Teaching Faith with Harry Potter: A Guidebook for Parents and Educators for Multigenerational Faith Formation
208
Teaching Faith with Harry Potter: A Guidebook for Parents and Educators for Multigenerational Faith Formation
208eBook
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Overview
Joanne Rowling’s great epic is forming the faith and moral vision of millions of people. If you are reading this book, forming faith is at least part or maybe all of your vocation, as teacher, pastor, parent, godparent, roommate, sibling, spouse, or friend. In baptism we vow to form our faith and the faith of others. To not use this modern epic in your sacred work is to leave on the table one of the most ubiquitous and enchanting tools of our time to awaken and baptize the imagination. Don’t put this wand away.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819233561 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 891 KB |
About the Author
Patricia Lyons serves as Missioner for Evangelism and Community Engagement for the Diocese of Washington. She is a member of the presiding bishop's cabinet on evangelism and the working group for the "Way of Love" curricular and support resources. An honors graduate from Harvard College in the Comparative Study of Religion, she holds a Master of Divinity degree from the Harvard Divinity School, and received her doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary, where she teaches theology and evangelism. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Teaching Faith with Harry Potter
A Guidebook for Parents and Educators for Multigenerational Faith Formation
By Patricia M. Lyons
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Patricia M. LyonsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3356-1
CHAPTER 1
From Rags to Snitches
The Resurrection of J. K. Rowling
She looked ordinary enough to be a mere Muggle, but as the woman moved respectfully but steadily closer to me in the church activities hall, I realized I was wrong. "I came to your lecture tonight to ask you one question. I could ask it now or at the end," she said softly. Her smile was so warm I could feel it. She clutched a purse knitted by hand, her moccasins dated from the 1980s, and she didn't seem to waste any time in her day on brushing her hair. She looked a lot like my image of Molly Weasley.
The church hall was festive for the lecture that night, titled "Harry Potter in Lent." Church volunteers had set up four long tables for their potluck dinner, each with a Hogwarts House banner above it, and the tables were piled high with British-themed desserts. An eagle picture hung on the podium set up for me to give my lecture on theological themes in Harry Potter. I had brought dozens of handmade Chocolate Frogs with Wizard Cards I'd made with faces from the church community directory. At the entrance to the hall, I placed my Hedwig puppet in an antique birdcage I had found online. The birdcage sat on top of a trunk with Hogwarts stickers on it, under a large sign in the hallway for King's Cross Station and a smaller sign for Platform 9M. The church hall was lit by strings of electric candles hanging from the ceiling.
I usually bring decorations to any public lecture on Christian themes in Harry Potter. But this particular church had its own passionate Harry Potter fandom, a group including all ages from young children to retired seniors. They had worked for hours before the lecture to turn their activities hall into the Great Hall, and many had brought their own Harry Potter memorabilia to add to the decorations. As is often the case, individuals who were previously inactive or mostly unseen members of the church had volunteered to help out with the Harry Potter lecture. Nearly every volunteer was wearing something that looked like old Hogwarts-themed Halloween costumes: House ties or scarves, Quidditch robes, and more than one pair of eyeglasses held together with tape. But these Potter fan volunteers had to be shown where the bathrooms, lights, or outlets could be found in the church. Harry Potter — themed events at church have a way of not only bringing new people into the church but also reinviting and reconnecting inactive members, often with their (young or adult) children in tow.
But back to the woman. She had approached me in a way that was both shy and bold. Her eyes were twinkling. I told her I would be happy to try to answer her question before the event started. The lecture was being recorded, and unknown to me, the recording had already started. So I have her words in digital form, though I can't imagine forgetting them. She took a deep breath and then said these words: "I don't go to this church — or any church, really — but my neighbor does. I saw the flyer about tonight from her church bulletin that was hanging on her refrigerator." Her crouching posture and nervous rocking back and forth told me she was somewhat apologetic about not being a churchgoer, but not much. She continued:
I am a total Harry Potter fan. I'm not a church fan. But I came here tonight hoping that you can explain to me why you think these books have changed my life. I know they did. I'm just not sure how, because I've read a lot of books in my life and not been so moved and changed by them. I've been a reader since I was four, and I'm seventy-one years old — my birthday was just last month. But very few things have ever moved me the way Harry Potter has moved me. I'll tell you this: these stories are too real to not be real. I don't believe in magic, but I'm here tonight to try to figure out what is different about these stories and why I'm different because I read them. So, that's my question before you even start talking: why does this story change people?
