“The Gospel According to Harry Potter” [1]
By Charles Rush
October 26, 2003
Romans 8: 35-39
 | ids |
love Harry Potter because they understand that there
are forces out there, menacing forces that are really big and really bad and
will do them harm. I think it helps to be small and easily overwhelmed.
When I was a small child, we had some really mean brothers
that lived in the neighborhood that daily threatened to do me bodily harm if I
ever left my yard. They weren't kidding.
One time, they caught me unawares, stuffed me in a trash
can and rolled it down a hill where it crashed into something. I was all of 5
or 6 at the time. They were laughing. I was really hurt but I ran like hell.
There was no trip off property that didn't have a surveillance check, proper
preparation. These brothers weren't human to me. They were like the Cyclops
that Odysseus has to slay to get home from Troy.
Our ancestors believed in monstrous evil. They respected
it. That is why they had a ritual where they honored the Dead in the fall
because they believed that even the dead could still do them harm if they weren't
shown due supplication. So they gathered at the graves of the dead and they
brought them gifts, said prayers, and warded off evil. The Catholic Church
never stopped the practice, they just Christianized it, morphing it into
Halloween- all Hallowed Eve or All Saints Day, where we light a candle and do
our devotions to the ancestors that precede us.
We've tamed Halloween. It is costumes, masks, and the candy
is for us not for the angry ancestors. We don't believe in demons. We don't
believe in ghosts that live beyond the dead. In fact, as a culture, we don't
really know what to make of the concept of Evil. As a result, we can't really
explain even the obvious when it presents itself to us.
In the ancient world, if they were to experience a random
act of terror- and they did quite regularly- they would say, ‘that was evil and
it was done by someone possessed of an evil spirit'. (By the way, this would
all be true if you were Christian or pagan, Roman, German, or Celtic). And they
would know what to do. You stop it and destroy it. If you can catch it and
control it, you exorcise the demon spiritually and if you can't do that you
protect yourself spiritually with a talisman. Dracula can't bite you if you
lift up the cross.
That may be superstitious but at least it acknowledges a
transcendent metaphysical reality of principalities and powers and it takes
them seriously. We don't believe in any of that, so our commentators on
‘Charlie Rose' and ‘Hardball' are strangely inarticulate when it comes to
explaining why a dozen Al Quaeda operatives would kill themselves flying planes
into the World Trade Towers. The search for root causes just doesn't add up. They
must be poor. They must be uneducated. They must resent American Foreign
policy. They must have been religiously confused. Each of these root causes is
reviewed- as if to reinforce the core liberal values of the West that
tolerance, pluralism, education, material well being, and the equality of the
sexes- are so fundamentally important that if we just all lived by them, there
would be no evil in our world. So why is there still evil? Well, because some
people are poor, they are ignorant, their religion
prevents them from developing tolerance. Implicitly we seem to be saying, if we
could just get everyone educated, if everyone had religious tolerance, if we
were all middle class, then… then, this would all go away.
In the books about Harry Potter, there are lots of people
too who no longer believe in evil. They are called Muggles
and they just don't get it. They are bland, two dimensional people, who live in
the tame predictability of the routine they have created for themselves. Evil
Spirits swirl around them all the time, they just can't see them.
Harry not only sees them. He is the only one who can or
will actually name the evil spirit Voldemort. Naming
things has a certain power over them. They can't get to you in the same way if
you can name them.
I know that, for me, one of the things I have come to
appreciate most about the Christian faith is its frank acknowledgement of the
reality of evil and its realistic understanding of human nature. Despite being
over worked in the wrong way, it remains one of our most important spiritual
insights.
I wrote my dissertation on the events leading up to the
Second World War, a period that Winston Churchill aptly called ‘The Gathering
Storm'. In it, I came to appreciate just how we let the demons loose in our
midst.
