Disciples on the ACIM Path

Meet Thérèse Marie Quinn

By Karen Bentley

Thérèse (pronounced Ter Aze) Marie Quinn lives in a fairy cottage, or at least that’s what she likes to call it. Her home is surrounded by fragrant lilacs and the breathtaking vistas that are found along a quiet, untraveled road in the town of Monroe, located in the Mid-Hudson Valley region of New York State. Quinn might even be a fairy queen. Like her house, she is pretty and petite. Her long blonde hair is groomed with care. Her vocabulary is rich, and her speech is poetic. But it’s Quinn’s authenticity and fearlessness, more than any other qualities, which are so riveting and powerful.

Quinn refers to herself as a pagan, a mystic, and a devotee of love. “I don’t fit fully in any one tradition. The word pagan seems to work best, but it confuses many. Still, pagan fits the freedom I feel as an unconfined spirit of love, joined with the trees, the cat on my lap, the moon and stars – all I see is animated by the very love that fills my own heart. Love is the law for me. I like the purity of holding that vision. So, I walk in Love and go wherever it leads me. Life is simple and seamless.”

“My experience of Love is as a feminine presence. For me, God as Mother is the Holy Spirit immanent in form. My greatest experience of love is as a mother, feeling the outreach of love from me to my children, and the onrush of love to me from my mother. It feels natural to experience God as feminine. Others do not share this view, but it doesn’t matter. Give divinity whatever face, voice or gender you need to give it in order to feel safe enough to receive the love that you are. I feel fully safe with God, as Mother, to remember and return to that love.”

Jon Mundy introduced Quinn to the Course in 1977. “I was married but separated at the time. Six months later my marriage reconciled and my husband wasn’t pleased with this Course in Miracles. It was a threat, a cult. So I was a closet Course person, hiding my book like a junky his drugs. Anyway, I did the lessons alone. They were hard, and it took me probably three years to get through them that first time. I would perseverate for days on one lesson because I was resisting or angry or I would get stuck in places where I had to understand. Then, I would hear a voice that said my understanding wasn’t necessary. So, I would take one or two weeks and just breathe with it. When I finished the lessons, I felt new and bathed in light.”

“In 1981, my 9-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. Overnight, we were plunged into a 5-month stay at the Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC. The Course served me well as one of my greatest coping tools in those months and the decade of treatments that followed. As the need became more poignant to apply the lessons to chronic crises in my life, I was invited to participate with a small group of parents in the pilot program of COPE, a respite/educational experience for parents of children with cancer. Dr. Gerald Jampolsky flew east to be our keynote speaker. I had already known about Jerry only through his books, Love Is Letting Go of Fear and There Is A Rainbow behind Every Dark Cloud.

“Jerry blew me away that weekend. In the midst of humans who probably had the most virulent calls to fear’s conflict, he managed to reconnect each with love’s peace. By using his principles of attitudinal healing, I witnessed miracles unfolding indiscriminately through and around me. I knew that this was my way to speak a more generic Course language to parents for whom Christian terminology was obstructive. I became the facilitator of several mothers’ groups. My role was simply to open a safe space for sharing/hearing heart-content. My gratitude grew.”

“I’m relentless about the extension of love. It’s my life’s purpose. I’m passionate about healing and the remembrance of love’s power. Pediatric Cancer -- a manifestation that we humans experience as horribly unthinkable -- was the perfect place for me to learn about love and its full extension. There was nothing else that would bring the embodied me straight to the heart of Love. If I could see love eternally expressing through cancer’s atrocities to children, then I would never be blind to its radiance again. As a passionate healer, I needed to be in places of passionate misperception. My experience of Love as Mother assured my learning from children willing to walk the path of crucifixion in order to reflect whatever we have banished to the nether regions of our minds. It’s like they’re saying, We stand here, with all our gaping wounds and oozing parts, as the bald presence of Love, so that you can see there is nothing that cannot be forgiven. There is nothing so foul that you are dammed. There is no part of you that needs to be relegated to any corner of hell you can imagine. Stand up in your light of truth and summon all parts home. Then, let us go over the bridge away from misperception to create heaven right here because it’s never left us. When we judge, disenfranchise and bury parts of ourselves that we think are unlovable, we make pediatric cancers and wars on our planet. When we learn to love all parts of ourselves, we can understand our own power, teach it to others and make something different….”

“My soul, my wholeness, chose pediatric cancer through my son, Jesse Séan -- who was bald and bombarded with drug therapies and radical surgeries -- to learn that love is eternal. Love can wear any mask that we choose but the mask cannot touch its perfection. These children are miracles, but many see them as sick and broken victims of nightmare. I chose to see the Love that they are because my love as a mother would not allow anything else. They were willing to teach me about love in the only way I would get it. I was willing to walk with them and learn. Together we shone a light on another way’s seeing.”

“As a human and a mother, I wish I had chosen gentler lessons. But as a passionate healer with a dramatic flair, how could I be anything less? It’s me. Healing is not about the symptoms. I have seen symptoms disappear, and yet my own son died. His symptoms continued. They didn’t vanish. But healing happened. Healing is not about the form, and Jesse showed me that without uncertainty. When we all get it collectively, there will be no reason for disenfranchised parts of our collective to manifest symptoms like cancer through our children in order to get our attention. Until that day, drama will continue to play a role in our learning.”

“A symptom is a teaching tool. That’s all it is. When we learn the lessons of love individually, we can decide to continue with symptoms in order to demonstrate the light of our learning, or we can peel the symptoms away. Either way has no real meaning. It’s just a choice. Symptoms are teaching tools, and to get fixated on them is a distraction. The real miracle is a shift in vision, a seeing past the symptoms. The miracle has nothing to do with the removal of the symptom itself. The Holy Spirit can use all things, from pediatric cancer to the war in Iraq. All things can be given for love and restoration of the sonship’s conscious unity.”

“I absolutely consider myself a miracle worker. Miracles are my daily bread. They unfold with each step of my day, each beat of my heart. I see them wherever I turn. I have no full remembrance of the Thérèse who had no idea what a miracle was. I love that little Thérèse. She’s part of who I am. But I really have no full remembrance of standing in a place where miracles are not real. I think a miracle is whatever opens the ability to recognize love’s present truth. In that recognition’s moment, extension of the miracle is a natural result. That’s the way it is. So, at this point in my life -- having traveled into the depths of hell, experiencing some of the darkest demons that form can conjure, and moving through it – it is just so pristine for me how very, very clear and present love always is. It speaks to me through everything on this planet.”

Thérèse Marie Quinn is a poet, postal clerk, reiki master, tarot master, ordained minister, and Attitudinal Healing counselor for women’s issues, chronic illness, and bereavement. She can be reached at tmarie@frontiernet.net.

©2004 interviewed, organized, edited by Karen Bentley. Karen Bentley is the author of three ACIM-based books: The Book of Love, 10 Radiant Ideas, and Stop Out-of-Control Eating. Her fourth book, The Power to Stop, will be available in fall 2004.