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PURIFY YOUR HEART
What's in your heart? Mine always has one corner focused on my next meal. I also carry a truckload of concerns for people I love, getting my work done, the latest world crisis. But I confess I spend a lot of time thinking about food.
"Create in me a clean heart, O God." In the much-prayed Psalm 51, we plead with God to be washed white as snow, to be purged of our faults. Cleanliness is more accurately translated as purity from the Hebrew texts. It has little to do with hygiene. This, despite all the washing that Pharisees later obsessively wind up practicing, described in the weary litany by Jesus: "the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds." (Mark 7:4) All this washing did not necessarily result in the goal, which is a pure heart.
What exactly is a pure heart? We may suspect it has something to do with sex. Many of us were taught that purity equals chastity equals abstinence from whatever the sexual instinct wants. Actually, a pure heart implies singleness of purpose and direction. The pure heart wills one thing. Its motive is undiluted.
Meanwhile, the distracted heart is hungry for all manner of things. It's easily captured by shop windows, advertisements, the neighbor's goods, all the stuff people seem to possess and enjoy on television shows and in movies. Purifying our restless hearts is a matter of uniting our will to the divine will. Not easy, but exquisitely simple.
—Alice Camille,
reprinted with permission from TrueQuest Communications
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