Harry Potter and the Mission of the Church

(I have shamelessly stolen this approach and some of its main ideas for this piece from Chris Crass,” Expecto Patronum: Lessons From Harry Potter for Social Justice Organizing,” Sunday, December 15, 2013, Truthout)

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is far more than a work of young adult fiction. Like Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, her Potter stories encode a way of being she promotes. It’s not the Christian vision underwriting the Lewis and Tolkien tales. But neither is it antithetical to it. Rowling’s vision seems to reflect the kind of secularized Christianism that used to order life in the West. I say
“used to” because of late He Who Must Not be Named and his Dementor and Death Eater minions are shaking the already rickety foundations of that secularized Christianism.

They are the antagonists that threaten Rowling’s similar world in the Potter stories. And that attack is focused on Hogwarts, the wizarding academy whose magic powers are ranged against the unholy trinity just named. Hogwarts is among various wizarding schools which populate the “world beyond the everyday world,” the muggle world in the stories. Though the wizarding and muggle worlds are to be kept separate, Voldemort’s attack and takeover of Hogwarts, however, compromised that buffer and evil magic begin to destabilize the muggle world.

There’s a certain similarity here between a Christian view of the world and Rowling’s. And many observers identify the weakness of the church as a key part of what is weakening the foundations of our world. Sam Speers at New City Commons lists the factors in this weakening including, “the waning cultural influence of churches and other virtue-forming institutions (and, too often, the silence or inarticulacy of American churches in times of moral crisis).” His colleague Emily Gunn describes the cost of such weakening:

“the only response to daily rituals of dehumanization is to combat them with daily rituals of dignity. It will be impossible to respond well to extreme moments of racial hatred and nationalist delusion—and when those moments come, we must respond—if we do not immerse ourselves in the daily task of respecting our neighbors and our enemies, insisting on their dignity and our own.”

The world of muggles and wizards goes through a crisis similar to our own world in the stories. Infernal powers attack the most important site of resistance to their designs: the wizard school at Hogwarts. This bastion of resistance to the machinations of Voldemort for total power requires the defeat of Albus Dumbledore, the great wizard and headmaster at Hogwarts, and his work to resist Voldemort centered at the school. I suggest that the church is a fair analogy for the role Hogwarts plays in Harry Potter’s world.

Opposing the church in our world is a foe of great power with its own design on world domination. Whether we personify this power in a devil figure or see it as an impersonal power or force is less important than recognizing the existence of malignant intent in the universe and its strategic plans to usurp God’s place in the world. I like to picture this power as an unholy trinity – Mars, Mammon, and Me. The undoing of our Hogwarts, the church, has its focal point in the primacy of the self, the power of “stuff”, and the efficacy of violence.

I want to explore some ways I see Rowling’s Potter epic suggesting ways for the church to effectively resist the Voldemortian attacks on its integrity and identity by the unholy trinity. But first a quick look at the kind of world Voldemort wants:

-a classist society based on socially accredited biological differences.                                      -criminalize those on the margins and divide classes based on ethnicity and politics.                                                                                                     -those at the top claim to be the defenders of the way Tradition and the Natural Order have constructed the world.                                                                                                                                  -Use fear and hate to weaken the bonds of human connection while simultaneously uniting those at the top.

That’s a pretty good description of our world too, don’t you think?

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Part of (d)evil’s work is to get inside our heads and distract and divert us from faithfulness to God. If we attend to these distractions and diversions we will find ourselves far from where we want to be and far from who we want to be. While we never fully and finally ward off these attacks, we can make progress. When Harry is paralyzed by thoughts Voldemort used to distract and divert him, suggesting how similar the two were, Dumbledore comes to his aid whispering to him “Harry, it isn't how you are alike, it is how you are not."                                                 Harry then sees his family and tells Voldemort, "You're the weak one, and you will never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you."  

Wise mentors and genuine community are two resources God has given us in the struggle with our Voldemort. Further, our experiences of being loved both heal and strengthen us to act from love. It is our essential difference from who we were and how we lived that constitutes our witness. As MLK, Jr. noted, it is the community that generates this difference: "Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives."               

