—or what purported to be his chains—in a reliquary in the crypt chapel of the church of San Pietro ad Vincula in Rome. In that revelatory moment I recognized in them my own chains, the ones I had allowed to weigh my life down with shame and guilt and fear, the ones I now knew I finally needed to cast off. That’s when the meaning of my birth day came to me in a flash, and I understood with blazing clarity what my name meant, and why you had given it to me so many years before.

I went back home determined to find out how to change my life—and I’m proud to be able to tell you I succeeded (even though that change led me eventually to a very different spiritual path).

Such a complex character, then, that biblical Peter who became the first Bishop of Rome, the founder of the Roman Catholic church: the simple man whom Jesus met by the Sea of Galilee and chose to make his “fisher of men”; the one who cravenly denied his savior “before the cock crowed thrice”; the one who rediscovered his fortitude and courage and became the “rock” upon whom the Christian church was built. Did you know, Harry, when you gave me the name that I would “inherit” something of Peter’s cowardice and something of his strength, something of his fickle faithlessness and something of his solid, rock-like trustworthiness?

You certainly gave me a name to live up to. I don’t suppose my namesake will be waiting for me with his keys at heaven’s gate. I have surrendered that belief, if indeed I ever really had it. Was he waiting for you? I’ll be reminding you one day of how reluctant you were to leave this world. Was that because you, too, had doubts about that… well, let’s call it by its name: that myth?

Your doubt-ful son, Peter