Leigh McLeroy, Thank God for Harry!

 
Q: How many wizards can you cram into a nice, neat, evangelical box?

A: Not even one. Especially not this one.

Like 8.5 or so million other readers, I learned this week of Harry Potter’s fate in the seventh and final installment of Jo Rowling’s serial tale about the wizard “boy who lived.” If you haven’t yet finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, read this post later, when you have. And enjoy the story in the meantime. (Or, if you’d rather read “Christian fiction” than “stories of the occult,” well, read on…and pray for my eternal soul while you’re climbing up on your moral high horse.)

Now that I have finished the book, I’ve allowed myself to sample the discussions that are “apparating” right and left in the media, particularly the blogosphere, and finding that “deconstructing Harry” is a favorite pastime of many.

Is J. K. Rowling a believer, Christian readers want to know? Were the three hallows – the resurrection stone, the elder’s wand and the invisibility cape – symbolic of the three temptations of Christ? Is Harry a Christ-figure? Could Hermione be Mary Magdelene? Does the fact that Harry arrives in King’s Cross to sort out his fate in the presence of fallen Dumbledore mean anything? “Come on, King’s Cross, get it?” And what about those Bible verses on the tombstones of Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore, and James and Lily Potter?

That these discussions are proliferating faster than the treasures in Gringott’s deepest vault is, hopefully, a tribute to Rowling’s masterful storytelling and the power of the story itself – not an attempt to “baptize” Harry Potter and cram him into a neat, evangelical box. Because that would do a disservice to the writer, the story, and every reader of it, now, and in the years to come.

“The reduction of literary works to pious epigrams is a jolly parlor game,” said writer Annie Dillard, “little more.” In her excellent book Living by Fiction, Dillard argues that “from any work of fiction we may derive an interpretive view of the world,” but “the novel, even the unabashed novel of ideas, is not a tract.” Now, here’s the quote that will likely get me into trouble. She went on to say that, “unless we are Marxists or fundamentalists, we do not judge a literary work according to whether or not we agree with its world view.” (Or the author’s, I would add.)

I don’t know what J.K. Rowling believes, but here’s what I believe. Harry Potter is a tremendous character, Rowling is a master storyteller, and Harry’s story is as redemptive and rich as they come. And that redemptive richness – its tensions between darkness and light, good and evil, love and jealousy, and its honestly-constructed characters who never, ever hit a false note – resonate with the Great Story, the Gospel Story. Because all the best stories do, whether they mean to, or not.

Is Harry supposed to be Jesus? I don’t think so. Harry’s Harry. But if Harry’s unselfish love makes you think of Jesus, well then, think of him. And if Snape’s conflicted spirit and long-held torch for Lily Potter make you think of the beautiful ache of longing inside all of us, well then, think of that ache.

If Dobby’s loyalty reminds you of John or Peter, or if Malfoy makes you think of Judas, no harm done. But to reduce the elements of this magnificent tale to a set of tit-for-tat matches renders it weaker than it would be otherwise.

Roman Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor claimed that the novelist “has to create a world and a believable one.” Who can deny that Rowling did exactly that? No, I don’t believe in wizards and spells and hallows and horcruxes, but I believe in Hogwarts as Hogwarts. It rings true to itself. It doesn’t need to be anything else – any more than Narnia needs to be anything but Narnia. “The virtues of art,” said O’Connor, “like the virtues of faith are such that they reach beyond the limitations of the intellect, beyond any mere theory that a writer may entertain.”

Every perfect piece of writing, every clearly-played note of music, every rightly-rendered piece of art rings with the clarity of the Greatest Story Ever Told. “A thing resounds when it rings true,” says Andrew Peterson’s lovely song “More”, “ringing all the bells inside of you. Like a golden sky on a summer eve, your heart is tugging at your sleeve, and you cannot say why.”

Whether it set out to do so, or not, Harry Potter rings true for me. I loved his story, beginning to end. Did you?

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Editor's Note: for more on the authors that Leigh mentions, and the works that Dillard and O'Connor wrote, please see the following:

Wikipedia entry on Flannery O'Connor

Amazon link for the Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor

Annie Dillard website

Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard's most recent (2007) novel, The Maytrees

 

Comments

[Harvey Kay]

Great post.