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Dementors were among Voldemort’s chief minions. Greatly feared, these creatures were armed with the power, as Professor Lupin explains, to "drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them . . . every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life." Harry and his friends have one weapon to defeat and repel Dementors with: A Patronus Charm. This entails summoning a protective guardian in the shape of an animal that can rid one of their Dementors. These foul beasts guard prisons. They seek to imprison us in our fears or prevent us from breaking out of them. Our Patronus emerges out of our deepest, fondest memories, one rooted in love.

We can parse this process in a number of different ways depending on our particular experiences. I find one of mine in a little used but quite remarkable passage in 2 Peter 1. The writer there lists a number of virtues all of us would like to mark our lives: faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, mutual affection, and love. If, however, these marks of growth and maturity in Christ do not mark our lives, this lack comes from one simple (or perhaps not so simple) factor: “For anyone who lacks these things is short-sighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins” (v.9.) I still recall with joy and tears the day I realized how fully, completely, and unconditionally God has forgiven me in Christ.

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Community is essential. There’s no way to be Christian alone. We need each other as we have already seen. And we also need an institutional embodiment of this community. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or highly formal. But it does need to be organic. Hogwarts, and the Order of the Phoenix illustrate this in Potter’s wizarding world.

Every movement has a life and that life needs to take on a form and shape to sustain itself. We can’t start with the form unless it is highly elastic. Organic institutions or forms have five characteristics. They are

-nourished by and are the primary place where new and existing participants experience the counter-narratives which constitute their call, identity, and vocation in their world. In Walter Brueggemann’s words, they share and savor dangerous memories.

-partakers of the mystery of life that sustains them. Baptism and eucharist are the forms of partaking that sustain the church. A dangerous presence lives at their heart.

-even as their boundaries form and shepherd the life they share the life within pushes them to transgress those boundaries perpetually incorporating a wider cross section of people than they have before. This ongoing rhythm of establishing/transgressing boundaries is ingredient to the life of God’s people. This constant integration and reinterpretation of the boundaries builds the beloved community which serves as a prototype of God’s design for human life. The church, then, is a dangerous demographic that breaks boundaries and taboos and remains endlessly open to new life and the gifts of others (Michel De Certeau).

-dangerously different not pliantly domesticated to the word around them. The community is immersed in the daily life of their context and in the crucible of that life learn the ways to help and serve others, to become a “church for others” following Jesus who is the “man for others.”

-Finally, they remember their saints and martyrs. “At the end of the Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore challenges everyone at Hogwarts to ‘Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.’"

We are struggling in our culture at present with the meaning of monuments and remembering the past. The capacity of the people of God to remember truly and well the people worthy of it and the lives is a gift we must carefully cultivate in our congregations and share in appropriate ways with our world.

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The life and mission of this community is based on gifts. The apostle Paul lists the fivefold gifting of leadership God gives his people in Ephesians 4: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. These folks curate the life that grounds and nurtures the people to discover and express their gifts in serving Christ.

In Harry’s world it is Hermione Granger who demonstrates the importance of giftedness. For she is the “pastor” par excellence in the stories.

Harry, and to a lesser degree Ron, exhibit apostolic and prophetic gifts and it is Hermione who turns that energy into building a movement rooted more broadly in the hopes and dreams of the Dumbledore supporters at Hogwarts. She understands that the struggle cannot be simply Harry against He Who Must Not be Named. That’s how he sees it most of the time. But Hermione is often able to integrate his passions and exertions into a larger movement for freedom and justice. Without her Harry would never become who he needed to be to truly defeat Voldemort.                                                                                                                       

She demonstrates the power of leading with others, rather than over them. “Hers is a leadership based in respect earned through years of building positive relationships, providing support and encouragement and consistently acting in a principled way” (Chris Crass).

As a muggle-born, an outsider, Hermione leverages that experience when she defies intimidation by the house of Slytherin. Further, she uses the knowledge gained as an outsider to motivate and bring others together in a united front Hermione shows the best strategic thinking in the group and routinely sees connection and draws accurate conclusions about what is going on and needs to be done.-Hermione routinely manifested the best big-picture thinking of what's going on, knows who can be counted on, and knows how to bring people together                                                 

Hermione’s “feminist” leadership is a refreshing portrayal of the riches of leadership with others. Rowling has crafted a powerful and integrated picture of a richer kind of pastoral leadership that exceeds what we tend to see as “male” or “female” and can thus service as inspiration for all those of us who aspire t