Unless your attention has been completely distracted this past year, you have probably heard the name Harry Potter. If you are a child of reading or even of listening age, or one of their parents, you may have heard it daily.

Kids are having a great time reading about the exploits of Harry, who is only ten years old himself, about to turn eleven, at the start of the first book about him, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [hereafter 1], which concerns events during Harry’s first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, somewhere up in or near Scotland. In the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [2], Harry is twelve and in his second year at Hogwarts. In the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [3], he is thirteen and in his third year. The series will continue in this fashion for four more books, the next one due out in June.

Parents and teachers have been delighted to find children indulging in the joy of reading. They and other adults have discovered that the books are a delightful indulgence for them, too. And the publishers, the illustrator, and the author, a Scottish woman, J. K. Rowling, have had the delight of watching the three books sit side by side at the top of the best-seller charts in the United States for months, in addition to their huge sales in Great Britain and elsewhere. (At last count, the book had been translated and published in 28 languages.)

It would seem the only people who aren’t all that delighted are certain fundamentalist Christians in our own country, who have complained that the books contribute to legitimizing witchcraft. So far it seems that they have found little support for their point of view, though I respect the parental concern behind it.

Some religious liberals might have a parental concern of their own, that books like Rowling’s might weaken their children’s ability to discern what’s real. This is sometimes expressed as the worry that children will think that if a fictional character can fly, they are safe in jumping off the roof.

The latest research is consistent and reassuring, that most children know by five or six how to entertain the existence of two worlds, the one they live in and the story world they hear or read about. Bruno Bettelheim’s argument that children profit by stories that foster a rich imaginative life has stood up well. Indeed, part of the profit turns out to be an improved ability to distinguish between fantasy and fact.

Bettelheim championed stories like Harry’s, full of the fairy-tale’s power to express a child’s worries, frustrations, and dreams. Here, for instance, as often before, an undistinguished but plucky youth has a miserable childhood until he discovers he’s not the nobody he thought – in fact he is a big someone, and has an great talent, and can go off on his own, meet danger with great valor, and succeed. It’s a winning formula, and Rowling uses it well, as the sales figures tell.

How many children never think their guardians are being mean? Well, Harry, an orphan, is raised by his aunt and uncle, and they’re downright horrible to him. They make him sleep in the cupboard under the stairs. One year for his birthday they gave him a coat hanger and a pair of his uncle’s used socks. He is subject to a steady combination of neglect and verbal abuse.

How many children never think their guardians are sort of boring? Well, Harry’s uncle makes drills. As the story begins, he is picking out his most boring tie to wear to work. About the only things besides drills that he and his wife seem to have any interest in are normality and Dudley, their son.

How many children never think their siblings are useless, or mean, or both? Well, Dudley seems to do nothing but sit, eat, watch TV, and pick on Harry. Thanks to Dudley and his friends, Harry’s glasses have to be held together with scotch tape.

And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, it turns out there is a whole other world Harry never knew existed, but everyone in that world knows all about him and thinks he is a very important person, a hero. And that world is full of interesting people and wondrous things, magical things, and a school where Harry can learn magic himself. And about the most important thing at that school is a sport he’s never heard of before, but even though he’s a pretty small kid and only a first-year student, it turns out he is just naturally great at this sport, and he becomes an instant star!

Not that everything’s perfect at the school. There are some mean kids there, too. And if when it comes to unfair teachers, who favor some students and openly dislike others, like you, it’s hard to match Professor Snape! You get Snape, along with Harry’s classmate Draco Malfoy, Draco’s evil father, Draco’s followers, Crabbe and Goyle, Argus Filch, the school caretaker, and Filch’s cat, always out trying to catch students breaking rules, and Harry doesn’t always have an easy time of it.

Plus, every year there are big, ominous, adventuresome doings at the school, with Harry in the midst of it all, along with his friends, Ron and Hermione, and others, even hapless Neville Longbottom. Because Harry’s fame in the other world, the world of magic and witches and wizards (like him) brought him not only the admiration of many but the hatred of some,  both because of something that happened when Harry was only one year old.

I am not going to give away much more, even though it is inconceivable to me that anyone wouldn’t enjoy these books even if they knew every plot, unless they just didn’t like lots of imagination in a book. By the way, I couldn’t tell you the plot lines of even one of the books in the time of a sermon, so many things happen, stories so cleverly intertwine, and so many surprises come along. I think that’s why the books work so well as chapter-an-evening reading to kids, at least to kids not too easily worried or scared before trying to fall asleep.

I will only say for now what happened when Harry was one. One of the wizards had gone over to the Dark Side, to the use of magic powers with evil intent, and he built up quite a following. He was known as Voldemort, or as Lord Voldemort to his followers, or as You-Know-Who to everyone since except a few people – Harry being one – bold enough to utter his name. His message was, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it….”: [1:291]

In those days, Voldemort was not among the weak. As one character says, “terrible things happened. He was takin’ over. ‘Course, some stood up to him – an’ he killed ‘em. Horribly.” [1:55] He killed Harry’s parents, and was about to kill Harry, but failed; and in failing he lost his considerable magical strength. Voldemort fled, and most of his followers recanted their former involvement.