[Amy]

Yes, I love Harry and am so grateful for this, a reasonable post.

[Huis]

Excellent point, put very well. I also think that the temptation to over-analogize or even allegorize can raise the possibility of accepting or calling things in a "good character" good when really they are an example of what not to do.

[Mark Upton]

Sadly, I heard Dillard interviewed on NPR yesterday, and she said that The Maytrees is her final work.

[Leigh]

Mark - I did not hear the interview, but I'm sad to hear that her latest book will be her last. She has a wonderful voice that will be missed. Hearing her read from "An American Childhood" in Wichita, Kansas, several years ago is one of my favorite "literary" memories!

[Andrew Peterson]

Thanks for the nod to the song, Leigh, and for the thoughtful review of the Harry Potter grand finale. Here were my thoughts after finishing the book yesterday (from my message board), for what they're worth.

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Today was a sad day. Ben (Shive) and I flew from New Orleans to Denver, Harry Potter books in tow, and read like mad during all our flights. We looked about as nerdy as the fifty other adults I saw in the airport today carrying it under their arms.

I finished about an hour before Ben and had to wait until he finished before we could talk about it. What a great, great story.

I played a show with Fernando (Ortega) tonight, and was so sad and emotional during the Queen of Iowa and Lay Me Down, partly because I was thinking about HP. Those songs deal so much with heaven and death and hope, which is so much of what the end of this series is about. I was so glad to read "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death" and "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" on the tombs in the cemetery, to see the cloud of witnesses (of sorts) walking with Harry to his death, to see his struggle to trust Dumbledore even when he felt he didn't have much reason to, the way the evil characters consistently fell into the pits they themselves dug, how Harry's sacrificial love for his friends protected them the way Lily's did for him, when Harry's in King's Cross station and asks Dumbledore what happens if he takes the train and the reply is simply, "On."

It occurred to me that Rowling has planted seeds of eternity and God's truth in literally millions of people, whether that was her intention or not. It's easy for me to imagine a child reading and loving these books the same way C.S. Lewis loved his mythologies, and that child, when he's older, hearing the true tall tale of Christ's sacrifice; the pieces snap into place and he realizes that what he loved about Harry Potter's epic tale--the loyalty, the courage, the need to trust, the sacrifice, the baffling compulsion to save the lives of even your enemies (Draco), the shining hope that death is not the end, the bright victory of Love--these things are complete and fulfilled in the gospel of Christ and in his Kingdom, which is no fairy tale but is God's honest truth.

I know it's just a story, maybe even mainly a good story, but there's just too much redemption and truth to ignore. Good art gives us language to help us think about things that we may know but can't always articulate. Tonight when I was listening to Fernando sing Crown Him With Many Crowns, the book had so prepared me to worship Christ for his courage, his sacrifice, and his resurrection that I sat in the back and cried. This gospel we proclaim actually happened. The stories are true. Christ's victory over death will be ours.

"Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death." 1 Cor. 15:24-26

AP

[Leigh]

Thanks, Andrew, for sharing what you loved about Harry's ending. I found many of those same things deeply moving - especially Harry's walk to his death with his family - and his asking his mother to stay close - and yes, Dumbledore's "On." Your comment also articulated what my heart was struggling to express and didn't: that although HP resonated with me because I know and love the Gospel story, perhaps one day the Gospel story will resonate with someone else because he or she loved Harry as a child. Perfectly, beautifully put. (Chesterton said the same thing about the "fairy stories" he loved as a child!)

[Reggie Kidd]

Thanks to Leigh McLeroy and Andrew Peterson for such penetrating remarks. OK, with AP and a lot other believers, I too took heart in the gravestones ("The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death" and "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also").

But did anybody else take as much pleasure as I did in Mrs. Weasley's going after Bellatrix Lestrange: "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! ... OUT OF MY WAY! ... No! ... Get back! Get back! She is mine!"?

Thank God that Jesus is "Christus Victor," and that, as the NEB puts it, "overwhelming victory is ours through him who loved us."

[Leigh]

Reggie, yes! I LOVED Mrs. Weasley's jihad on Bellatrix! Thanks for reminding me of another delightful moment I'd forgotten. (It's not wise to mess with mothers and their children - wizard or muggle.)