I didn't used to understand the idea of purity in religion. In fact, I found it alarming, as if it were some sort of political statement about the nature of people or the nature of gods, as if impurity in religion was some equivalent to a sense of intrinsic sinfulness that was bestowed upon humans.
I have a different understanding now; the words for that understanding flow from both Kemetic and Feri principles at this point. When I try to articulate it, I get threads from both.
Start with creation, start with perfection: that moment where the words that are the universe were first spoken, the shudder of cosmic orgasm, however you think of the First Time. All things were aligned; all things have in their being a connection to that creative spasm, that instant, and one can step back into that place and be in tune with it, feel the music of the stars in one's soul.
Thorn is fond of quoting Victor Anderson on this: when you are truly in alignment, you can ask the universe for anything -- and get it.
Because when truly in alignment, that essential creation is there, flowing, the Heart is singing its truths clearly, and that which one wants from that space is what the universe wants for one.
That space is hard to maintain, hard to find; the grit of everyday living accumulates, gumming up the gears. Entropy happens, things wind down. So one way of approaching kala, of approaching purity, is cleaning up the gears, unclogging the drain: we know that things will, left unattended, drift away from that moment, but that doesn't mean the cleanness is lost -- that moment is always there, implicit in the fact that we are here, and so we can reach for it and find it and go back to the beginning, where we are all true. And by making ourselves clean of all the accumulated entropy -- physical, spiritual, mental, psychic, wherever we tend to get gummed up -- we steer the entire universe back towards purity, because alignment within aligns the universe. As above, so below.
But true alignment within is also a complex process. I know, even as I make kala and wash myself with natron before my rituals, that I am only as aligned as I am capable of being in the moment: I have scars. I have places in myself where my energy stagnates, or where there are whirlpools that are eroding away parts of me. And so again, purity is not merely washing away the entropy, but clearing away places that I know it tends to accumulate, where it will puddle in the future. Every time I unearth another place where my life-force bogs down into sinkholes, I have made a step towards a greater capacity for alignment, a greater capacity for purity, for kala. As I clean those out and restore them to functionality, my capacity for these things expands -- while before I might have been able to be a small part of the alignment of the cosmos, now I have expanded, become more myself and more capable, because my energy runs cleaner, without eroding, without vanishing into years-old wounds or yesterday's resentments.