“Becoming More than Muggles”

The Rev. Carol A. Huston, Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, September 23, 2007

Reading from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale by Frederick Buechner

For this theologian and preacher, the fairy tale is a category which includes folk tradition and also authored works like The Wizard of Oz, Through the Looking Glass, and Lord of the Rings. Buechner says that these works give us the sense that in another world, distinct from ours, the marvelous and impossible thing truly happens, and he quotes J. R. R. Tolkien saying that the fairy tale

Buechner himself continues: Joy happens, and the fairy tale where it happens is not a world where everything is sweetness and light. It is not Disney Land where everything is kept spotless and all the garbage is trundled away. . . On the contrary, the world where this Joy happens is as full of (evil and fear) as our own world, and that is why when it happens it is as poignant as grief and can bring tears to our eyes. It can bring tears to our eyes because it might so easily not have happened, and because there are the wicked ones to whom it does not happen, and just because there are some to whom it does not happen, it happens in a world where those who live happily every after must do so in a world where though happiness is both inevitable and endless, (fear and evil also persist). . .The tears that come to our eyes at the joy of the fairy tale are nevertheless joyous tears because what we have caught a glimpse of, however fleeting, is Joy itself, the triumph if not of goodness, at least of hope.

Sermon: In the June Communitarian each year, I publish a list of books I intend to read during the summer. A few of you have talked with me about the list, or about particular titles on the list. A few of you have asked me if I finished all the books. The answer is “no.” I’ve finished only two of them, but I’ve started the rest and will make a good stab at finishing all of them in the course of the next few months. You will hear about some of those books in sermons to come.

But today I’m going to talk about one book that I did finish. I finished it quite quickly. It was the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series.

I have followed the series since the publication of the third volume, and I have also taken every opportunity to go to the midnight release of the books at bookstores. The first time I took my younger daughter with me – she was 21 at the time. Another time I took my older daughter with me – she would have been 29 at the time. Twice I went alone, one of the few adults in the store, there without the excuse that this kid of mine really wanted to come. I went to the store because I like to take the opportunity to be in a bookstore, packed to the gills with excited people at midnight. I believe that this world would be a better place if that happened to bookstores more often.

As I say, I read the last volume of Harry Potter quickly. It was a matter of family communication. Those two daughters were not with me when I went to Borders this time, but each got their own copy as early as they could. I knew I would not be able to communicate with my children until I had finished the book. My younger daughter was truly worried she would have the ending tipped to her by the media if she did not read quickly.

We agreed that the media did a pretty good job of not giving out premature information about the end of the series, but the way the world went, I’m going to assume that those of you who did not read the books have at least an impression of the stories. The story begins in volume one with Harry Potter learning that he is not simply a miserable, unloved 11-year-old orphan, but that he is instead a legendary hero in a parallel world of wizards and magic because he survived the violent confrontation that killed his parents when he was a baby. He leaves the normal world – our world – the world of the Muggles – to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and each of the seven volumes treats one year of his life, mostly in the world of magic. It is an alternative world, but it has its normality as well, and in some ways Harry and his friends are normal teenagers. Though famous and on the path to important work, Harry’s skills as a wizard are not all spectacular, and he doesn’t avoid the usual growing pains of adolescence. Along with the “fairy tale” qualities like those listed in the Frederick Buechner reading earlier, the Harry Potter series is also good coming-of-age fiction.

The books have been wildly successful, and I applaud when a book can have this kind of power. Whether or not all the children who ramped up their reading skills to follow the Harry Potter series keep it up and read other things, I think reading is a basic good. But what good is in the content of the books? What lessons were children and adults were gaining from these books? What did J. K. Rawlings want to say to us?

First, she said that the world contains evil Even if you did not read it, you know that there was a character of great menace: “He- Who-Cannot-Be-Named,” as most said, but Harry almost always called him Voldemort. This series was already popular before 9/11, when more people on the world stage began to talk about evil as a force around us. J. K. Rowling lived through that transition as well, and so it was interesting to see that as the series developed in last two books particularly, the evil facing Harry Potter became more and more a matter of human beings making supremely bad choices. We learn about Voldemort when he was called Tom Riddle, trying to find his way to power over life and death in a world of people who were not nice to him. Interestingly, in the last volume we learn that even the Harry’s mentor Dumbledore had made bad choices, and he understood the evil that he might do if he placed himself too close to power. In this magical world, as I see it, evil was not a free-floating force, it was actually based on individual choice. J. K. Rowlings is a humanist, after all. The characters in the book who have lived into adulthood are generally mixtures of good and bad.

