Harry Potter

Spoiler Alert: Don’t read this if you want to be surprised by the final movies.

With the seventh Harry Potter movie part 1 rapidly approaching, I must take the time to talk about why I love the Harry Potter story:

1 – Because of sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis described sehnsucht as the “inconsolable longing.” He describes it in his book Till We Have Faces:

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Fantasy literature is an attempt to embrace that other world that we all long for, and good fantasy makes you believe that it is possible to do so. Harry Potter is good fantasy.

2 – The Harry Potter books create a uniquely wonderful fantasy world. People, and especially children, love to imagine that they can become invisible, or open locked doors, or fly (I remember using an umbrella to try to fly once.) In the Potter world, all of this, and so much more, is possible. Also, the characters live in a castle with secret chambers, and hidden passageways, and password-protected doors. Who wouldn’t want to live someplace like that?

3 – The Harry Potter characters are wonderfully developed. They are flawed. They make mistakes, big mistakes, and they pay the consequences for them. It is always important to me to have characters who make mistakes that can’t be undone, because that is how life is.

And there are just so many of them. Check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_characters

4 – The story pulls you in. You CARE about what is going on in the story, what is happening to the characters. Delores Umbridge made me angrier than any other character EVER. The situation seemed so hopeless; Harry felt so helpless against her, and I felt helpless too. I really did. Especially when she gave Harry, Fred, and George a lifelong ban on Quidditch. GRRrrrr… it still makes me angry just thinking about it.

5 – Harry Potter is good literature. You could teach an English class about these books and be able to give examples of symbolism, all types of conflict, different character types, etc, etc. What impresses me even more is how much Rowling builds on classical literature. Just one example of this: The Divination teacher’s first name is Sybil. The word sybilla in Greek means “prophetess,” and the most famous Sybil was the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess who presided over the oracle at Cumae.

6 – The Potter books have such good themes: Love is important and is stronger than the pull of evil (we can see this both with Harry and with Severus Snape); Might does NOT mean right; it is important to keep fighting evil until the very end, even when it seems hope is lost; friends are important; courage is important; and on and on.

7 – There are great quotes in the books / movies:

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high.  Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.”

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”  

8 – Harry Potter has moments that make you want to dance – when Fred and George escape Delores Umbridge; when Neville kills Nagini (taking care of a Horcrux AND getting back Gryffindor’s sword from Griphook all in one heroic moment); when Ron finally kisses Hermione…

9 – The Harry Potter books are not “Christian” as our society has come to think of “Christian,” but the worldview presented is undeniably Christocentric. It is an epic story of good versus evil, in which the main character ultimately must die in order to get rid of the evil. Then he comes back to life and whips evil’s butt (doing so without even using the Avada Kedavra curse – score one for non-violent resistance, sort of.)  

Here are some other Biblically aligned ideas / themes:

-         Having faith and persevering even when you don’t understand the reasons or what exactly is going on.

-         Loving someone means you are willing to die for them.

-         Resisting the temptation of power.

Here is a great article about the Christian themes and influences in Harry Potter: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3507 This article appeared in The Christian Century, January 15, 2008, pp. 24-27.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:

On the other hand, John Granger, author of Finding God in Harry Potter, argues that the books speak to something deep in the human heart. "All humans naturally resonate with stories that reflect the greatest story ever told, the story of God who became man," he writes. He believes that the Harry Potter novels "touch our hearts because they contain themes, imagery and engaging stories that reflect the Great Story we are wired to receive and respond to." Granger maintains that Rowling is following in the footsteps of authors such as C. S. Lewis in using magical themes to point up archetypal human experiences that relate closely to salvation history as understood by Christians.

Indeed, Rowling, who describes herself as believing in God (though with a faith more akin to Graham Greene’s than Lewis’s), has stated on several occasions that Lewis’s fantasy stories were a major influence in her life and that to this day she is incapable of being in a room with a Narnia book and not picking it up to read. Certainly her books can be seen as attempting to carry religious, and specifically Christian, ideas past the "watchful dragons" that Lewis wrote about in his own reflection on the role of magic and fairy tales.

In a seemingly post-Christian era, there is an urgent need to articulate the basic themes of the Christian mystery in ways that are fresh and original, yet faithful to the truth of the gospel. Since the publication of Deathly Hallows Rowling has actually spoken about the Christian theme of the books, saying that to her the religious parallels have "always been obvious. But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going."

G. K. Chesterton wrote about this issue in his essay "Magic and Fantasy in Fiction." He speaks of the net of St. Peter and the snare of Satan, each of which represents a different kind of magic in which one can become enmeshed. "I am convinced," he wrote, "that every deep or delicate treatment of the magical theme, from the lightest jingle of Peacock Pie … to the most profound shaking of the phenomenal world … will always be found to imply an indirect relation to the ancient blessing and cursing; and it is almost as vital that it should be moral as that it should not be moralizing."

Anyhoo, I just had to take a few moments to express my excitement about the opening of the movie tonight, and how else would I do that other than basically writing a paper, complete with sources and citations…??