HARRY POTTER REVISITED

A few weeks back I opened a hornet's nest on another site by asking if anyone found it curious that there are two Biblical quotes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Since enough time has passed for people to read the book, I'll give the answers as to where and what the quotations are: The epitath on Kendra Dumbledore's grave, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21, HPDH, p. 325). And on James and Lilly Potter's grave: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Corinthians 15:26, HPDH p. 328).

To my mind, the inclusion of the Biblical quotes was a subtle refutation to accusations that the Harry Potter Books are anti-Christian. A number of self-identified Christians (and some non-Christians) had noticed that the seventh book in the series had more religious overtones than the other books had. Some people became very upset that any religious interpretations should be made of the books. One person told me to "get a life" because I knew enough scripture to be able to recognize it when I saw it. Jimmy Crickets! They are as bad as the people who accuse J. K. Rowling of being a Wiccan or a Satanist. Somebody else thought I was "Idiotic" because I suggested a Christian (which Rowling professes to be) would be inclined to have her beliefs influence what she writes.

As I indicated earlier, (This Christian and Harry Potter) there really is no theory of the supernatural in the Harry Potter books. Magic is a technology that muggles can't master. There is no religion per se in the series, although a good case can be made that Harry does reflect many traditional Christian virtues. There is a ritualistic functionary in the books, the funny little man who performs Dumbledore's funeral and Bill and Fleur's wedding, and we can interpret him as something like a priest or minister, although that is not explicit and it would be strange to introduce a religious figure.

Nevertheless, there are these two Biblical quotations as epitaph. Someone remarked to me that it is common for non-Christians to use a Biblical quotation as an epitaph, but I don't think this is true. No one with in the story recognizes the inscriptions as Bible verses (but see what I say about Hermione below), but that isn't strange since there are no references to a religious worldview of any kind in to the books. No, the fact that these are Biblical quotations is the author sending a message to the reader that the character in the story doesn't perceive. This is an accepted literary device. I think it is a subtle wink at the Christian readers to say, see, I'm not a heathen at all.

When Harry and Hermione discover the Potter's tombstone with the epitaph, "The enemy to be destroyed is death," Harry worries that it might be a Death Eater idea. After all, the most important concern of the Dark Lord is to avoid Death. But clever Hermione (often the surrogate for Rowling) explains, "It means . . . you know . . . living beyond death. Living after death." That is a fundamental belief in Christianity.

Of course the theme though all seven books is that Harry is protected by his mother's love, expressed by her sacrificing her life. That theme is echoed in Harry's willingness to sacrifice his life. And the place where Harry makes the decision to go back and face the Dark Lord the final time is King's Cross. How more obvious does the symbolism need to be?

Rowling is not the anti-Christian occultist the fundamentalists often make her out to be. Her use of religious themes is much more subtle than C. S. Lewis, maybe too subtle for some to recognize. What she believes is in the themes of the book: good against evil, the danger of power, the value of virtue, the destructiveness of prejudice, the victory of love over hate, the importance of sacrifice. Why wouldn't a person want their children to learn these things? Are they anything that what Lewis subsumed in the Chronicles of Narnia as the "deep magic."

Stop fussing about the books. Given most of the garbage our children are exposed to, these are a treasure.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

Laundry

For years now I have been hauling laundry off to a laundromat or laundry room to take care of that domestic chore since I never purchased a washer and dryer. Now, this is not the lead in to a denunciation of sock eating dryers, although I do have this joke that was posted on the drier at my seminary.

"Two weeks ago I put seven pairs of black socks into the dryer. I took out six pairs of back socks and one brown sock. Last week I put six pairs of black socks into the drier. I took out five pairs of black socks and one red sock. This week I put in five pairs of black socks, one brown sock and one red sock. When I came to take them out there were no socks at all, only a note: 'Do not tamper with the laws of nature. Bring more socks.'"

Anyway, my ordeal with the laundry has been of rather different nature over the last nine years. There are two laundry rooms in the apartment complex where I live, a large one some distance away and a small one almost next to where I live. The small one has problems. All the washers and driers require that you put funds on an electronic card to make the machines work. The problem is that the only device for putting money on the card is in the other laundry room on the other side of the complex. If you want to use the small laundry room you first have to walk across the complex to put money on your card and then walk back again. Actually this has turned out not to be a serious difficulty since I never use the nearby laundry room. The washers there tend to shred my towels. It's simpler just to walk across the complex and use the large laundry room where the money machine dwells and my towels remain intact.