There is a holiness about her words that has stayed with me as I speak to groups small and large, whether they be youth groups, adult retreats, clergy conferences, teacher conferences, secular parenting groups, book clubs, leadership seminars, or Harry Potter Bible studies. No matter where I go, I remember this woman's conviction and her question: "These stories are too real to not be real" and "why does this story change people?"
The woman's words resonate strongly with me because for years of teaching Christianity, I have often said the words "the resurrection is too real to not be real." So I recognized what the woman was trying to say about ideas that seem too good to be true and yet also so powerful in our lives that they can't be fiction. Keep in mind Harry's question to Dumble-dore about the very nature of magic, life, and death in their final intimate exchange at King's Cross Station.
"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
"Of course it's happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
Often we are drawn to accept certain ideas or narratives into our definition of reality, not as propositions or arguments, but rather as explanations for our lived experiences. Of all the ideas, claims, and parables in the Bible that are hard to understand or even to accept, the resurrection is an event and an experience that makes sense to me and my lived experience. I see its presence and power in my daily life — in seasons, in relationships, in joy, and in suffering. I have simply never experienced a death of any kind that did not unfold in some form of resurrection — of new life, new identity, or new freedom. Resurrection is not the erasing of pain or grief, but rather a birth through pain and grief, pointing and powering toward new life. Resurrection is too real not to be real. And the specific account of the resurrection of Jesus strikes me as sharing the shape of my own experiences of death and resurrection in the human condition. The Gospels never introduced to me the reality of life after death. Rather, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus affirmed and confirmed my own experience of liberation — in body and spirit — in all the areas of my life where I have accepted and passed through the limits, the losses, and the death inherent in human life and creation. When I have dared to embrace the promise of abundant life in Christ through many kinds of suffering and death in human experience, I have found every tomb empty, powerless over joy, and flooded with resurrection light. Resurrection is real to me because resurrection has happened to me. For me, the Gospels are not didactic as much as they are diagnostic. I do not believe I am unique in holding this conviction. I believe that at the core of every human person is both the hope and the expectation that we can and even will overcome death in all its forms. Grief is itself the evidence that death is a scandal to our imagination and our rational mind.
The reason the Harry Potter series is so powerful for teaching faith is that it is a story about resurrection, from the first page to the last word of the epilogue. And in this way, the epic corresponds to the deepest longings and dreams of any person. The stories do more than engage us with a story about the life, death, and resurrection of any one character. They brilliantly portray countless examples of folks living familiar and relatable versions of daily life, though living in a world infused with both the natural and the supernatural. Rowling has intentionally written an epic in which there are sufferings, deaths, and explicit resurrections in the lives of many characters, and the result is that the truths in her books correspond and call to the truths in our own experience. In lectures and teaching, I have learned from many a Harry Potter reader that often a voice in their head whispers things like "Me too" when they read Rowling's masterpiece.
It's crucial to consider that Rowling's epic is not just about the possible resurrection of Harry Potter after receiving a death curse from Volde-mort in the Forbidden Forest at the end of the series. I want to be clear about this from the outset of this book: I do not believe Harry Potter ever died in the seven books, nor do I believe he was actually resurrected from the dead, as some have interpreted from the stories and specifically when Voldemort strikes him with the killing curse in the forest. These seven books are a resurrection story, but I do not believe they are a resurrection story about Harry Potter. If this were the case, then this epic is only a resurrection story about Harry, and that would not, in my opinion, explain the global appeal of these books and the millions of readers who say that the books affected them in unique and transformative ways. Such a narrow understanding of where and how resurrection happens in this narrative simply does not explain how these books are changing people's lives.
Hidden in the Snitch
I believe these books change people's lives because the resurrection at the core of this story is the real and lived resurrection of Joanne Rowling. Her story of resurrection in her lived experience is not fiction. It is the story and reality of her life. I have witnessed what happens to people when they experience the truth and grace in her life story, told through the narrative of Harry Potter.
