Sally Quinn: Finding Magic
Sally Quinn: Finding Magic, A Spiritual Memoir
Sally Quinn interviewed by Victor Fuhrman
The word Israel for most reflects the name of a nation or people. It derives from the Biblical patriarch Jacob, who after wrestling with an angel is given the name Israel, meaning he who struggles with God. Every sentient human being, whether a believer, agnostic or atheist, can share the name Israel because of we all struggle with God.
Today we talk with the famed journalist, commentator and author Sally Quinn shares her journey of discovery. Sally is a long time Washington Post journalist, columnist, television commentator, renowned Washington DC social hostess and founder of the Washington Post Website on Faith. She is the author of several books and joins us to discuss her captivating new book Finding Magic: A Personal Memoir.
Victor Fuhrman: Let’s begin with your childhood in Savannah and Statesboro, Georgia and the fundamental experiences that began shaping your understanding of the mysteries of life.
Sally Quinn: I grew up as an Army brat, but my mother was from Savannah, Georgia, and she grew up part of her life in Statesboro, which is a tiny town right outside of Savannah.
My mother’s family were all Scots, McDougal’s, who had come over from Scotland to North Carolina and then followed the turpentine trade down to Statesboro where they built a huge plantation house right out of Gone with the Wind. My Aunt Ruth, my mother’s aunt, lived in this big beautiful house where we stayed in the summers. It had white columns and a great long, wide hallway that ran the length of the house.
My Aunt Ruth was a Scottish Presbyterian lady, who wore little lace collars and played the organ in church, but she also had another spiritual life, which was the life of the Scottish mysteries. She believed in the stones, psychic phenomenon, time travel and all kinds of spiritual things, the occults, the tarot cards, palmistry, astrology, and ghosts.
And so, we were brought up with sort of these two conflicting views of religion. There was this sort of institutional religion in the Presbyterian church, and then there was all this other stuff, although we didn’t think of that as a religion.
The other thing was that we had staff who were all Black, some of them descendants of slaves who had worked for the McDougal family, and they would go to their Baptist church on their side of town on Sundays. But, they also practiced voodoo, and that was very much a part of their spiritual lives. They had voodoo ceremonies that I saw and witnessed in the house. And that was part of my embedded religion, also.
So, I had these two ideas of what religion was like. For some reason, I always felt that institutional religion was the legitimate religion and that this other stuff, this psychic and the occult and the mysterious and the phenomena and the supernatural was not legitimate.
For years, until I started writing this book, I always thought it was not really legitimate.
I realized one day that it’s all magic, that all religion is magic. If you’re a Catholic, you’ll grow up and believe that you’re gonna go to hell if you sin, and even when you get older, and you decide that that isn’t the case and you don’t believe it. Intellectually, you don’t believe it, but there’s still some fear, some emotional feeling that it might be true or what they call Catholic guilt or Jewish guilt or whatever you’re brought up with. Whether you’re Muslim or Hindu or Christian, you always have this, if you’re brought up with it, this embedded religion that just keeps coming back at you constantly.
So, for me, that was the foundation of my religious life and my spiritual life.
Victor Fuhrman: How did your mother and your Aunt Ruth regard this dichotomy between the Christian faith and the Celtic and voodoo traditions? Was there anything said about it at the time?
Sally Quinn: Never. That’s the thing that was interesting was that they incorporated it. They somehow compartmentalized it. So many people are in the world of the supernatural, people who are psychic and people who are astrologers and people who are tarot card readers or palmists who are also practicing Christians or practicing Muslims or whatever. And when you talk about, for instance, Jesus Christ walking on water, that’s magic.
So, if you’re going to church and you’re reading this or singing about it or listening to sermons about it, it doesn’t seem so strange when you come home, and you’re practicing another form of religion or mystery or magic or meaning that it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Victor Fuhrman: It’s fascinating to me because as a child, my father was not particularly spiritual or religious at all. My grandfather was. So, we were talking about your mother and your great aunt who were both psychically gifted. What was it like to have people close to you who had these abilities?
Sally Quinn: I didn’t think anything of it. It just was part of our lives. My Aunt Ruth was really psychic. My mother’s mother, who died when my mother was two years old, predicted her own death.
My Aunt Maggie was incredibly psychic. There’s one story in the book where she was living in Fort Pierce, Florida, and she woke up in the middle of the night screaming and said to her husband, there’s been a terrible plane crash in the Okefenokee Swamp. They contacted the authorities, and they said, well, yes, a plane has gone down, and she told them exactly where the plane was.
So, these were all stories that we just sort of understood to be true. And, the McDougal House was haunted, of course, and all the ancestors would go up and down the hallway at night.
Now, all these stories are stories that I grew up hearing, and so I didn’t think anything of them.
Victor Fuhrman: You talked about the chains with the ghosts. What do you think the significance of that was?
Sally Quinn: Well, my feeling is that they just wanted to say don’t forget me, I’m here. I talk in my book later about having contacted my husband Ben after he died through a medium. And it’s kind of the same thing. It’s just I’m still here so don’t count me out.
Victor Fuhrman: When did you first realize that you had psychic abilities?
Sally Quinn: Very early on, just little things, I can’t remember the first time, but I do know that the phone would ring, and you’d know somebody was there before you picked it up. I do believe that, if you really want to, you can develop your psychic abilities. So, there are times when I feel like my antenna is just up quivering, way up there picking up all kinds of signals and information and other times where I’m just blanked.
Victor Fuhrman: What made you lose your faith in the existence of God?
Sally Quinn: I always believed in God when I was little. I remember saying my prayers. I believed in God. I believed that Jesus was the Son of God.
But, my father was in World War II, and he was there on the day that Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp was liberated. He had a staff photographer take a lot of pictures. When he came home, he made a scrapbook of these photographs, which he hid in a cabinet in the study.
One day, I was looking for something in the cabinet and I found these scrapbooks. I looked at them and was absolutely horrified. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. All I knew was that daddy, we didn’t have television then, and I didn’t read the newspapers, but that he was fighting the bad guys, and they were called Nazis. And that’s really all I knew.
I was just so horrified, but I kept sneaking back and looking at these pictures. They were all piles of dead bodies that looked like skeletons and then living bodies that looked like skeletons, emaciated people in these striped uniforms and just devastation everywhere and American soldiers in these pictures looking with horror at these people they saw.