When I first moved here each tenant had a key to unlock the laundry room. Except my key didn't work. It took a while, but I eventually persuade the powers that be to give me a key that actually unlocked the room. After that they changed the system so that you fit your electronic card into a device which then unlocked the door–sometimes. Everyone had to develop the skill of jimmying the lock open when the device failed to work. After a time that was replaced by a deadbolt lock for which no one by select staff members had the key. The idea was that they would open the laundry room at a specified time and lock it at a specified time. Yeah, right. It was supposed to be open at 7 a.m., but it never was. So I took to waiting until 8 a.m. to start the laundry. Only now they decided that that was the perfect time for washing the floors, so even though the room is open at 8 o'clock, you can't really get in until almost half-past.

Now it should be fairly easy to put money on a card and then use the washers or dryers as needed. About six weeks ago I put my card into the money machine, put $5.00 on the card, pressed the release button (which should return the card), except my card would not come out. Undaunted, I fiddles with the card and poked around with my keys and eventually the card came out. I did the washing that day, but told the management about the problem. Of course, they did not believe me that there was something wrong. (They never believe what you tell them.) So the manager had to come out and investigate and get a card stuck herself. Ha! She put a sign on the machine that said it was out of order and went off to call the company that services the machine. The next week I came to do that laundry. The sign was off the machine, so I assumed it was fixed. I put my card into the machine and tried to put money in. It would not accept any funds. Fortunately, I had enough on my card to do the laundry, but a lady who came in after me was quite dismayed to discover that she could not add money to her card and the management could not provide an alternative. The week after that only to find that the machine had been unplugged rather than repaired. Now I had to find a laundromat somewhere.

For those of you unfamiliar with coin laundries, I can assure you that they are never located in the genteel sections of town. The one I discovered was in a plaza along with a day labor office, a tatoo parlor, and a place where people receive court-ordered anger management classes. Charming. Well, the good thing was that I was able to read several chapters of a book while doing my laundry. The next week brought more of the same. Finally, two weeks ago, the machine was fixed and all was right with the world. Except, over those few weeks of visiting the laundromat, I had forgotten how much trying to use the dryers were like playing a slot machine. You put your clothes in the dryer, pay your money (via electronic card) and magically forty-six minutes later your clothes are dry . . . or maybe not. Sometimes the dryers do not actually dry anything. One machine in particular is notorious for not working. I had forgotten this and naturally ended up with one load of wet clothes.

This week I arrived at the Las Vegas style laundry room and found that the defective dryer was (ta-da!) no, not fixed, but had a sign affixed saying it was out of order. Haha! Victory! Almost. There was only the tiniest of irregularities this time. I placed my clothes in the dryer, inserted my card, and the machine proceeded to display instructions on its little electronic panel in French rather that English. Well, that was nothing to an old hand like me. So I pressed the correct buttons in the proper order, told the machine, merci, and viola! Forty-six minutes later all my clothes were perfectly dry. Well, that's isn't quite correct. All the clothes that I removed from the dryer were perfectly dry. However, one white sock seems to have vanished entirely. Ah, well. I am no match for the laws of nature.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

FINDING PASTORS

On of the duties of a pastor in the Lutheran Church is to "seek out and encourage qualified persons to prepare for the ministry of the gospel." Boy, can this ever cause sleepless nights, and I'm not even very good at doing it. Some people familiar with Christianity might wonder why anyone would have to "seek out" persons for the ministry. Aren't people "called" to the ministry by God. Well, yes, but how does that call come. The Bible is filled with dramatic stories of persons called to serve God: Moses and the burning bush, Samuel and the voice in the night, Isaiah and the vision in the Temple, Paul and the appearance of Jesus on the Damascus road. Yet most clergy I have known never have that sort of experience. Many of them were sought out by others and encouraged to pursue the ministry. As I have discussed in another blog, I didn't even have that. I had to try to figure things out for myself.

Figuring out what a "qualified person" might be is hard. In my denomination (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) there is a whole processes for figuring out who is qualified, but the beginning point is often a local parish pastor like myself. So what do I look for? First, an expression of faith. That doesn't mean a blind acceptance of doctrine without question. To be sure, the better pastors are ones who have struggled with believing. What I look for is a person who takes their faith seriously, that is finds in their faith a source of their values and purpose in life. Without this element there is no reason even to think about ministry as a possibility.

