Purity

The word purity feels harsh to me – like a scrub brush on a stained tile floor, scouring out the dirt and grime. It feels like bristles and bleach and power. Even so, I’ve thrown myself into a kind of interior scrubbing all my life. I have an obsessive need, almost a reckless need, to purge myself of impurities. I have always wanted to be perfect; to be free of anything dark or chaotic or wrong. The biggest problem with this is that I then reflect that need on others. I cannot handle much that brings imbalance, and I consistently feel a need for people to notice their problems and improve them quickly. I have always taken a manic, deep-clean-in-a-day mentality to purifying my life – the moment I notice an impurity, in myself or in another, I will do everything I can to get it out. 

This has, of course, not served me well on the whole. It has allowed for me to grow quickly, yes – but it has not always allowed my roots the time to catch up, and I often wilt under the pressure of quick growth and the lack of structure to support it. This is a lesson I have never wanted to learn, but keep bumping up against: purifying happens over time, often gently, sometimes completely undetected. Of course, there are the moments of intense purification – new relationships, new jobs, conflict with loved ones. I have experienced all of these this year, and the weight has often felt nearly unbearable. But most of life is not about intensity; it’s about longevity. 

I wonder now if purity is less about scrubbing, more about soaking. I wonder if it is less about bleach and more about warm water filled with gentle ingredients that slowly pull the impurities from us. Sometimes there are spin cycles, and sometimes there is scouring. But most of the time, I think maybe it’s more about sitting in the gaze of God’s love, in the joy of his face, and allowing his warmth to melt off the hardness we’ve accumulated in our hearts. Maybe, in the gardens of our souls, it’s more about planting the good than weeding out the bad – although both are needed. A friend told me the other day that oftentimes it’s best not to set all of our efforts on squelching something we think is wrong, for it might not in fact be wrong at its core – it may be a desire in us that is pointing to a greater need for God. It is, possibly, something we need to ask God to meet in us, instead of running from what our soul is desperately seeking.

I have always loved water. I love swimming in the summer, I love taking off my shoes and wading into creeks with bare feet. I love the sound of water, I love the soothing touch of water. I wonder, then, if purity might feel less harsh and painful if I thought of it more like a baptism – a falling gently into weightless joy, a lifting back up into newness. I have never had much of a connection with baptism; it scared me as a kid, and even as a pastor I cared more about character transformation than I did about the one time decision to get baptized. But now, in linking it to the feeling of release I get when I am around or in water, I think it’s sinking in. Baptism is a one-time event, but it showcases a choice we are making with our lives: to allow the grace and love of God to envelop us and turn us into something we never imagined we could be.

Purity, then, is coming to mean this to me: choosing to be baptized again and again, drawn into the waters of love and letting them overtake us so that what is not of love might be washed off. Our baptism is a symbol of this, and it shows us that what we are stepping into over the course of our lifetime has already been accomplished by Christ’s death and resurrection. But this does not mean we only enter into purification one time. In fact, we have the choice to enter into it every day. We have the opportunity to jump into this joy, moment by moment, and allow the waters of grace and love to mend us and cleanse us. Even on the hardest days, purity is a relief and a release, not a burden.