But who knows how sincerely, and some remained loyal, and Voldemort’s own whereabouts isn’t certain. It is the continuing influence of his movement in some form that haunts the school each year, with Harry not just as a central character but as a likely victim – though for a time one year he is suspected as the culprit himself. By the way, like many good mystery writers, Rowling keeps setting the reader up to guess wrong as to who is up to what, for what reason, and on which side. There being four books to go, one can be fairly certain that some characters we have come to regard as good or as evil are not as they have seemed.

I want to spend the remaining time suggesting that though the books function well as mystery stories, as fairy tales of a sort, as adventure tales, and as comedy, too, they also deal with religious themes. The books are implicitly theological, in the broadest sense.

Unfortunately, the strongest example doesn’t come to light until almost the end of the first book, so I am going to give something away, though it is only a secondary story line, a line Rowling apparently means to weave through many books, maybe all, before we get the whole picture of what happened when Harry’s parents were killed. You learn more in the second book and the third. Maybe something in a later book will prove me wrong, but at this point, I think Rowling is iterating a basic Christian message in a new form, with Harry’s mother Lily in the role of Jesus.

When Harry first hears the story of how ten years before he came to be saluted by witches and wizards everywhere as “the boy who lived,” [1:17] his good friend and benefactor, the school gamekeeper Hagrid, says about Voldemort, “Most of us figure he’s [still] out there somewhere but lost his powers. Too weak to carry on. ‘Cause something about you finished him, Harry. There was somethin’ goin’ on that night he hadn’t counted on – I dunno what it was, no one does – but somethin’ about you stumped him, all right.” [1:57]

But at the end of the book, we learn that the thing Voldemort hadn’t counted on was Harry’s mother’s love. She “needn’t have died,” Harry is told. “She was trying to protect you.” [1:294] As the headmaster of the school tells him, “Your mother died to save you. There is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves a mark. Not a scar, no visible sign … to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.” [1:299]

Harry’s mother’s sacrificial love for him saved Harry’s life, and it would seem that in that sacrifice she was the undoing of the murderous, power-mad Voldemort. If so, she saved all the witches and wizards, at least for a time. Her love and her dying triumphed over the power of death. Not to belabor the point, but one way of stating the Christian gospel is much the same: that in his love and in his dying, Jesus saved all people, triumphing over the power of death.

Even holding back from the question of any larger redemption, in the world of wizards and witches at least, love is (as even an evil character concedes) “a powerful countercharm” [2:317], so that anyone “filled with the power of hatred, greed, and ambition” would find it “agony to touch a person marked by something so good” [1:299] as having been loved.

Would that it were true in our world, too, that our love could protect our children against hurt and harm so well. But there is some truth to the notion that the love we give children does leave an invisible mark that helps protect them from some powers that would do them ill. Love does work lasting wonders not just among the magical. If only every child grew up loved, grew up blessed with that powerful countercharm.

Among the powers that conspire against us humans are dementors, both those invisible ones of which Rowling writes, and some of our own, people who suck the joy out of others, out of a room, out of a meeting. Heck, really good dementors have been known to turn a whole congregation sour – and for my money, congregations exist to help keep our spirits up and to uplift the spirit of the world, to strengthen those souls of ours that dementors like to deaden or even to rob.

I think this is a spiritual matter, and I’m all for adding dementors to our theological lexicon, as a reminder of what to guard against, and I mean that in ourselves as well. Save me, God, save us all from delivering the word or taking the action that saps another’s spirit, that adds to the weight on their heart, that discourages or deprecates them – and may we be spared those words and actions directed at us, or miss or ignore them. Amen.

I have only a few additions to make to my theology according to the Harry Potter books so far. Two are about characters, Dumbledore and Peeves. I want to suggest that Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, widely acknowledged as the greatest of all wizards, is a God figure, and one of a particular sort.

It’s not just that he runs the school. He also has extraordinary powers, perhaps greater than anyone, though he denies it. “Voldemort had powers I will never have,” he says. To which a teacher replies, “Only because you’re – well – too noble to use them.” [1:11]. He is the only wizard or witch that Voldemort is afraid of. He can make himself invisible without an Invisibility Cloak. [1:213]

Admittedly, as gods go, Dumbledore is pretty down-to-earth, even a little whacky. He “enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling.” [1:103] At the grand dinner at the start of classes, he rose to say “’Welcome! Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
“’Thank you.’
“He sat back down. Everybody clapped and cheered. Harry didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
“’Is he – a bit mad?’ he asked [an older student] uncertainly.
“’Mad? … He’s a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes.’” [1:123]

But he is also the force in the life of the school and its students and faculty on which they all depend. There is a repeated sense that however badly things go wrong, ultimately Dumbledore can make things right. A friend tells Harry, “With Dumbledore around, You-Know-Who won’t touch you.” [1:260] Likewise, “Harry was safe. There was simply no way that Snape would dare to try to hurt him if Dumbledore was watching.” [1:222] “You couldn’t help trusting Albus Dumbledore, and as Harry watched him beaming around the students, he felt really calm for the first time since the dementors had entered the train compartment.” [391]

But if Dumbledore has that kind of godly presence, combining power and authority, and eliciting trust and what amounts to reverence, he exercises his power in distinctive ways. If he is like a God over the world of Hogwarts, it is a God that grants free will. He uses his powers sparingly, he is absent when we as readers might wish he were around, he reins in people gently when we might wish he would come down hard – but he intercedes just enough, just in time, that things work out okay. And the students and others at the school will have seemed to have mostly pulled it off.

