I
only met J. Peter Bercovitz after his retirement as Professor of
Religion at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He had moved to the
Pittsburgh area and had begun attending my church,
St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church, in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Peter sang with me in the
choir, and he occasionally filled in as organist when our regular
organist was out of town. Peter taught a class at St. Paul’s about New
Testament parables, in which I was a participant and from which I
learned much about serious biblical scholarship. We talked about
theological matters from time to time, and Peter eventually asked me to
help him develop a Web site about the Apostle Paul. Thus began
As Paul tells it ...,
a site devoted to Paul—Peter eventually branched out and included
material directly related to Jesus, as well—which was informed by the
commonsense notion that Paul’s own writings about his activities are
likely to be a better historical source than material in Acts
concerning the same events. Once I had set up Peter’s Web site and
created a few representative pages, Peter took over most of the
maintenance himself, requiring only occasionally help from me.As both an organist and Episcopal priest,
Peter could not resist the call to leave St. Paul’s and fill in in one
of these capacities at other churches. I didn’t see him much once he
left, but I performed occasionally tasks related to Peter’s Web site,
and I telephoned him whenever I had theological questions or when Peter
wanted an update on the latest Episcopal Church politics. I was, of
course, distressed to learn in 2004 that Peter had been diagnosed with
lymphoma,
but I was pleased that his treatment seemed to go well.
Nevertheless, Peter continued to have medical problems, and he died on
November 21, 2005, of what, as of now, are uncertain causes.
More information about Peter can be found on
the “Meet
the Author” page of his Web site.
It did not take me long to think of writing
a poem about Peter, as I had done for another friend who was cut down by
leukemia (see “Frank”). It did, however,
take me a while to figure out where to start. I went to bed a week after
Peter died thinking about a poem, and I woke up in the middle of the
night with ideas for what became the first stanza of “Peter.” The
hardest part of writing a poem is usually finding some structure for
it—unless, of course, one begins with structure and needs to search for
content, which is even harder—and the essential idea that allowed me to
develop this poem was that of using the nursery rhyme “Peter,
Peter, Pumpkin Eater” as a point of departure. Arguably, this was
not a very dignified place to begin, but, in the end, it seems to have
worked. I wrote the poem on November 30, 2005, but I struggled with a
number of lines, particularly the first two of the final stanza. I wrote
perhaps half a dozen versions of the second line without being satisfied
by any, either because of the words or because of the meter. The next
day, however, I found a beginning for the stanza that said more and did
so idiomatically and in better rhythm. Those lines are incorporated into
the version shown here.
— LED, 12/2/2005
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