Sally Quinn: Finding Magic
Finally, I asked my mother about it, and she told my father, and they were upset that I had found the scrapbooks. But, I had a conversation. Daddy sat me down on his knee that night and went over the scrapbooks and explained to me about Hitler and the Nazi’s and World War II and what he was doing and why he had gone there and that–what they were doing to the Jews.
When he finished explaining this to me, I said to him, “Daddy, did God know about this?” And my father said, “Yes, he did.” And I said, “But then why did he let that happen?” And my father said, “Well, God is a mystery, and we don’t sometimes know why he lets things happen.”
I decided that there was no God because, as I was saying my prayers at night, all those people in the concentration camp, all those little children who watched their parents perish and who died themselves were just praying to the same God, and he didn’t listen to them. And so, I just assumed that there was no God because if there were a good, all loving, omniscient and omnipotent God, he would never have allowed this to happen. And so, that’s when I stopped believing in God.
It wasn’t until I was age 13 that I actually learned the word atheist, but I never did believe in God after that or at least in a God, a loving, all loving, caring God.
Victor Fuhrman: Now, even though you had rejected the concept of God, per se, as we talked about before, we’ve had these experiences of transcendence. Talk about how they affected your spiritual path.
Sally Quinn: Well, I do believe in a creator. I just can’t get my mind around the idea that there was nothing and then there was something. My human brain can’t comprehend the fact that there wasn’t some creator, something or somebody who created the universe and all of that. However, I do think that what has been created has allowed a sense of divine and a sense of transcendence and mystery and magic to imbue our lives.
I think that you look for magic, and you look for signs of the divine, and you will find them everywhere, even despite all the suffering in the world. I mean, it’s trite to talk about the sunset and the stars and the moon and the oceans and the mountains and all of those things, but when you look at the idea that people can love other people, that is something that is so close to the divine. That is sacred, that is holy, and that comes from somewhere other than what we human beings can comprehend.
Victor Fuhrman: What other qualities could we add to the word magic?
Sally Quinn: Well, my book is divided into three sections: magic, mystery, and meaning. So, certainly, mystery, the mysterious, the unknown, the sacred, the divine, I can’t think of another word right now, but, I mean, magic is something that you either believe in, or you don’t.
I believe that magic is something that is so available to everybody, and it’s not just somebody doing magic. I believe in divine synchronicity. I don’t think that there are coincidences. I’ll just give you an example: I’m starting to write a novel now, and one of the main characters in my novel is a Catholic priest, actually, the Archbishop of Dublin, and I’m heading out to Ireland to do some research on it.
And so, in my novel, the priest is a big fan of William Butler Yates, and he quotes Yates, and he carries off the book of Yates around with him. And I’ve been trying to get a hold of some Yates scholars at Georgetown. I’ve called and called, and nobody answered.
And one night, a friend of mine came over for dinner. This was last week. She brought her husband who I had only met once and had never really spoken to, and it turns out that he was one of the world’s greatest Yates scholars and was going to Ireland tonight. I’m leaving tonight, for a Yates festival in Sligo, Ireland and he asked me to come with him.
It was so amazing that I had been trying to find somebody because I certainly had read Yates, but I’m not a scholar, and I need tutorials. And so, this whole trip just kind of ended up being planned around this Yates festival and this guy who I had no idea was a Yates scholar. I don’t think that that was a coincidence. I think that that’s divine synchronicity. And so, I think that’s magic.
Victor Fuhrman: What has your spiritual journey taught you?
Sally Quinn: The Spiritual journey is about wanting to be a good person, a better person. I think, certainly, studying religion and all the faiths, which I started doing once I started the religion website on faith, was to learn about the different faiths of the world, the different religions and to understand them. And I think everybody should do that. I mean, geography, anything, philosophy because I think it’s very important to understanding other people.
I’ve become very pluralistic. I believe in anybody doing and believing what works for them. We all have different beliefs.
You can walk into a church or a mosque or a synagogue with 3,000 people, and they all have a different relationship with the thing or the person they call God.
So, I’m totally respectful of anyone’s beliefs, no matter what they are, whether they’re occult or whether they’re religious or Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Jainism or Wiccans or whatever as long as they don’t hurt anyone. Part of the thing that’s been most important to me to learn is to be respectful and accepting of other people’s beliefs.
I’m not perfect, but I do think that I am much more sympathetic and more empathetic toward others than I ever was before in my life. And I also believe that the most important thing in life is love and that without love, there’s really nothing. You can’t live without love.
And so, the love of my parents, certainly, and my husband and my son Quinn, who is the love of my life, and my family and my close friends, all of that has been enormously important to me, and I can’t imagine living without love. I think that if you experience love, I write in the book that, my mother loved me so much, and when she died, I just felt this love coming to me, and it just came and came and came. I started giving it away, and I’d give it away and give it away and give it away, and I just am never on empty. I just keep getting refilled because there’s so much love out there to get and to give.
And so, for me, that’s been the most important lesson of this experience I’ve had and writing this book.
Victor Fuhrman: And I would say that that love is truly finding magic. Sally Quinn, Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir. Sally’s book should be in most bookstores in the United States on the 12th of September. But you can already pre-order it on Amazon.