The fact that these books tell the story of J. K. Rowling as much as the story of Harry Potter was not my first impression. The story was so compelling and engaging that I thought little of the author on my first viewing of the films or reading the series. I'd seen all the movies and read all the books more than once before I did any serious consideration of the life story and the spiritual journey of Joanne Rowling. But once I had sifted through documentaries and the awkward interviews (and gotten used to Rowling's disconnection from, leaning toward disdain for, the press), it became clear to me that her actual life is woven into every chapter of the fictional books, the stories reflecting the dark depressions and miraculous resurrections she experienced as a child and young adult. And so powerful were those experiences and transformations in her life — coming from darkness to light in learning to deal with her depression, learning to deal with her independence as well as her need for other people, meeting with both success and failure — that the grace-full cycles of breaking, healing, and resurrecting in her life can be experienced by the reader. Her real resurrections — incarnate in Harry, Neville, Dobby, or Snape — arrest us because they remind us of our deep hope for our own. We love Harry Potter, not because Rowling wrote a great story, but because Rowling wrote our story with the ending we have longed for in our lives. How did I answer the question of the Molly Weasley — looking woman in the church hall? "When we read the truth, the truth will set us free."
It is predictable in our consumerist culture that many people simply admire the life of J. K. Rowling, calling hers a "rags to riches" story. But the story that is most remarkable about J. K. Rowling is not the financial success, not going from being on public assistance and living in public housing to becoming one of the wealthiest women in Britain and the world, though thanks to Oprah and Time magazine, that's the story many people know. The story I'm talking about is her personal experience of loss, failure, depression, and hopelessness, which did not destroy hope or creativity but allowed, perhaps forced, her to die to many things and find new life in writing the story of Harry James Potter. In a speech to Harvard graduates, Rowling put it this way:
I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my [college] graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
For most of us, our greatest fear as human beings is death or one of the countless forms of death in our daily lives. Even Freud, haunted and left undone by his own thoughts of death, who wrote so many volumes to explain (and blame) all the fears in life that fashion human beings, spoke of the "painful riddle of death." But Rowling makes peace with death in a way that Freud never did, "because [her] greatest fear had been realized, and [she] was still alive." In more than one way, Joanne died. And yet she found that life was not a casualty of death. This resurrection transformed "rock bottom" into the solid foundation on which she "rebuilt [her] life." Tens of millions of readers have been inspired to seek similar transformations in their lives because J. K. Rowling left her tomb with a typewriter.
Defeating Dementors
I'll talk more about dementors in chapter 4, but a dementor is precisely the kind of character that is created by a person who has wrestled with real demons in her life. Who has not encountered something like a dementor at some point in life? I have lost count of the number of people — from children to adults in their eighties — who raise their hands in lectures or book groups to testify about their struggles against what they call the dementors in their lives.
One of my techniques to help group members flesh out these impressions is to have them each write down a list of their personal dementors — those things that suck the joy and every happy memory out of them — and make word clouds to project on the wall of the meeting space. Words leap out of the collections of daily dementors: cancer, divorce, insecurity, loneliness, depression, failure. One of my favorite ways to use these dementor word clouds is to collect them from different groups of people and show them to new groups, asking, "How old do you think the people are who made this dementor word cloud?" Folks are often shocked when I tell them that clouds speaking of cancer, terrorism, and financial insecurities are from eighth graders. Equally shocking to groups is when I read a list of dementors containing insecurity, popularity, and awkwardness and inform them that it's from a senior citizens' book group.
In years of talking to Harry Potter fans, I have never had a person say they haven't faced dementors. Not one. Varied are the ways we suffer as human beings, but Rowling's brilliance is inventing a potent and palpable creature that readers recognize and immediately associate with their suffering and struggle with death. Rowling's foul hooded joy-suckers put a particular face on our universal foes. "There is a whole burgeoning field of religion and popular culture ... looking at these stories as a reflection of the spiritual or religious sensibilities of the culture," says Russell W. Dal-ton, an assistant professor of Christian education at Brite Divinity School in Texas and the author of Faith Journey through Fantasy Lands: A Christian Dialogue with Harry Potter, Star Wars, and the Lord of the Rings. Dal-ton goes on, "When stories become as popular as the Harry Potter stories, they no longer simply reflect the religious views of the author, but become artifacts of the culture, and they say something about the culture that has embraced them." "Reading Harry Potter is like reading the diary I never kept for myself," one senior citizen in Pennsylvania told me. A young adult said to me in a Bible study, "Harry Potter books are the soundtrack of reality." In many ways, the series stands before each reader as a Mirror of Erised; in Rowling's personal and resurrection-focused narrative, we see our own longings for a resurrected life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching Faith with Harry Potter by Patricia M. Lyons. Copyright © 2017 Patricia M. Lyons. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface The Girl Who Lived
Introduction I Ignored Harry Potter for a Decade
Part One Why Does Harry Potter Work for Teaching Faith?
