Once many years ago when I was foolling around I told a fellow grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I was tarrying for awhile in my transient bookish student days that I was going to write my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of jokes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. “Well,” said my friend, “That ought to be a short thesis.”
You can learn a lot about people by pulling their ambulatory appendages and in that instance I saw that my buddy didn’t know much about Emily who though a dark spirit in many of her poems was also a great master of riddles. To which I add that its no sin to not have read deeply in Emily Dickinson but I like to imagine that perhaps someday that fellow will do just that and be amused in his old age.
Jesus made a pun on Peter’s name: ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church’.
Peter is petras, a stone, in Greek.
I’ve been in mind of this moment in the New Testament for a couple of reasons: the first has to do with the magic of giving one another spiritually expansive names. As I said to my friend Gary Whittington just the other day: “Has there ever been a better name than Crazy Horse?”
My own surname means grove of spruce trees in Finnish unless you take out one of the “U” s in which case the root of the word changes from Kuusi which means spruce tree to Kusi which means piss.
Grove of spruce is, I submit, a spiritual name. Piss-pot is another matter but one might argue for its religious meaning with sufficient comparative analysis and some brio.
The second thing that Jesus’ pun puts me in mind of is that we can admire each other’s strengths and build a vision from something we’ve seen that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.
The pun is not always the lowest form of humor.
Perhaps the last thing to add is that it takes only a single stone to have a church. Peter is also an alter.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Nicely done. But while Peter may be an “alter”, he more likely is an “altar,” eh?
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