One of the first things I did in my research was to
actually read Mein Kampf, the
lunatic ravings of a not very bright racist who, in that book, turned 10
paragraphs of thesis into 700 pages through sheer reiteration. He actually
wrote that book when he was in jail for trying to overthrow the German
government with about 200 other young men. If you wrote the real story as
fiction, I don't think any publisher would believe it. .. but
it really happened.
Hitler used to give his speeches in the late twenties in
the beer halls of Munich Germany that were filled on the weekends with idle men,
hazards of the first world war. I've seen pictures
from the era and they are really striking. What you see is literally thousands
of men in truly huge beer halls and they are all in uniform. You might ask why
they were in uniform several years after the end of the war when the Germans
had no army? The very complex answer to this straight
forward question was probably best given in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. There was something about trench
warfare, something about the loss of human life on such a dramatic scale,
something about the arbitrariness of who lived and who died
that cast an ethos over pretty much all of Europe
after its end.
Soldiers especially found it very difficult to reintegrate
into normal bourgeois society. They found it boring. They lived for the
abandonment of the night, the mystery of meeting a total stranger in lust, the
quick thrill of group intoxication. The play Cabaret gives us the PG version of that night life. And in Germany, where unemployment was at catastrophic levels, whole
groups of men got together on the weekends with their old units, put on their
uniforms and went on maneuvers, and got drunk with their buddies. This was the
world that they felt most comfortable in. And their wives and families let them
go. You can find these photos of thousands and thousands of them in these beer
halls, listening to nationalist nuts like Adolf
Hitler after they are loaded, giving vent to all their frustrations,
disappointments, blaming them on outsiders, giving them permission to be angry
and urging them to hate.
After the fascists won a small number of seats in the
parliament, they began to organize and spread their hatred across the country.
Along the way they figured out that it was better to hold rallies at night
because people were more willing to allow their emotions to be swayed in the
darkness. Along the way, they figured out that it was better if you had a mass
rally with a large crowd, they are more willing to things that they wouldn't do
in smaller number. Along the way, they figured out, in the words of Joseph Goebbels ‘the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to
believe it. Along the way, they figured out that there was something primal
about bonfires. Along the way, they figured out that one spot light focused
tightly on one speaker held people's attention and transfixed a number of them
in a quasi-trance like state that made them more able to absorb the message.
After a decade of improvement, when they had the influence and the money to put
it all together, they were ready to roll out those night marches and rallies at
Nurenberg with precision effectiveness.
When you watch those rallies and listen to Hitlers speeches telling people
that it is okay to live out of their anger, that it is a duty to hate, and that
the enemy in our midst is a cancer that has to be cut out, you are watching
evil released, given life and allowed to swirl through everyone there. Then
they figured out how to follow up with carefully orchestrated pogroms that led
to the development of the police state. And somewhere in there, the force
released became collective, somewhere when it became institutional,
it took on a new form and people changed around it.
Spiritually speaking, they lived out of their fear. They
began to think about survival more fundamentally than morality. They were
driven by their anxiety. They learned to tolerate a level of inhumanity in the
community around them that they did not know they were capable of tolerating.
They were changed. They were shaped by this collective spirit and they were
mal-formed by it. And even if you couldn't point to it and touch it in any one
place, it was a tangible presence nevertheless.
I read the testimony of an SS agent, after he had spent
several years interrogating people, rounding them up, routinely using torture.
Somewhere along the way, he realized that he had become a sadist. He spoke
about how difficult it was for him to go home on the weekend and be with his
family as a normal father, a normal husband. His spiritual values had become
rewired and one day he realized that he couldn't unwire them. Collective evil
has a power to shape us spiritually that dramatically. Given the proper
circumstances we can all live out of our dark side as they say in Star Wars- our fear, out of
our anger, out of our revenge and hate. Evil is very real and even if it takes
an intersection of conditions for it to flourish to its full bloom, none of us
is immune from it. Germany ought to be an important example for all of us
precisely because there was no more educated, tolerant, pluralistic society
than Germany just a generation previous.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that peace,
like war, must be waged. What we do daily to instill values in our children, to
build community around us is critical.
