Nine years later

Last night I had a bit of nostalgia while sitting at the Willow Creek Theater, catching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the second time with the family. It suddenly hit me that it was nine years ago on Thanksgiving that I went with my family to first see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. How life runs in circles!

Nine years ago I was a sophomore in high school. Holy crap. A lot has changed. I started writing after seeing the movie. I'd never written before... I mean outside of school-work and AOL messenger. That was about it, but thereafter I came to enjoy writing for fun. I don't know how many hundreds, probably thousands, of pages I've written since that day, but in some small part it all comes back to nine years ago.

Life changes, people come and go. I've learned a lot, changed quite a bit, and I've grown up with Harry alongside. It's a strange, perhaps dorky, thing that it has had such a profound influence on the last nearly decade of my life, but then again I look at what others hang on to and I wonder if maybe it isn't so preposterous after all.

I'm working on setting up an independent study this spring on common narratives in contemporary preaching with Harry Potter as its focus. My initial course title idea is "Preaching Harry Potter: HP as preeminent sermon symbol". Here's the gist of it: we don't have shared narratives these days in the same way that my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did. We don't work the same kinds of jobs (agriculture, farming, mining, stocks, whatever). These days our jobs, families, and private lives are as diverse as could be. And so we don't know each other anymore; we don't share things, and we especially don't share common stories.

So, this makes preaching difficult. With few common lived narratives, there are precious few things that everyone can relate to. Preachers are forced to use either church-y symbols that don't have any meaning to people for the rest of the week, symbols that they themselves find meaningful (which will connect with only a small proportion of the congregation), or stories from the news and symbols in popular culture.

But our news stories are so diversified and polarized along politic lines that outside of massive events like September 11 we don't share the same news. And even when we do, our opinions cloud the way we relate to any shared national or local, political narrative. A preacher who uses primarily the news as example will undoubtedly alienate.

So what are we left with?

Well, I think there are only a few things we still share communally. Sports is one. Even if you don't follow football or baseball it remains a shared, local narrative that is meaningful to a group of people. Yet, I don't think sports are quite universal; the divides here are more along gender lines than anything else. There are plenty of women who enjoy football and men who enjoy swimming or gymnastics, but when you talk about one or the other you are inevitably bringing up inherent divisions.

So, the only thing I can think of that bridges all these gaps is a story, one so powerful and persistent that it speaks both to young and old, white and black, male and female. It is the story of our lives, even if we think it is only the story of a young wizard boy. I get a little agitated, I must admit, when I see young people dressed up like witches and wizards for midnight showings and book releases, because the point of HP is not to try to leave this world for a better one in which you can cast spells. No, the point is that you are already Harry, you are already Hermione, you are Ron or Luna or Snape or Malfoy or Dobby, and you are going to go through the same things they do. Magic is incidental to the narrative that we all share. That is the power that nine years later I still feel. It is the reason I want to share a story. This story is big enough to mean something. It's big enough to be preached, because it points inevitably back to what is true and good in this world. The gospel of Harry Potter is that we are Harry, saved before we could do a thing about it. That is a symbol we can all hold to.