Clare Boyd-Macrae.
Writer and author Clare Boyd-Macrae*, who had long suffered from bouts of depression, told her family ‘I just want to get rid of my demons’. Then she heard about an intensive week of silent meditation, and she signed up to go.
New Year’s Eve. The last day of 2023, the first year for a while there have been no lockdowns. All the people I love the most (except the babies, who are in bed) are lolling comfortably in the main room of our beach shack, where the whole clan gathers after Christmas. Shiraz in hand, my husband, who likes to do these things, asks everyone to think of what their hopes are for the next year, the next three, the next five. And we work our way around the room.
The mood is mellow, chilled, mostly optimistic. There have been some tough years, not so very long ago, in our crew, but 2023 wasn’t one of them. Maybe, in 2024, we would get lucky yet again, in a world of Gaza and Ukraine, and climate carnage. Our four offspring, simultaneously, had been lucky in love the last 12 months, a first. Maybe we were on the up.
I was the last to speak, and if I remember rightly, I started with a long sigh.
‘I just want to get rid of my demons,’ I said. I know I’m meant to befriend them, but I don’t want to. I hate them. I just want them to get the hell out of my head.’
I don’t want to overstate the situation. Mostly, my life is one of great happiness. I have known more health, laughter and love than most. But my childhood was complicated, to say the least. And anyone who has suffered periods of depression knows that the fear of the Black Dog (a benign name for such a monster – I love dogs!) returning rules your life, worse than the fear of death. And, even if you’re lucky enough, like me, to have discovered medication that works, there are days. Days that remind you of how it used to be nearly all the time. And the thought of going back to that is crushing. You don’t want it for you, you don’t want it for your loved ones.
And, you know, I really should have worked this baggage out by now. God knows, I’ve tried. Medication and meditation, therapy, spiritual direction, love, friendship, community, church, prayer, all the good stuff.
Last year, newly retired, unsure what I wanted to throw myself into with this new luxury of time, I was certain of one thing: I no longer wanted to be a busy person. I sat with indecision; I sat in liminality for nine months. I prayed, as I always do, and in this period, the burden of my prayers was: ‘Guide me, loving heart at the centre of the universe. I want to be useful, but in a way that brings me joy.’ I came across this wonderful line by 20th century writer and theologian Frederick Buechner: ‘Vocation is where our own deep gladness meets the world’s great need’. What was my retirement vocation to be?
Towards the end of last year, I was still waiting for the guidance I sought, getting impatient, imposing my own scurrying, anxious, perfectionist timelines to the big love that I was expecting to let me know what to do with myself.
Then, somewhat randomly, I heard about an intensive week of silent meditation, and I signed up to go. It was run by the World Community for Christian Meditation, with whom I’ve been involved for many years, but this was more hard core than any other retreat I had been on.
The week was tough; ten sessions of meditation a day, most of which went for half an hour. I am accustomed to twenty minutes of meditation each time; those extra ten minutes were excruciating. My body and mind, long trained to be still for twenty minutes, almost exploded out of my chair as I sat, wishing that the gongs would go, and release me.
I was totally up for this meditation boot camp, but by day three, I was struggling. Day four was a rest day, where we were only required to go to two meditation sessions, and I walked and walked, high in the Adelaide Hills, missing session after session, glorying in the creation, pondering (as the retreat leaders had advised) that I was a loved creature among all the other loved creatures. After lunch I slept, missing more sessions, curled deliciously in bed, oblivious to the world, to prayer, to everything but my need for rest.
The next day, I was restored and, mysteriously, my body and mind and spirit sank gratefully and joyously into the full half hour of meditation. When I returned home and tried to meditate for twenty minutes, I was brought up short, pulled out of my deep place, thinking, ‘Wait, what, that’s it?!’
Life tends, mostly, to be a one step forward, two steps back affair. Sometimes, though, something big shifts. In the weeks after my retreat, I feel newly loved, newly strong. I try to work out what has disappeared, or at least shrunk in my heart; I think it’s fear. I am less driven, less anxious about upsetting others, about not doing enough, about never being sufficiently productive and loving. My perfectionism, that cruel mistress, has lessened her hold on my being a little. It feels as though those extra ten minutes, repeated many times a day, took me into a place of deep healing.
Michael Leunig says, ‘there is only love and fear’. Henri Nouwen wrote of living in The House of Love. My whole life has, despite an abundance of love and luck, been lived in the house of fear, or at least on its verandah, in its shadow. This has affected everything, from my sleep to my marriage, from my headaches to my friendships. Now, something has shifted. There’s a lightness in my being. I am less afraid of too much joy.
I am reminded of the story in Mark chapter 9. Jesus, along with his disciples Peter, James and John, have been up a mountain and had the intense religious experience of the transfiguration. When they come back down to the plain, they find a desperate father begging Jesus’ other friends to cure his son, who is ‘possessed by a demon’. The disciples try, to no avail.
The father turns to Jesus, who heals the boy. When they are alone again, his disciples ask him, ‘Why could we not cast this demon out?’ to which he responds, ‘Some demons can only be cast out by prayer’; some translations say, ‘by much prayer’.
All my life I have prayed, and now, with retirement, I can pray with an abundance of time I have never had, and suddenly, fear is banished. My demons lessen their hold. I move gratefully into the House of Love.
Clare Boyd-Macrae lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a member of the Uniting Church. She has had over 200 pieces published in The Melbourne Age and has had three books published: Three Gates to Paradise (2006), The Whole Shebang (2008) and Off the Page (2017).