The other personal characteristics I look for in a person vary somewhat, but have to be their to some degree. A person needs to have the intellectual prowess to complete seminary training. By the time they are finished, they'll have to know systematic theology, historical theology, biblical studies, and the practical fields of pastoral care, Christian education, worship, and preaching. A person also needs a level of emotional stability and maturity to be a pastor. They need a willingness to work hard, often in difficult situations (including difficult people). A sense of humor wouldn't hurt, either. If you take yourself too seriously, you'll be overcome. I like to tell prospective candidates for the ministry that most churches would turn down St. Peter or St. Paul as a pastor because they weren't enough like beloved old Pastor Hackemeier who ministered for 39 years in the same church.

In 30 years of ministry I have only come across one person I actively sought out to consider ministry as a calling. I don't know how that will work out yet. Time will tell. I have, however, encouraged a number of people who have already come to consider the ministry. I didn't seek them out, but somehow they came across my path so I did everything I could to support and encourage them. I have also come across a few people who I wasn't quite sure about. They were people who were considering the ministry, but I felt some unease about the possibility of them actually becoming clergy. Because of my uncertainty, I felt it was necessary to encourage them to go ahead with the discernment process so that they could have the insight of other people in determining their call. In most cases they were never ordained, most of them never getting even as far as starting seminary. My instincts proved to be right, but I think you have to err on the side of grace so you don't discourage one who may turn out to have the necessary gifts and calling. Sometimes a person who at 20 doesn't seem to have it together enough to be a pastor matures over the course of years so that maybe by 30 or 40 they are ready. You don't want to close off that possibility.

There have been two types of situations, however, where I actively discouraged people from pursuing ministry. In the first type of situation, the person has severe emotional or psychiatric problems that would make it impossible for them to function in the ministry. It is one of the sad things in life that some mental disorders express themselves in religious terms. People sometimes have psychotic episodes in which they believe God is speaking to them. So it is important to try to listen to a person and observe their behavior to determine as best as possible the root of a person's desire. Several times I have talked with women convinced that God was calling them to be missionaries in far off lands. They want to leave for the mission field as soon as possible without their husband and small children. Suggesting to them that caring for their children might be God's true call for that time in their life is often met with stony disbelief.

The other circumstance that I have found troubling has been when someone wants to be a pastor without having to go to seminary to study. They believe they should be ordained with no training. Sometimes they even have the church picked out that they are convinced they should be assigned to. I am a firm believer that a four-year bachelor's degree followed by four years of seminary training is essential. In recent years I have become uneasy with the increasing number of people being trained for ordained ministry by some alternate method that doesn't require so much work. I am not sure that's a good way to solve the clergy shortage.

Of course that is part of the reason we clergy are charged seeking our and encouraging persons to prepare for the ministry of the Gospel. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans: "'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.' But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?" So I'll keep seeking and encouraging. It's part of my journey.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

SECRET PLEASURES

YIPES. I was on vacation last week and didn't work on any blogs because I thought I had several spares. None of them are actually finished, so I have nothing clever this week. (Yes, some of you are thinking, he NEVER has anything clever. POO!)

In yesterday's paper there was an article on some people's secret pleasures. I confess to having several not so secret pleasure's, one of them being reading children's books. These aren't books I read as a child, but ones I discovered as an adult, so maybe they have a certain attraction for me that is quite unlike the attraction they have for children.

One book is Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I love the quirkiness of the writing. I first learned about Alice from the Disney cartoon which really drew on both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. They are quite different books, with the Wonderland one being the superior. Carroll certainly was a prototype for J. K. Rowling in that he learned the value of merchandising his literary creation with all sorts of add ons you could purchase–like the Wonderland Stamp Case.

The other great discovery was Kenneth Grahame'sThe Wind in the Willows which I have in the wonderful edition illustrated by Eric Kincaid. You sense right away the much more relaxed Edwardian atmosphere of this book. You marvel at the arrogant stupidity of Mr. Toad, the common sense wisdom of Badger, the leisurely life of Rat, the deep feelings of Mole, and the
meanness of the stoats and weasels, especially the Chief Weasel who is the cause of so much trouble (I think I've met him somewhere.) I'd really like to know Rat and Mole and Badger and Otter and the Mice children. When I need a refuge from the frenzy of life, I turn to the Willows.

Well, may your journey take you to some imaginary places also. May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne