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Not having time to read what one would really like to read is the bane of a student’s life. Being compelled to read things that one would not otherwise find very interesting does not help much either. I continue to write a postgraduate thesis and therefore don’t get to read much of what I would like to. I am working my way (slowly) through Bishop Spong’s autobiography “Here I Stand” at the moment. More on that perhaps another time. One book, or really series of books, that I have not read, but intend to, is Harry Potter. However, I have now seen the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and enjoyed it very much - as did the whole family. Our youngest child watched it seven times during the three day period we had it on rental! I just happened to have seen the Harry Potter film during the course of the same week I received a catalogue from a Christian bookseller and was amazed by the parade of prominent (American) Christian leaders who had bothered to actually write books condemning the whole Harry Potter phenomena as a “pagan” attempt to win the minds of children and direct them into a “non-Christian belief system.” This reminded me of some talk back radio I had heard and some television current affairs reports on the Harry Potter phenomena that generated a similar response from the leaders of some Christian Churches in Australia. All of that probably lay in the background somewhere to a question one child (holding a half read Harry Potter book under his arm) asked me recently in a grade six RE class – “Is Harry Potter evil?” How sad. I don’t believe Harry Potter is evil at all but I do think it is wrong to deny children the enjoyment of an imagination and to forbid their engagement with stories (fairy tales, myths, fables, and the like) which entertain and delight and engage on several levels, even if some of those levels are not “real.” What is really quite bizarre indeed is to seek to denounce this from a religious perspective – and then ask children to believe in a God they cannot see or hear or touch, and in stories from a Bible that often sound very much like the forbidden stories about magic, witches, wizards, fairies, and the like. Adults can make this distinction and wrestle with the issues theologically if they really want to – I think it is unfair for adults to force children to. Returning to Harry Potter, I wonder just how many of the Christian voices raised against the books and / or film have actually read or seen it. The high point in the story, and its very moral or message, comes in the closing scenes where Harry is told that the power which overcomes evil is no magic that he possesses or can conjure up, but in fact a power completely beyond him and external to him - the power of self sacrificial love, a power that is stronger than death itself. “It’s love, Harry, love” that is the greatest power in the universe and which ultimately overcomes evil. Unless I am myself now “be-witched” by Harry Potter and lie under his “pagan” and anti-Christian spell, this seems to have quite a bit in common with the Gospel of Jesus Christ! |