What a Geek: I'm Blogging About Harry Potter

When I finished "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", I felt more than a little relieved. I’m not a control freak, really, but sometimes a story seems too good to be true, and I find myself holding my breath, waiting for the disaster around the curve of the narrative horizon. The entire Potter series was like that for me: a long journey of near disasters all the way home. At every turn I worried that the entire tale would hit a rock and spin out of control. But it didn’t.
I was shocked, after all was told and as much as was prudent revealed, at what a Christian tale J. K. Rowling has spun. I wasn’t shocked because I have any opinion of her personal faith, but shocked at how much of the Christian world shines in her creation. Granted, it’s a world where dragons and werewolves coexist with wizards and trolls, with scant mention of God, the Church, sacraments, the saints, or angels, but, nonetheless, it’s a God saturated place.
When the Potter phenomenon started sweeping the US, I had a lot of encounters with conservative Christian friends who were convinced that Harry Potter and his creator were in league with Satan (a supernatural creature who also gets no play in her books). Any attempt to compare her to the mythopoeia of the likes Tolkien and Lewis was met with resistance. They and she had nothing in common. C. S. and J. R. R., after all, were Christians, whereas J. K. had (has?) a much more sinister agenda. There was a hilarious piece in the satirical “Onion” magazine several years ago in which Satanists crowed over the great boon that the Potter books were to their cause of recruiting young people to their diabolical ranks. That article was picked up by well-meaning conspiracy theorists and touted as proof positive of Rowling’s dastardly plans. I imagine that earlier generations of evangelicals had similar conversations regarding the validity of Lewis’ “mere Christian” Anglicanism, lubricated by alcohol and swirling with tobacco smoke, or Tolkien’s (gasp) unreconstructed, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. Makes one yearn for simpler times, when at least fundamentalists consistently rejected everyone who didn’t look like them.
Despite Rowling’s defense by such bastions of neo-fundamentalism like James Dobson and Charles Colson (both of whom have a lot to contribute to small areas of life – child rearing and prison ministry, respectively – and little to add to the larger conversation, save by intimation), many people I’ve met continue to keep their children from Harry Potter. As more than one child has told me, “My mother doesn’t want me to read books with witches in them.” Of course, in their minds, Rowling’s witches (and wizards) are nothing like Middle Earth’s or Narnia’s. They told me that when we stood in line together for "The Lord of the Rings".
What I like about J. K. Rowling’s magic is how mundane it is. It functions, by and large, as technology, and is mastered by careful attention to formulae and rote learning. Some, like the art of divination, is scoffed at for its imprecision and creepiness. There are irreducible laws of magic, “discovered” and written up for future generations by early scientists . . . I mean, wizards. After a while, it becomes like the technology of Star Wars. It’s cool to see people travel by brooms, old cans, and through fireplaces, but eventually all that fades into the background as the “real” story unfolds and things like mercy, bravery, cooperation, and, the greatest of these, love, come to the surface.
It happens in the first book, when Dumbledore lets Harry in on the secret of his survival. One of the world’s most powerful wizards was defeated by love. Harry’s mother’s love protected him and continues to protect him. Christian? Not necessarily, but better by far than mere magic. When I read that chapter, I held my breath, afraid the story would wreck on the downed limbs of sentimentality. But, somehow, the scene felt right, and love came through as it is – strong and soft at once. As the story continues, toward the end, we learn that Harry’s mother voluntarily chose to die for him, a love which reflects, at least, the story of God’s incarnate love.
Harry ultimately learns the same lesson. As the realization of his impending death grew, I worried that it would be death in battle, a defeat rather than a choice. Instead, it was a death, accepted, if not calmly, at least with resignation similar to Jesus’ acceptance in the garden.
In the end, when Voldemort is defeated, it is not by Harry’s hand, but by his own. Bonhoeffer’s early assurance that evil finally defeats itself, that its own energy turns inward, comes to pass.
I’ve read a little about the allegorical nature of the Harry Potter series. I think that for most of us, allegory is just easier to deal with than a good story that. Allegory insists that each piece of a story have a correspondent in reality. To read Harry Potter as a Christian allegory, then, means we need to look for God, Jesus, the saints, and the Church between the lines. So, for instance, I’ve read that Harry is Jesus, Hogwarts the Church, and Dumbledore, of course, is God.
When at last he’s killed, Harry finds himself at King’s Cross Station, talking to his departed mentor, asked to decide to go on with the quest, or to continue on the path of death. Either way is acceptable. King’s Cross is an interesting choice. In the books it functions as the point of departure from the Muggle world to Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The symbologists among us, I’m sure, are having a field day with it. It easily conjures the cross of Christ the King as well as the place of decision for or against the will of “The King”. There are other symbolic bits in the stories, from the number three to the phoenix, but I don’t think the key to the Potter stories lies in unlocking a series of arcane codes in some neo-gnostic quest for more light.
Tolkien had no room for allegory, and is said to have disliked The Chronicles of Narnia very much for their occasional forays into that realm. He was more interested in telling good stories, and good stories always tell the truth, albeit sideways, as an accident. So, by way of example, watching Frodo deal with Gollum we “accidentally” learn that mercy is better than revenge and that everything, even people and situations bent double by evil, can be turned back toward the good. Tolkien didn’t set out to teach anything transcendent, but good stories always tell the truth.
Good stories always tell the truth. They can’t help it. But the truth, like good stories, can never be fully consummated in a list of facts. Good stories tell the truth by implication and insinuation, rather than by allegorical correspondents, much like real life. There seems to be a debate going on among some Christians as to whether Harry is a “Christ figure” or not. The mythologist Joseph Campbell would say, of course he is. At risk of over-simplifying Campbell’s lifetime of work, he contended that all real heroes are emanations of one great archetype: the hero with a thousand faces. Christians might add that Jesus is indeed the archetype of humanity, and the heroes we most cling to are the kind who step beyond themselves, who become more than they were by becoming less than they seem. Jesus, as Lewis noted, was no different from all the other hero-gods dying and rising all around the Mediterranean (and indeed, the entire) world. Except that he really did it in real history and had real effect. He was indeed the hero with a thousand faces, finally unmasked and plain. And his story both repels and frees us.
“There is no greater love than this,” said Jesus, “than that a person lay down his life for his friends.” Good stories can begin the process, the journey, of spiritual transformation. They can also accompany us as we take that unending journey, as that process unfolds and unfolds in us.