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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Quilts as Tangible Memories and Bequeathed Love
by Jean Anderson Dunham, guest contributor
Rose triangle bead quilt (photo: Carson Too)
If there is one tangible object that represents my mother, it would be a quilt. She spent my childhood making beautiful patterns: lone stars, flying geese, double wedding rings. Each stitch was exactly even and the corners of the fabric joined together just right.
She was a perfectionist, my mother, and at times was a little too hard on us. I tried to be the daughter she thought I should be. And I never smiled right in pictures. But to my mother, if things were perfect, she could love.
I now know this fear was a sign of deeper hurt and that she longed for love in ways her own mother couldn’t provide. But I have these quilts, these beautiful transitional objects, and they remind me of her.
Jean Dunham is a child psychiatrist living in Austin, Texas. She curates articles and images she finds interesting on her Tumblr at roots and wings.
Pope John Paul II’s “Healing of Memories” Between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West
by Dr. Adam DeVille, guest contributor
In Damascus, Syria on May 7, 2001, Pope John Paul II is helped by Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregorios Laham III after praying at the Church of St. Paul on the Wall. (photo: Enric Marti/AFP/Getty Images)
As the world watches Pope John Paul II being beatified, I want to reflect on one phrase he used almost from the beginning of his papacy through to the end, a phrase of great significance for human psychology, human history, and human harmony: the “healing of memories.”
When he was elected in 1978, his fellow cardinal and Pole, Stefan Wyszyński, reportedly told John Paul that the latter’s mission was to lead the Church into the third millennium. To do that, the pope began laying the groundwork by dealing with some of the problems from the first and second millennia. Memories of those problems — divisions among Christians, persecution, the use of violence to propagate the faith — continued to haunt the church.
As a phenomenologist with an acute insight into the human condition, the pope knew that memories of past hurts must be acknowledged before one can move on. He wanted the Church to move on freely and joyfully into the third millennium, and so he made it a priority to work for the healing of memories.
Of those memories whose healing he not only called for but actively worked towards, none were as long-standing as the memories of division between Western and Eastern Christians. Christians have memories of three periods of especially painful division: the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, in which Christians in Syria, Egypt, and Armenia divided from the rest of the Church over the question of the nature of Christ; the so-called Great Schism of 1054, when the leaders of the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople attempted to excommunicate one another; and then, of course, the Western divisions of the sixteenth-century Reformation.
John Paul felt that the East-West split was the one with the greatest possibility of being healed, perhaps even in his lifetime. That view was a touch too optimistic, perhaps even naive, but it was charming and inspiring in its hopefulness.
He did more to advance East-West healing than any pope before him. No other pope, for example, had ever written a fulsome letter like John Paul did in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, asking humbly for other Christians to tell him what was wrong with his office and how to fix it. Such a request was, and is, utterly unprecedented in papal history.
On November 27, 2004, Pope John Paul II embraces Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I during an Ecumenical Celebration at St. Peter’s Basilica. The Pontiff also returned relics of two early Christian saints aiming to establish unity among the two Christian churches. (photo: Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
How did the Christian East respond? Here we see anew the importance of healing memories. Too many Eastern Orthodox Christians, in 1995 and still today, looked on the papal request as a ruse designed to trick them into surrendering. One Orthodox priest I know — who works with Catholics daily and is very open and friendly — said that John Paul’s request was a bit like being “hugged by a bear.” He wants to love you, and you want to let him love you, but you have memories of being mauled in the past and the scars to show it, so you remain mistrustful.
That mistrust, sadly, remains high among many Eastern Christians, of whom I am one. When you have a thousand years — and more — of division behind you, it takes time to overcome such longstanding memories of division and discord. What is especially sad and difficult to see are those Eastern Christians who have no interest in letting go of their hurts, who refuse all healing because they think — like people who believe childhood vaccines cause autism no matter how many times the science debunks this nonsense — that the “medicine” will kill them. When the pope talks about the healing of memories, some regard him as a kind of Dr. Evil figure, uttering soothing platitudes designed only to brainwash unsuspecting Orthodox into accepting their new status as automatons under papal domination and control.
How does one heal memories, both legitimate and neurotic — if not psychotic? Here I find the work of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas — whom John Paul surely read — to be very important. Levinas’s great insights were what he called the “ethics of the face” and the dangers of abstraction. For Levinas, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he knew that it is much easier to malign someone, to be dismissive of and divided from others — even to kill them — when I do not have to acknowledge their humanity and look them in the face. I can abstractly consign someone to a racial, ethnic, or religious category and thereby dehumanize them.
But if I undergo what Levinas stressed repeatedly — the face-to-face encounter — then it is much harder for me to dismiss someone as a “dirty papist,” a “perfidious Byzantine” or a “Russian schismatic.” The face-to-face encounter is the beginning of the healing of memories of past hurts and divisions.
That is why it is so important for Catholics and Orthodox — Eastern and Western Christians — to begin to engage one another on the most basic level: in their neighborhoods, in their local communities, wherever they find themselves working, playing, and praying together. Once we acknowledge our shared humanity and begin to build not merely bridges but friendships and relationships, we not only heal past memories but create new ones in proleptic remembrance (what Scripture calls anamnesis) of the unity that is happening and is to come.
As we honor the memory of Pope John Paul II, by any measure one of the outstanding figures of our time, we have to continue his work of healing the memories of East-West division so that Christians may be united so that the world may believe (John 17:21).
Correction: The first photo caption incorrectly labeled Gregorios Laham III as Syrian Greek Orthodox Archbishop. This has been updated to Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch.
Adam DeVille is author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity and assistant professor of theology at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He’s also the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies and blogs regularly at Eastern Christian Books.
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.
