Harry Potter and depths of understanding

It happened again. Another confirmation student, chilling in my office before class, pointed out Harry Potter on my shelf and said, "You're not supposed to have that in church." Barraged as I was by a dozen early teens taking up every corner of my office as they do on Wednesday afternoons before choir, I ignored the comment until later. That's when I wanted to start throwing chairs, because... well... who still thinks that?

Plenty of people, I guess. Plenty of people think Harry Potter is a manifesto on witchcraft and plenty of people think Christianity is about rules that keep us from having fun, and plenty of people think that our political leaders are good if they wear a certain party badge or bad if they don't. Plenty of people think like this. We like to talk about black-and-white thinking--and that is part of it--but it's more than that. This isn't just understanding that there is grey area; it is realizing there is depth--legitimate, awesome depth--behind so many things that we talk about in the church and in the world. We do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we only scratch the surface of a subject before making up our opinions.



Last Sunday, I was charged with creating a giant maze in our youth room so that, in pairs of two with one blind and the other seeing, our youth would test their abilities at directing and listening. One was the caller and the other the runner through, over and under the various levels of the maze. Of course I created an epic maze, because that's what I do. I used around fifty folding chairs, five folding tables, a Foosball and pool table, a slide, several spinny chairs and other assorted obstacles. I would bet that, even if you had your eyesight, it would take almost a minute to complete. Yet, when I let in one of our teams the 9th grade boy who was in charge of calling out directions looked at the course for no more than 10 seconds. That was it. He knew what he was doing.

This is how too many people make decisions. When it came to the hard parts of the course he didn't know what to do because his simple glance at the obstacles was not enough. He thought he saw the whole picture--and indeed he could have given a fairly accurate sketch even in just a 10-second look--but it was the details that got him.

Whether it's a book like Harry Potter, leading one another through a maze, or pondering our faith and what it means for us, we are tempted to only scratch the surface. We're scared to do otherwise. Accepting that the witches and wizards of  the Harry Potter universe do not, on their own, make the morals reprehensible means that there are other things in life with what may appear to us to be unattractive packaging that might nonetheless contain within them a golden egg. That's scary, because it means that things that appear ugly to our eyes may, in fact, be good. It's scary, because it means that people who are different from us may in fact be as good--or better--people than we are. That's frightening.

But you know what's more frightening? A world where we assume that first blush is all that there is. That's the world of prejudice and hate; it's the world of witch hunts, of anti-science and anti-church fear. It's a world where we sometimes live. Together we need to work toward achieving a deeper depth of understanding in every area of our lives, and we need to teach our young people and old people alike that thinking is preferred to answering immediately and that the deep, though scarier, is more invigorating than the shallows.

Or at least let's agree that Harry Potter is about more than witchcraft.