Harry sees this himself, reflecting on the odd but characteristically background role that Dumbledore has played in a dangerous situation in which Harry was a hero. “He’s a funny man, Dumbledore. I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance. I think he knows more or less everything that goes on here, you know. I reckon he had a pretty good idea we were going to try, and instead of stopping us, he just taught us enough to help…. It’s almost as if he thought I had a right to face [a danger] if I could.” [1:302]

This goes along with one of the points that gets made in all three books: not just that we have free will, but that how we exercise that freedom is how we determine who we are. In the first book, the point is modeled by the centaur Firenze, half man, half horse. Criticized by a fellow centaur for caring about anything but the motions of planets and stars – that being the activity centaurs are given to by nature – he replies in anger that a crisis is at hand – a unicorn, an innocent creature, has been killed in the forest. “Or,” he says sarcastically, “have the planets not let you in on that secret? I set myself against what is lurking in this forest….” [1:257]

I set myself. I make my choice. “It is our choices, Harry,” says Dumbledore in the second book, “that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” [2:333] And it is a choice that makes a stunning climax to the third book, which you’ll have to find out on your own.

So I’ve run out of time before I could tell you about the way that class is an issue in the books, and even more so, the ancestry of the students, and the prejudice of some so-called pure-borns, with witch and wizard parents,  against those of non-magical parents, the Muggle-borns. Or the satirical character Gilderoy Lockhart, a wizard popinjay. Or Ron’s twin brothers, who provide antic good humor, unfailingly. Or the sorting hat that assigns students to one of the four houses that compete against each other. Or the neat gross stuff, like when Ron’s wand backfires and he starts burping slugs. Or the Marauders Map or the Whomping Willow (not the weeping willow), memory charms or live chess pieces, portraits that move about from frame to frame, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans (and I do mean every), or any of the other characters of the magic world, like dragons, goblins, ghosts, house elves, vampires, hags, trolls, warewolves, a basilisk, and a phoenix. If you’re lucky, you may have a young expert you can consult.

Nor will I go into any concerns about Ms. Rowling’s writing style, which includes such curious practices as an almost total refusal to use the subjunctive; an unappealing preoccupation with people’s weight; or her use of “they” or “their” as singular pronouns, even if the gender is known, such as, “I heard somebody come in. They said something funny…. It was a boy speaking.” [2:299]

I can’t close, though, with at least brief mention of Quidditch and Peeves. You have to know at least this much about Quidditch if you are to carry on intelligent conversation in the future about Harry Potter, because it is such a big thing to him and the school and the books. So as not to bore Rowling regulars, with each book the description is more concise. This, then, is from Book 3:

“There were seven people on a Quidditch team [all of them flying on brooms]: three Chasers, whose job it was to score goals by putting a Quaffle [a red, soccer-sized ball] through one of the fifty-foot-high hoops at each end of the field; two Beaters, who were equipped with heavy bats to repel the Bludgers [two heavy black balls that zoomed around trying to attack the players]; a keeper, who defended the goal posts; and the Seeker, who had the hardest job of all, that of catching the Golden Snitch, a tiny, winged, walnut-sized ball, whose capture ended the game and earned the Seeker’s team an extra one hundred fifty points.” [3:143] I would only add that Harry himself is a Seeker, and a great one.

Which leaves me with Peeves. I don’t think you can have a sound theology without including the Peeves factor. If you want to say that there are characters like saviors, seekers, and God in life, then shouldn’t we make a place for a poltergeist, a spirit that just makes mischief and you can’t make him stop? Even as nice a school as Hogwarts can’t escape having Peeves.

So as hard as it is to get to class on time in a building with 142 staircases, “Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him…. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs out from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, ‘GOT YOUR CONK!’” [1:132]

He just keeps showing up. “Professor McGonagall pointed them into a classroom that was empty except for Peeves, who was busy writing rude words on the blackboard.” [1:151] Later, “they didn’t meet anyone else until they reached the staircase to the third floor. Peeves was bobbing halfway up loosening the carpet so that people would trip.” [1:274]

Hogwarts is a fun world to visit, and not altogether unlike our own. We have our Peeves and dementors, too. We have our versions of Quidditch, as you can see on TV this afternoon, as Super Bowl nears. And we have free will. Though our efforts may also receive only a little outside help at best, we too have the chance to choose bravery, goodness, and love.
 
 

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