This is the final post where I’ll be offering some theological reflections on community trimmed from the theology section of my recently-finished book on Harry Potter, due out in Summer ‘10. These reflections may seem a little choppy, since they’re no longer part of a larger context, but the larger context is J. K. Rowling’s emphasis on the value of community. And they’re released in the wake of massive layoffs at the seminary where I received my MDiv, perhaps the most important community of my life. I hope they’ll be of use.
We band together for formation and for mission—the battle against injustice and evil—and the fact that we choose these groups is significant. We can’t choose your family, it has often been said; but we can choose—and our chosen by—our friends. And in his friendships, both within the Order of the Phoenix and at Hogwarts School, Harry is particularly blessed. He is loved—and he is held accountable and urged to be his best self. In this simultaneous love and urging people to higher standards, we can see how friendship functions within the ecclesia. In the Gospel of John, Jesus himself modeled the concept of friendship to shape them into a community who could both love and act:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
(John 15: 12-17, NRSV)
Among those who love each other and are part of the healing of the earth, as those in an ecclesia—or the Order of the Phoenix—are, then true friendship can thrive, and lives can be changed. Within these relationships, people can be free to be themselves, and are called to be their best selves. People can share anything with each other—like Harry’s embarrassing revelation in Order of the Phoenix that Cho Chang was weeping as he kissed her, or Ron’s confession in Deathly Hallows that he had been a prat for deserting Harry and Hermione. As Mary Earle and Sylvia Maddox write, such a friend “honors the secrets of the heart and gently nudges one’s dreams into being.” [1]
Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius are true friends to Harry, and often the book depicts Harry reaching out to them for counsel, comfort, and encouragement. But Mary Earle and Sylvia Maddox note that we can also experience soul friendship in those beyond the reach of our present moment and current surroundings, that a soul friend may also reveal her- or himself to us “in our reading or in our prayer.” [2] The Potter books are full, of course, of those who reach out from beyond the here and now to aid and instruct, including portraits, Hogwarts ghosts, and other such figures.
In the Book of Hebrews, we read of a communion of saints from whom we learn and by whom we are inspired: “So since we stand surrounded by all those who have gone before, an enormous cloud of witnesses, let us drop every weight, every sin that clings to us and slackens our pace, and let us run with endurance the long race set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1, The Voice) In the Christian tradition, these saints are figures from whom we learn and by whom we are comforted and encouraged; the medieval genre of the saint’s life was intended as an exemplary story for others to emulate, while the examples of modern saints—Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, and Mother Jones, for example—may also help to mold us into those we are meant to be.
In the persons of Harry’s parents (and later, sadly, Sirius and Lupin), we find this abstract concept of the communion of the saints brought to life, since over and over again in the books one or more of them appears to Harry. They peer out at him from the Mirror of Erised and from Wizarding photos. Harry’s parents appear out of Voldemort’s wand in the graveyard in Little Hangleton thanks to the miracle of Priori Incantatem, encourage him to hold on, and direct him in what will happen. And they come to him in the moments just before his death, when he opens the Snitch Voldemort left him and takes out the Resurrection Stone. His mother tells him he has been so brave, and his father, “You are nearly there . . . Very close. We are . . . so proud of you.” [3] Then Sirius and Lupin encourage him not to be frightened of his approaching death, and then all promise to stay with him, to be with him as it happens, to give him strength.
In all of this—as in Harry’s post-mortem conversation with Dumbledore in King’s Cross Station—those who have gone before are not separated from us by a gulf, but are with us (part of us, Lily Potter would say), in all we do, walking with us, encouraging us, still teaching us, so that together we can do what needs to be done, can be the ecclesia of the faithful.
[1] Mary C. Earle and Sylvia Maddox, Holy Companions: Spiritual Practices from the Celtic Saints (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 22.
[2] Mary C. Earle and Sylvia Maddox, Holy Companions, 22.
[3] J.K. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 699.
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