The Shouting Tree
The Way of Redemption
By
© Callaghan Grant
April 13th, 2000
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
You find within
these events
what you are
ready to see.
To Sandy:
I told you
I wouldn’t be little
for
Ever
Gratitudes
There are so many people to whom I feel gratitude for helping me, indeed, forcing me, to write this book. To the local businesses who would not give me a job when I was 100 lbs overweight and too crippled to work, I say thank you. The hopelessness I felt when you turned your back on me caused me to turn inward to the Voice for Truth, Love and Forgiveness for solace and reassurance. Within that stillness I asked my Shepherd how to feed the flocks He had given me and therein clearly heard Him say to me “Deliver your message and it will deliver you”. The times are hard and I have learned that the times become hard when we, out of fear, harden our hearts to one another. Thank you for the lesson of peace and self -reliance that you taught me.
I thank those who have abused me for teaching me how not to behave towards others and how to stand up for myself without being unkind. Daddy told me I didn’t have time to make all the mistakes on my own and for my own self edification, so I’d better learn from the mistakes of others as well. I learned allot from Daddy just that way. But to Dad I owe the deepest debt because he taught me that miracles can and do happen. Daddy and I forgave one another and became the best of friends. I wish he had forgiven himself as well. I learned late in his days that he still carried the burden of trying to wrest from me in my youth the tributes I’d have given gladly just to please him, had he only bothered to ask me kindly. I learned from this that, no matter how completely another forgives you, you must forgive yourself in order to make place for the Miracle to intervene,
I thank my Sister Cyndee for teaching me that some people are easier to love from a distance and that maintaining that loving feeling is far more important than maintaining proximity. She also taught me that I am helpless to help those who will not to be helped. I surrender.
I thank my mother for her every rescue and her devotion to her children. She taught me selflessness. She was an unbelievably devoted mother and educator and she taught me to respect those who give their own time to teach others quickly what they’d otherwise spend much time learning on their own. God bless the teachers.
I thank my Beloved Husband and friend who taught me determination and salute him as the Captain of my Heart. I shall love him always.
I thank my dear Stuart who was my friend when I was in trouble and who gave me shelter and who then, again, reinforced the lesson of surrender to what one cannot change. Him too I shall love always.
I thank my Sister Christine and her husband, my Brother Brian, who teach me peace and rationality when I am battered and buffeted by my emotions, who stand with and beside me through all things, who came to the Pacific Northwest and helped me regain my sense of continuity and dimension in a culture so much less passionate than the one in which I was raised. They rock! And they are my rock.
I thank Dr. Wayne Dyer for his work which has led me to many insights and Eckhart Tolle whose work culminated in a satori experience on October 31st 2007, and which has carried me through the most distressing of transitions and even helped my body to begin to heal when I was near death. I thank the publishers of these men’s work. I thank Gary Renard for his work and for pointing me towards “A Course in Miracles”.
I thank Jeff Brown, the author of “Soulshaping” who gave me the courage to self-reveal and to add the scenes in this book that gave it the continuity necessary to bring its messages to fruition. His “naked” honesty opened my heart to emulate his courage and candor. Thank you, Jeff Brown.
I thank my Shepherd, for never leaving me, for loving me and looking past my rage and pointing my own gaze past that illusion, deeper to the love thwarted that is at the basis of every emotion that does not appear to be love. He has taught me again and again, with infinite patience that “Love is all that IS”. He is the source of my strength and my constant companion and I, the smallest flower of His great vine, hope only to please Him in this life and to join His other helpers in watering that vine. I love you ALL – especially those who have hurt and misused me because it was in that great distressing that The Christ came to me and put His roots down in my heart. May His vine bear fruit in me by this work and may all who read it be blessed with the fullness of the Holy Spirit, feel the spangled energy of His mighty chi throughout their bodies and know by His presence that this message is for THEM: “NOTHING happens TO you. It ALL happens FOR you. Your Shepherd NEVER leaves you, therefore – laugh!”
Preface
What is true? True is what one experiences and may recount for their own benefit and, perhaps, for the benefit of others.
What you are about to read is the recounting of true events, retold as the heroine remembers them. These events are herein shared because they have been pivotal in the formation of her resilient spirituality and relationship to God and to His creations. They are shared with the hope that you will learn from them the gentle and godly art of “The Way of Redemption”: a method by which we look closely at the most distressing events in our lives and find within them, through our willingness to do so, and with the guidance of the Little Voice within, meaningfulness that will bless our lives and our perceptions of the universe. When we learn to redeem each “tragedy” for the blessings hidden therein, we use our godly estate to reassign significance, transforming calamity into bounding personal growth strides that allow us to walk our own unique path to authenticity with courage and resilience and, omniportantly, accompanied by “…the peace which surpasses all (rational) understanding”.
Go with Colleen and with God on this journey, trusting that His love is everywhere and that, in every event, there is a lesson brought to carry you to the deeply rooted KNOWledge that “Nothing happens TO you, it ALL happens FOR you. Love is ALL that IS.” To accomplish this you have but to resign now as your own teacher and learn to listen to the Truth, whispered to your heart, by the Little Voice that knows. It is the Holy Spirit. It is the Voice for Love. Follow it and it will grow stronger. Trust it and it will lead you home.
It has been said that Truth must be lived -- to be “known”. Knowing is direct experience and direct experience of Truth is what is often referred to as “enlightenment”. Satori experiences are brief but significant glimpses of the enlightened state. These may have after effects that linger for years, a few months, days, or, most frequently, a few blessed moments. They leave the experiencer changed but often confused; wondering what it was, sometimes devastated that they cannot get “back to” that blessed state of perception although they long to do so. This is a kind of post partum grief that most spiritual seekers experience many times in their lives, often never reaching the goal of a living salvation in which their experience of the world is of a consistent state of felt connection to God and to everything that God is. It can be the source of great despair that manifests as a longing for Home. This is the darkness that exposure to the light of Truth can bring: How do we reconcile the perfect love, beauty and grace of the satori with the world which, so hungry for that light, pulls it right out of the unwary seeker, caught up in its ebullience and, typically, filled with the desire to share the experience – to make it more real and lasting by bringing someone there with them.
I beg you, for the sake of all that is meaningful and for the sake of the world which needs this grace now more than ever, if you meet such a one who tries to bring you with them into this state of vision purified by love, go with them if you can. Open your heart and hear them. Strip away the emotional armor you have put on to protect your heart from the world. What they are offering you is a chance to share the only REAL thing that exists in this world. It is real because it is eternal: It goes with you when you leave this temporal context which is not your home, to the eternal context which is your home. Inasmuch as this dream we call “life” is such a miniscule part of our journey of self-experience, it makes little sense to consider anything here more valuable than the one Truth that goes with us, connecting us forever to one another and to God.
This concludes the Front matter for “The Shouting Tree – The way of Redemption”. The remainder of this true life recounting of the events that shaped Colleen’s spirituality can be read free of charge from the Kindle Lending Library. If you do not have a Kindle, you can download the Kindle reader for free and read the text of this beautiful story of the power of forgiveness on your computer, iPad or iPhone or Mac. Please go there and read the work, which consists of `10 chapters and is complete taking only four hours to read, and come back here to Authonomy to rate it. We thank you and know that you will be blessed by what you find in this work.