And the answer to those who chose evil must be force, but a particular kind of force. Even under pressure. Harry Potter never, I believe, uses a deadly spell and only rarely does he send forth a spell that is a physical blow to the opponent. His preferred spell by far is “expelliarmus,” which takes the wand out of the hand of the opponent. Even in his ultimate confrontation, while Voldemort sends a deadly curse, Harry says “expelliarmus.” He also makes much use of a cloak of invisibility, and he casts defensive charms on behalf of others. Like me, I think Harry would have been against preemptive invasion of Iraq, but he certainly would have kept the arms observers in that country. It’s too bad we don’t have access to the “expelliarmus” charm in our Muggle world.

The books celebrate the individual differences between people. The wand is the symbol of the individuality of each wizard. You don’t buy your wand off the rack; you find the wand with the materials that match your character. And in the area of individual strengths, the female writer J. K. Rowlings did a good job by women. Hermione is clearly smarter than Harry, and the women as a whole have physical courage to match the men. There is definitely a respect for individuality in the books -- individual choices, individual talents. But the over-all arc of the series goes beyond individuality. In the middle books of the series, Harry becomes too much the individual, trusting no one, angry but determined that he must do everything himself, by himself. But in the last book particularly he gets beyond that. Through most of that last volume, he works in relationship with his oldest friends and a circle that he knows he can trust. Ultimately he comes to a task that he must do by himself, but even as he is physically moving toward that task, he makes a brief detour to enlist someone else (Neville Longbottom) to make certain that a particular detail is attended to. And as he walks alone, he is movingly accompanied by those who have died before him in this struggle. I agree with most reviewers that she got the end of the series right. It provided the moment for Tolkein’s “catch of the breath, beat and lifting of the heart.” And that ending had more to say about community (well chosen) than about individual endeavor. I’m glad that our young people are reading that. A Unitarian theologian wrote, “Freedom involves more than freedom of choice. Socially effective freedom requires participation in associations. . .” We see the power of community around us, from the people who have traveled to Jena, Louisiana in the name of equal justice, to the Buddhist monks marching in Myanmar, for freedom and democracy.

Please come to the Book Group’s special meeting today after coffee hour to talk more about Harry Potter – to disagree with me if you wish, to bring in your own ideas as well. But before I close, I want to highlight one more thing that I saw in the series. Through atmosphere and impression, the Harry Potter series brings home to us the power of place. More than one reviewer declared the last book too long, particularly through the meandering odyssey that Harry, Hermione, and sometimes Ron made through the wilds of England. There was real relief and a pick-up in the story when at last they returned to Hogwarts, the place that we had learned to love as the setting for most of the time in the other six volumes. I felt that the wind went out of the sails of her storytelling whenever too much time was spent away from Hogwarts. There was importance in the architecture and surroundings of the place that we had come to feel as sacred. Things were thoroughly visualized there in a way that they weren’t elsewhere. A place can be sacred.

And now I’m probably going to disappoint all of you, but I can’t stop myself from this choice. I am going to relate this last point to our Capital Campaign. Place is important. A congregation needs a functional home. It is only here that we can tell a grounded story, here we can make relationships, here we find the breezes to launch ourselves on the work that we must do in the world. Place is important. J. K. Rowlings said so.

And, while I am at it, I’ll also draw from Harry Potter the reminder that community is important. In this building campaign, no one should be walking alone. We are a community, we should trust one another. We should work together. Some can give, some can receive, that is the fact of individual circumstance, but to achieve anything, we must work in community, pulling on the talents of each of us. J. K. Rowlings said so.

Now I really and truly don’t think that this has anything to do with the capital campaign, but I want to leave you with the reminder of the other lesson from Harry Potter -- that minimum force is the right way to go, even in the face of evil. Evil has human motivation, and we must defend ourselves from it, but often the way to do so will not be in direct aggression, but in the way that we redirect forces. J. K. Rowlings said so.