CHILDHOOD AND HARRY POTTER

CHILDHOOD AND HARRY POTTER

The Limpid Years

In his old age, the English composer, Sir Edward Elgar, looked back to his childhood and wrote up some of the musical sketches that he had jotted down at that time. He called his new work “The Wand of Youth”, a sad and nostalgic piece, the opus of a man for whom childhood was “long ago and far away,” a time of innocence, a better time. We’ve all been there. And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine persist in the ninety ! In welcoming children (“let the children come to me”) and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood; and his warnings about scandalising the little ones included protecting that beautiful child within us from being reduced to an ugly urchin. The controversy over adult vs. infant baptism was resolved in advance by Jesus’ word to the old night visitor, Nicodemus, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms !

Sir Edward Elgar was near to what Jesus meant when he saw childhood as a time of innocence and wonder; that some of the things that adults take for granted are, when seen through children’s eyes, signs and illustrations of the creative love of God: “All things bright and beautiful......the good Lord made them all.” Their sense of wonder sees life as something new, a gift untainted by sin and familiarity. The Christian mystic, Thomas Trahern, described this marvellously by picturing a newly born child reflecting in wonderment on its entry into this world. Children easily have a sense of God and his presence in the world that adults too easily lose. In each one’s own way, the little ones reproduce the stories of obedience to God’s call. For example, the story of the boy Samuel. “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.” That story shows us how the open wonderment of childhood needs the experience of age to interpret the marvellous and unexpected. Samuel heard the word of God, but only knew it for what it was after Eli explained what he must do if he heard it again. Children have the capacity for great faith and forgiveness. Many thousands of people, including children, died in the concentration camp in Ravensbrook during World War II. Near to the body of a child a prayer was found. “O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill-will; but do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have borne, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”

Teaching Adults

Not all children display such virtues, and it’s easy to sentimentalise them.

 But at the very least, young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red ?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now ?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head ?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying ? Where’s her mummy and daddy ?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying ?”

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, unless it be those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

The Period of Childhood

Yet life is more than pain and puzzlement. Besides telling them to be like little children, Jesus told his followers (his “little ones”) that God was their Father, the most reliable and loving of all fathers, and that “all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.” According to Thomas Aquinas, the child is “potentially a person”, with the capacity through appropriate formation to grow in wisdom and virtue. The characteristic of being human is the ability to find meaning through myths and belief systems by which sense is made of the world. The Christian tradition provides what is of value, giving meaning to childhood and family. For example, children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable to being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. Childhood’s meaning in society is represented in rituals, namely, “bar mitzvah”, cubs and scouts/guides with their distinctive roles and practices. Through these transitional rituals a society guarantees the integrity of this period called childhood.

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper of them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. In today’s terms, they will do a Harry Potter.

Producing their Potter

The Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling are a big hit with the youth of today, and the movie based on the first novel, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” is the sensation of today. Harry and schoolmates want to escape from the straitjacket of adult discipline and religious conformity. They want their own way to freedom, which includes making use of sorcery and magical animals, which in turn is why certain religious interests have condemned the books. Actually Harry and friends want to save the world, even if they whiptail it upside down. At the denouement Harry has to cross wands with the sinister Lord Voldemort, an arch-wizard bent on global thraldom. It is essentially youthful joie de vivre against the controlling mind of the overbearing adult, white magic against black, good against evil  -  and guess who wins at the end and how.

Heroes without Power

Children have an entirely healthy desire to turn the world around. and this desire is an echo of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, the young Harry Potter rejects totally all worldly power and success -  yet another echo of Jesus’ option to join the sinners in the Jordan, followed by his rejection of religious and political power in the desert, and finally his refusal to use force at Gethsamane. Jesus himself said that his kingdom was not of this world, but the children would be at home in it. Every child not only wants to turn the world upside down, but to save it; and that is why children identify with Harry, with Robin Hood, with Huck Finn in his saving of the slave, Jim, and with George Lucas’ creation, Luke Skywalker. The final scene of the first of the Star War movies gives us an insight to every boy’s desire for recognition as hero and saviour.

Imaginative Redemption

 Somehow for Christian education to touch the boy/girl at the deepest level, our practical theology must place Jesus in that heroic context, offering a meaningful non-soppy heroism to children today, connected to the cosmic milieu in which their minds now operate. The George Lucas stories, the Narnia books, the Potter novels, and the “Lord of the Rings” all vivify the desire of children to live in a world that they can master and mould, escaping from one they patently can’t. That so many also want to escape from Christianity also is a problem that deserves the most careful thought. For instance, they have no time for those whose Christianity is merely nostalgia for a buttoned-up past, or for a Christianity that is largely the intellectual empire of those governed by fear of the present or future, or fear of youthful freedom. The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them. It’s no fault of theirs if they are not, or the Harry Potter storywriter’s; it’s ours.