Purity

For as long as I can remember I have struggled with a feeling of sadness each time I heard the word ‘purity.’  I felt I could never be part of the good that word expressed because of experiences in my childhood.   This involved a friend of my parents’ so I could never talk to my parents about it. 

There were also times when people made accusing comments to me about troubles I was having being the result of bad relationships I had had when young, or hints that they were going to tell my parents about this and that, and so on, which left me with a great sense of fear.  One day I was to have an anaesthetic to have teeth removed and I was terrified that I might talk about this while unconscious, and be found out.

For many years this fear was driven underground, until I met my husband and could talk to him, and knew he loved me no matter what. But I still thought of myself as someone who had been impure and was now working my way out of it.

Many years later I was awake praying in the middle of the night about a very challenging situation and the word ‘purity’ came to me.  My heart sank and again I thought, But I’m not doing anything wrong or bad, surely?  I went to a thesaurus and looked up the word ‘pure’ to get a fuller sense of its real meaning, and to my delight one meaning of it was ‘complete,’ as in ‘a complete idea.’  My heart lifted and I then spent several hours searching the Bible and Science and Health to find everything I could about purity and being a complete idea of God.  It was like being in an illuminated room.  I began to see that I was a spiritual idea, and as the child of God I had always been whole and beautiful, so there was nothing to feel impure about.  I could relax and love myself as God loved me.

A few days later I had three friends round for supper and we were talking about this new sense of purity.  One of them reacted because of experiences he had been through.  When I went on to explain what I had been discovering, he began to smile again and said, Oh that means me too!   I don’t have to carry the burden of past experiences!  

What a joy it is to see these false concepts lift and our lives become restored to their original beauty and wholeness.