Harry Potter is on an adventure to bear this out. He has to
face the evil Voldemort. At one point in his life, he
has to enter the dungeon and face a great serpent in order to save a friend. In
the midst of battle with this great serpent he is wounded, fatally so because
of the serpents venom. Just as he begins to grow pale, a phoenix appears, the mythical bird of death and resurrection. The
phoenix appears whenever the virtue of loyalty is shown and the bird's tears
have healing powers. As the phoenix weeps on Harry's wound, he is healed, an
image almost straight out of the Christian tradition where we are healed by the
tears of the Christ.
Harry only gradually learns that he owes his very existence
to the profound love that his mother had for him. When he was a baby, the evil Voldemort tried to kill Harry and his mother stepped in the
way of Voldemort's attack, sacrificially giving her
own life that he might live. At one point, someone says of Harry that he has a
special protection from evil because his skin is soaked in love.
It is a great image and an important insight. You know,
when our children are young particularly, we love them in a way that we wish we
could shield them. I think of a wonderful song that says,
“If I could, I'd
protect you from the sadness in your eyes, give you courage in a world of
compromise. Yes, I would. If I could, I would
teach you all the things I never learned. And I'd help you cross the bridges
that I burned. Yes, I would. If I could, I would try to shield your innocence
from time”. [2]
We wish that we could protect them from all the heart aches that
the world has to offer, the arbitrariness of history, and particularly the
things in ourselves and our families that might have toxic consequences for them.
We wish we could… but we can't.
The only thing that we can do is fill them with our love,
fill them with substantial spiritual values, and release them. And you know
what, it will be enough. We won't be able to shield them, we don't get to do
that, but they will be strong enough to get on through. Love has a life-power
like that.
We all have a child that we worry about because we
generally just take turns worrying about different ones at different times in
their lives. Right now, one of our sons is in the Army and he mentioned to his
mother that his unit is likely to deploy to Afghanistan at some point in the not to far distant future. This
makes her very anxious. She doesn't want him in danger. Never mind that he has
lived most of his life in danger. Anxiety doesn't have to be rational and it
usually isn't. And this kind of anxiety you just have to work through about 10
different ways from 10 different angles until you can manage it. You feel
vulnerable. You are existentially at risk and in the back of your mind you are
asking yourself as a parent, did we do enough? Did we prepare our kids for
this? We can't really protect them at any point. And God knows they make some
decisions that just invite problems. But I take substantial solace knowing that
that boy's skin is love soaked.
We can't control all of the events in the world around us.
We can't prevent our children from venturing into the wider world on their own
spiritual adventure. They have to find out.
But what we can do, what is so very important, is for us to
build families with solid spiritual values. It is so important that we manifest
love in our lives. It is so important that we build neighborhoods and
communities with substantial spiritual values, that we become reconciliators, that we promote goodness, love and life. We
have to build the things that make for peace day in and day out. In our little
corner, we can drive out chaos and evil because they find no foothold in the
midst of healing love. They are powerful realities but not as powerful as love.
At the end of the day, St. Paul used to say that love is what is fundamentally real.
Karl Barth used to say that the evil that presents
itself in our world, as dramatic as it is at times, is only a schaten existence. It is only a shadow because what is
fundamentally real is God's goodness. That is why St. Paul was so confident in our scripture today that he could
say.
“I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus…
neither principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
things past, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. You can take that one to the
bank.
Amen.
[1]
The title of this sermon is borrowed from
The
Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the
World's Most Famous Seeker
by Connie Neal
[2]
Song written by Ronald L. Miller, Kenny Hirsch & Martha V. Sharron,
recorded by Barbara Steisand, among others. See, for instance:
“If I Could”
© 2003
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved
