Using Harry Potter to Explain My Religion
by Eric Nelson, guest contributor
Still frame from “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
In addition to providing me with a least a decade’s worth of entertainment, J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series has also given me a fresh and hopefully meaningful way to explain my not-always-easy-to explain religion to others. And given that practically half the world has either read or seen the last installment of this epic series, I feel comfortable doing so without fear of spoiling the ending.
But first a little background…
As a Christian Scientist, I’m often confronted, by others and within myself, with some pretty tough questions about my faith — questions like, “If you believe that God is all good, all-powerful, and ever-present, how do you explain natural disasters, famine, war, and violent rampages? What about sickness, disease, and death? Why do bad things happen to good people?”
In short, “How do you deal with the question of evil?”
Although I’m very far from having anything even approaching a complete answer, I can tell you that one thing I don’t do is close my eyes and pretend it’s not there. Simply avoiding evil or wishing, hoping, praying that it just goes away is not the answer.
On the other hand, something I’d like to think I am getting better at over the years is choosing between what I consider to be effective and not-so-effective ways to defeat evil.
And this is where Harry Potter comes in.
As every Potterphile knows, there comes a time in Book Seven when Harry has to choose between two courses of action in his quest to deal with the evil Lord Voldemort, aka “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”
One path involves the acquisition of three “Deathly Hallows.” These include the immensely powerful “Elder Wand;” the death-defying “Resurrection Stone;” and the “Cloak of Invisibility” which, as the name implies, enables the one who possesses it to become completely invisible.
The other path — and the course Harry ultimately chooses — is to track down and destroy seven hidden “Horcruxes.” These are objects in which Voldemort has placed a part of his soul as a means of achieving immortality.
Now, I realize that any analogy between Harry’s strategy for defeating “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” and the practice of Christian Science may seem a little loose at this point. But hear me out on this.
You see, Christian Science is all about getting at the root of the problem. No, not by tracking down bits and pieces of an evil wizard’s soul (if this were even possible) but by addressing the mental nature of all evil, sickness and disease included — not with magic, but through inspired prayer. In this sense, Christian Scientists like myself are in league with increasing numbers in the medical field who acknowledge the direct connection between mind and body.
By challenging long-held assumptions about God as unknowable and man as essentially biological — even the apparent invincibility and inevitability of evil itself — I’ve found that I’m able to confront and defeat evil in much the same way as many folks in the Bible did.
Although modest by comparison, the physical healings I’ve experienced include a wide variety of problems — everything from everyday aches and pains to more serious, life-threatening conditions. The result of this process, this battle if you will, is the destruction of at least some small element of evil that would suggest that man has separated himself, by choice or by design, from God’s care.
Getting back to Harry, perhaps the biggest lesson for him, and for us, is what these evil-defeating experiences can teach us about the presence and power of love — a word that Episcopal priest and Yale lecturer Danielle Tumminio in her superb analysis of the Potter books equates with God.
But still we’re left with at least one unanswered question: If what Christian Science teaches is true, how come we still have all this evil to deal with?
This is a question I continue to contend with. While I may not have entirely grasped the why of evil, I’m grateful to have caught at least a glimpse of the how of its destruction. And I have no doubt that there will come a time when we’ll all discover, as did Harry, that evil in whatever form it presents itself can and will be defeated once and for all.
Eric Nelson is from Los Altos, California. In addition to his work as a Christian Science practitioner, he also serves as the media and legislative spokesperson for Christian Science in Northern California.
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When Yoga Gets Really Real
by Vanessa Reid, guest contributor
When I moved to Jerusalem two years ago, I thought for sure that I would continue my yoga practice, especially after working at ascent magazine and having yoga present in my life in so many ways for so many years. And I thought that I would even find others in this holy city to practice with. A sangha, a space, a teacher. Even other forms of spiritual practice.
But that has not been the case. At least not exactly. My journey has been quite different. But then why would I think that things would turn out the way I thought?
And so while I have discovered here many layers and qualities of spirituality that have moved my soul, shaken my assumptions, inspired further discovery, and shifted my consciousness, I have had to completely redefine my yoga. It has led me over and over to the question, “So then what is my yoga practice?”
My practice has been to reframe and re-contract my relationship with my own body, with my heart, with the identities I had accumulated up until now, and certainly with what I had understood yoga was for me.
More specifically, my yoga practice here, in Jerusalem, has been the rigorous commitment to understanding my own heart. And the pathway to this has been through being in a practice of relationship with my partner, Yitzhak, which is the reason I traveled to the Middle East, to this city, in the first place.
Relocating to this part of the world — and reconfiguring my identity into being one who is in a deep partnership — has turned my insides out and my outsides in. It has peeled my skin off, shown me more of who I am. It has dared me to look at what I dared not look at or meet within myself, which, even through my many reflections in my “hidden language hatha” practice, I had cleverly managed to not encounter.
If yoga in all its sacred expressions is to practice union, to become more whole, to let go of what I no longer need to keep evolving, serving, living, then my practice has been one of breaking my heart open. Of letting in light to places that I had kept dark. The practice of accepting and loving all those places in me and in others, including Yitzhak’s. The yoga has been “off the mat,” as we say in North America. It has been in all the letting go and surrendering.
And now, two years later, I find myself on my mat. Quietly, in my home, in a little corner that I had identified upon my arrival here as “the yoga corner,” I am finding my way back to a different yogic relationship with my body and life, and with the divine. I find myself much softer, less flexible, yet much more flexible.
I have relocated myself. I have new ground and a new centre from which I practice. I am deeply grateful for the years of practice and reflection and the teachings that are deep in my cellular structure and which, thank goodness, find their way into my life, my whole life, and particularly in hard moments.
And, significantly, I find myself sharing my practice with others spontaneously, generously, humbly — and together we open our hearts wide open, ever so gently, into the yoga of friendship, of listening, of vulnerability, and of being present to life and its mysteries with our whole selves.
I have matured. So has my practice. It is a life practice.
Hello mat.
Vanessa Reid is a Canadian writer currently living in Jerusalem, Israel. She was the executive publisher of ascent magazine and executive director of Santropol Roulant, a non-profit founded by young people that uses innovative approaches to food, relationships, and sustainability as a catalyst for social change. You can read more of her work on her blog, Jerusalem Journals.
We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
Health is not a commodity. Risk factors are not disease. Aging is not an illness. To fix a problem is easy, to sit with another suffering is hard. Doing all we can is not the same as doing what we should. Quality is more than metrics. Patients cannot see outside their pain, we cannot see in, relationship is the only bridge between. Time is precious; we spend it on what we value. The most common condition we treat is unhappiness. And the greatest obstacle to treating a patient’s unhappiness is our own. Nothing is more patient-centered than the process of change. Doctors expect too much from data and not enough from conversation. Community is a locus of healing, not the hospital or the clinic. The foundation of medicine is friendship, conversation and hope.
(via trentgilliss)
The Act of Parenting Is Folding the Towels in a Sweet Way
by Krista Tippett, host
I picked up Sylvia Boorstein’s lovely book That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist years ago and loved it. Then, three years ago, I found myself on a panel discussion with her and loved her in person.
I was struck in that discussion by one story she told, about a man who participated in one of her meditation and Metta or “lovingkindness” retreats; she conducts these for Buddhist practitioners but also for rabbis and clergy and lay people of many traditions. As this man prepared to pack up and go home, he described an unsettling sense of vulnerability, of openness to life which also meant that his defenses were down. He felt blessedly sheltered in the context of that retreat but far too exposed to take his newfound vulnerability out into the world.
This has its corollary in becoming a parent, I think. One’s sense of sovereignty and safety goes into freefall — and stays there. But no one tells you this in advance! As the French theologian Louis Evely beautifully put it:
“(W)hen one becomes a father, or a mother, one suddenly sees oneself as vulnerable, in the most sensitive part of one’s being; one is completely powerless to defend oneself, one is no longer free, one is tied up. To become a father is to experience an infinite dependency on an infinitely small, frail being, dependent on us and therefore omnipotent over our heart.”
So how to live, how to love, how to know what we can do (and what we can’t) to raise children who will participate in the world’s beauty and its pain and be safe inside their skin. This too is a conundrum, a daunting challenge that we rarely name together. But it is always there if we are raising children not merely to be successful (and there’s lots of advice about that), but to be good and grounded and kind.
As you might hear in the audio above, I went into this conversation with Sylvia Boorstein hoping for some practical wisdom about imparting such qualities of character. In the course of our time together, some of it in exchange with an audience of others with children in their lives, we circled back to the simplest and most daunting reality of all: our children are likely, in the end, to act and live as we act and live. Nurturing their inner lives means nurturing our inner lives, for their sake.
I couldn’t have found a better conversation partner on this. Sylvia Boorstein has four grown children and seven grandchildren, and her spiritual practice is blessedly reality-based. Buddhism, of course, is at its core about embracing reality head on, about minimizing suffering in life by first acknowledging that suffering is a fact of life and resolving not to make it worse.
So, as she describes, this spiritual practice has helped her grasp that her lifelong tendency to worry is simply a quality she possesses, no more remarkable than the fact that she is short and has brown hair. Others of us may have a tendency towards anger, or to reach for sensory comfort when life throws its curve balls. The trick for achieving balance and joy in our own lives — a trick made both harder and more important by the presence of children who exhaust as well as delight us — is first to know this about ourselves.
Spiritual parenting, as Sylvia Boorstein describes it, is not about adding work or effort to our overly busy lives. It is about self-knowledge and “wise effort” that helps us live gracefully moment by moment. It is manifest as much in how we fold the laundry as in how we discipline or praise our children. She offers this, for example, as a simple piece of effort that can reorient our attitudes and responses in all kinds of situations. Rather than asking, “Am I pleased?” in any given situation, we can ask instead, “In this moment, am I able to care?”
