Christian Viewpoint: From depression and despair on a quest for 'something different'
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“How could God leave me?” Mags Macdonald asked Clare Caley. “How could God give me that depression? How could God cause me to be suicidal?”
Mags spoke about her care by Lanarkshire nuns in her early years; about the disturbing gap in her records from ages 18 months to eight years and its impact on her sense of identity; about her abuse by a family member in a foster home. She spoke about deep despair; times in Craig Dunain Hospital, and later in New Craigs; the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder; abusive relationships and alcohol misuse; the agony of seeing her beloved twin boys taken into care while knowing it was best for them.
She spoke about the verbal and physical abuse she suffered in the grossly inadequate flat she was assigned to in Inverness. “Mad Mags,” they called her.
Somehow, as trainee priest Clare listened to Mags’ torrent of anguish she found words to say, words which restored to Mags a ‘profound’ sense of God as an ever-present Father.
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Mags talks about the many good things in her life. Her work as a medical secretary. The quality care she has received in hospital and community; the psychiatrist who worked with her for 15 years, significantly helping her. Her four sons’ success. The house she now lives in. The meds keeping her stable. Her work on behalf of the Highland Users’ Group (a mental health charity), raising awareness of mental health issues.
Mags feels that the God who is active wherever good things are done is particularly evident in the lives of Christian people. “They have something different,” she says. “I wanted a bit of what I saw.”
Through attending Inverness Baptist Church as a teenager she says: “I found a peace that I’d never known before.” Faith, she realised ‘was about loving Jesus and Jesus loving me, and having a Father in God’.
At St Michaels too, much later, she was encouraged by the priests and by Clare Caley, and by the accepting welcome of the people in the church. She realised that communion wasn’t just for ‘special people’ but for everyone who believes.
She was confirmed by Bishop Mark Strange (a ‘gentle giant’, she describes him) in the presence of friends and of her sons. In that welcome, an expression of God’s welcome of her, she felt she ‘was being given something better than ever I could imagine’.
As she lay in that squalid flat, despairing and hung-over, she would hear the bells of St Michaels round the corner, ringing. “I’d think ‘One day I’m going to be in that church’.’
We too are summoned by the same God to things we dare not yet dream of.
