Sharing is the means through which the holy relationship you have with everything is revealed in truth. This truth lies within everything that exists, as it lies within you. As you learn that who you are is love, no deception is possible, and you can only be who you are in truth. C:31.23
This is what happens with me: I get a sudden yen to re-read, or sometimes just to re-find a passage of a book that meant a lot to me. That’s what happened a few days ago when I took To Know As We Are Known off the shelf. It is, I believe, the first book Parker Palmer ever published, and it is my favorite of his. The copyright is 1983.
Sometimes I feel as if I could chart my trajectory since receiving ACOL by remembering my readings. I know one thing for sure. When I read To Know As We Are Known I was awed by how much of it sounded like A Course of Love.
The reason I went back to the book—this time—was the audio recording I’m doing of ACOL. But I didn’t know it as I felt the yen. I merely knew I was being drawn. I had recently recorded one of the concluding chapters of ACOL: The Nature of the Mind, and had experienced a deeply felt memory of the original receiving. That memory was of the way I heard the words in truth. They’re repeated and repeated in that chapter, and each time I heard them, I felt that I was in truth. It was the most inexplicable feeling. It was an experience of the reality of truth. Not truth as concept or statement, fact, or philosophy. I felt that truth had its own reality, its own realness, and it was right there. It was with me like a presence in the room.
I didn’t know I was seeking this book in response to that re-kindled memory until I found what I didn’t know I was looking for. It’s this passage, which is just one of many, where Parker Palmer speaks about truth in the way I felt it that day:
To know something or someone in truth is to enter troth with the known, to rejoin with new knowing what our minds have put asunder. To know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one’s whole self, an engagement one enters with attentiveness, care, and good will. To know in truth is to allow one’s self to be known as well, to be vulnerable to the challenges and changes any true relationship brings. To know in truth is to enter into the life of that which we know and to allow it to enter into ours.
The way Parker describes truth is, I feel, the way of this Course. Allowing these words to enter us, we know in truth, and in truth we are known.
