Once I ate a piece of fried Spam with Grey Poupon on it. I was fully aware of the irony of this. Indeed, I took great pleasure contemplating it during the meal. And I thought it was delicious.

Whatever that says about me is true.

I like cake icing a lot. The more the better. The only thing that stops me from fighting children for the corner piece of cake at birthday parties is knowing I would look ridiculous. I will, however, try to position myself in line so that I might be given the corner piece. If handed the corner piece of cake, I will likely protest briefly, saying "that's way too much icing, but okay if you insist."

Whatever that says about me is true.

I have loved Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers for a quarter of a century. I only eat the Parmesan cheese version. Unfortunately, Pepperidge Farm has a problem with product consistency. Some Goldfish are salted less than others, and some are puffier with a powdery texture that I don’t like. I learn the batch numbers and look through the packages on the shelves for good batches. Currently you should stay away from anything beginning with a D or a W. The RU series is pretty good.

Whatever that says about me is true.

I have always found it difficult to believe in things that seem unbelievable. When presented with a story in the Bible, I can’t help running it through my epistemological filters. And if I don’t think it happened, no amount of wishing, wanting, or denying can change my mind. I can gently avoid the subject. I can participate in the faith community’s worship. I can appreciate the beauty of the scripture in question and even speak intelligently about its archetypal value in a world of human myth and dreams. But if I don’t believe it, I just don’t. I’m not proud of this. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s simply a fact about me.

There is one exception to this. I have mustered enough emotional and mental energy to give assent to a small set of central Christian doctrines. This gift to God of my willing belief is the most sacred and vulnerable thing I can give to anyone. It’s the only thing I can give to the God who has everything. So I give it with love, knowing that it is a small and unimportant gift in the universe. I give this gift like a child who makes a homemade card and hopes his parents will put it on the front of the refrigerator.

Whatever that says about me is true.

I never got over not having a son, though I would not trade the three sisters for anything in the world, even a son. But that is a wound that will never heal. The only thing I have to give to the son I never had is carrying that sorrow and thinking about him sometimes. I still call him Elliot.

Whatever that says about me is true.

I can be a very crude and vulgar person, not out of malice or a desire to be rude or offend people. I just don’t seem to have the same boundaries that other people have. Sex and death and bodies and fluids seem very natural to me. I think that words like shit or fuck or damn or hell are just words. A lot of very funny things involve crude or dark subjects, and coarse language is a part of human speech. If I’m with close friends, I can be pretty vulgar. But I try not to offend people who would be offended by that kind of thing.

Whatever that says about me is true.

I could go on and on. There are things about me that I’m ashamed of and will not speak of publicly. And there are things about me that are even goofier than these I have mentioned. There are silly parts of me, proud parts of me, and vain parts of me. Some parts of me you might find adorable. And there are some parts of me that if you knew about them you might say, “Dude, you have a problem.”

To which I might say, “You mean a bigger problem than putting Grey Poupon on Spam, combing through bags of Goldfish Crackers in the supermarket, and bursting into tears when someone says Elliot?”

Now this is important. This is what I’ve been building to the whole time, though when I started this little piece weeks and weeks ago, I thought it would just be about putting Grey Poupon on Spam, which at the time seemed rather funny to me. But here we are at the end, and now something else has come to mind.

Whatever is true about you is true about you. I know that statement is absurd, but it works in the same way that “It is what it is” works. It is a good thing to say because we live in a culture that is heavily saturated with marketing, and it's easy for us to start thinking that what we say about ourselves is what's true.

It isn’t.

What is true about you is what is true about you. And no amount of denying and pretending and covering up will ever change that. Sure, you can fool people for awhile, but you are the sum total of all the things that are true about you. And what we’ve always said about God is that God knows the truth about us.

Saying that God knows us is a spiritual statement of faith, but the deeper truth remains whether or not you believe in God. What is true about you is who you are. You are not who you want to be. You are not who you hope to be. You are not the person that others think you are.

You are the person who is defined by what you choose and what you truly desire and what you really think and believe. That’s who you are. If you want to begin any kind of spiritual or metaphysical or personal journey, that’s where you should begin. You should begin by owning who you are.

It’s called spiritual poverty in our tradition. Jesus began his most famous words with this innocent sounding but profound statement:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

If I was only allowed to keep one verse from the New Testament, that would be the one.

rlp

.