Chapter 1 From Rags to Snitches: The Resurrection of J.K. Rowling
Chapter 2 The Bible Tells Me So: Teaching Faith with Harry Potter
Chapter 3 Learning is Magic: School is the New Cool
Chapter 4 Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Patronus Charm Works
Chapter 5 Peace by Piece: Wholeness and Holiness in Harry Potter
Part Two How Does Harry Potter Work for Faith Formation?
Chapter 6 Spiritual Parenting: Pride and Prejudice at Malfoy Manor
Chapter 7 Confirmation and Adolescent Faith: Building Dumbledore's Army
Chapter 8 Godparenting: A Sirius Role
Chapter 9 Faith Formation for All Ages: "Of all that is, seen and unseen."
Chapter 10 Social Activism: What Would Dumbledore Do?
Scripture Connections
Index
What People are Saying About This
"In a manner that is personal, playful, and profound, Patricia Lyons provides us with an illuminating lens through which to view the Harry Potter series, particularly as it relates to the formation of the faith and practice of young people. The connections she is able to make between contemporary experience and the Christian life are remarkable, all the while inviting us to approach the education and development of young people with fresh vision and renewed commitment."
––The Rev. Daniel R. Heischman, D.D., Executive Director, National Association of Episcopal Schools
"Patricia Lyons offers readers both young and old a fresh look at how to use the Harry Potter series as a tool for growing their faith. With clear prose and varied topics, she models what it means to use popular culture as a tool to gain a deeper understanding of one's personal beliefs."
––Dr. Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology, Seminary of the Southwest and author of God and Harry Potter at Yale: Teaching Faith and Fantasy Fiction in an Ivy League Classroom
"Harry Potter is one of the great retellings of our Christian story, as Patricia Lyons knows and explains with clarity and power. In Teaching Faith with Harry Potter, Lyons turns on the light for all of us who might need to find our way out of the darkness with the help of the Boy Who Lived."
––Greg Garrett, author of One Fine Potion: The Literary Magic of Harry Potter and My Church Is Not Dying: Episcopalians in the 21st Century
"This is the book I have been waiting for––and the discussion I have been dying to have with others about how to utilize the Christian messages in the Harry Potter stories unapologetically! I cannot wait for other people to read it and for the discussion and community to grow even larger as we tell and re-tell our Christian stories alongside and intertwined with the adventures of Harry Potter. I have known the value of J.K. Rowling's storytelling and theology since I first starting reading these books, and I am so happy to have the academic foundation that Patricia M. Lyons has researched and written with such care and detail. In many ways, Teaching Faith with Harry Potter reminded me of The Celtic Way of Evangelism. Both books argue that the only effective way to truly evangelize is to know our own Christian stories so well that we recognize them when other cultures tell stories of similar life-changing events. Making those connections in the culture around us is essential to helping others to know the truth and love of Jesus Christ."
––The Rev. Amy Haynie, Children's Ministries Coordinator and Associate Clergy at Trinity Church in Fort Worth, Texas is a RevGalPalBlogs and Episcopal Café blogger, as well as an unabashedly Slytherin Episcopal priest
"Patricia Lyons has provided the definitive faith-based commentary on the remarkable phenomenon of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Bringing her personal biography and a remarkable grasp of the literary achievement of Rowling's, she writes illuminatingly about all the key themes of theology from sin to Eucharist. Fittingly for the moment in which we live, we even find that Harry Potter can provide a Christian resource for resistance to President Trump. All in all, an astonishing tour de force––a text to read, study, and use."
––The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D., Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology and Ethics
"'Stunning' is the intentional adjective to use to describe this book. There have been a plethora of Harry books on the market, including those that delineate links with the life of faith, but this one stands above the rest. Lyons has done her homework; she has plumbed the classics of Western Spiritual traditions and carefully discerned allied themes and movements in the Potter series. I highly recommended this book for anyone interested in the spiritual movements of life; Christian Formation practitioners––take note."
––Victoria Garvey, former Canon for Lifelong Formation in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and current faculty for the Forma Christian Formation Certificate programs.