Article August 8, 2011 Issue

Untarnished

By Shelly Richardson

I’d had an old brassy-looking necklace with a locket in my jewelry box for years. Someone along the way had lost track of its value, because it ended up in a garage sale junk box. Some of its links were missing, so I never wore it. Finally I took it to a jeweler for repair. He told me the necklace was 18K gold and worth hundreds of dollars. No brass at all.

Now I have a new favorite necklace—not because it’s worth money, but because it’s given me an important insight into the nature of my spiritual identity. The necklace was always 18K gold, even when I thought it was brassy and cheap.  

Who knows what the necklace had been through over the years? Its intrinsic nature was unchangeable. In that very same way, our mortal history can’t really affect our intrinsic spiritual value, even if our lives seem full of mistakes. Our identity has always been perfectly spiritual.