Reading Harry Potter in Medan

I’ve just picked up the latest Harry Potter novel at a store in Medan and decided that maybe it was Desirae who got me onto what my life was really about and set me on the course I now follow. I was especially fond of her, and I still am, even though I haven’t seen her in years. She was a new kid at the church youth group when I met her, and I was – for lack of a better word – a leader. I don’t think I knew where I was going, and ‘leader’ is a title that ought to be applied to someone who does, although it seems to be applied willy-nilly to any breathing person susceptible enough to be flattered and accept it. I am susceptible to flattery. But back to Desirae. Desi – they all called her that – felt the world more deeply than most of her peers, and she walked the knife’s edge that someone like that always walks. When you dive into the world like this, you also see through it, and it either makes you wise or cynical. It was too early to tell with Desi which side she’d fall to, but the instant I knew her I was pulling for Wisdom. The other interesting thing about Desi at 13 was that she was completely uninterested in books.

I remember it as a Sunday evening, and a small group of us were out at the beach around sunset, just milling around in the enthusiastic manner of high-schoolers, with we leaders trying our best to mingle along. This was in the early days of the Harry Potter craze and I had brought the latest book in the series along with me, on a whim. I thought maybe I could read to them. We eventually found our spot near the pier, spread the beach blankets, and began lolling around. I fancied this as my moment, and reached dramatically into my backpack, saying that they all were very lucky tonight, because I just happened to have with me the latest volume of Harry Potter. Their heads popped up with the vaguely curious expressions that you see on otters when you first visit them at the zoo and they are waiting to see if you are one of those visitors that brings food or not. A sort of ‘this could be good, but we’re prepared to not care, as well’ kind of look. Teenagers are surprisingly conservative, against all appearances.

Desi was a lot of things, but conservative was not one of them. She rolled over onto her stomach with a look of complete disdain as she faced me and said, You’re going to read to us? Thirteen year-old girls can lace a sentence with such disgust that it has the feel of a knife going in. I suspect they know this. One must be strong. Yes, I told her, I’m going to read to you. You don’t have to listen. I opened the book. She rolled her eyes and wandered down the beach. Three pages later, she snuck back and curled at the edge of the blanket, listening. Two weeks later, I found her in the youth room, sitting in a corner while the other kids bounced around. She was two-thirds of the way through the latest Harry Potter, and gaining. Almost overnight she’d become one of those kids that reads with a flashlight under the covers after bedtime. She looked up at me with a sheepish grin and without a word we became friends.

I’m never sure if what I read teaches me about life and truth and faith and evil and good and God – or if it just confirms what I already knew all along. But it’s not about verifying the data, not some equation, where stories = life. It’s something else. The Shins have a line in one of their songs, perhaps sung tongue in cheek, but I like it plain:

Of course I was raised to gather courage from those lofty tales so tried and true / If you’re able, I suggest it ‘cuz this modern thought can get the best of you.

Gather courage. I hope if Desi got anything from all the things we talked about while I knew her, it was that: Read, and gather courage.

One night in October a few years after the summer we became friends, she and I were on another beach with more or less the same group as before. I’d stopped working with the youth group by then and was studying to become a teacher. Some of the kids still kept in touch, though, and these few had come out to visit me and go for a night walk along the beach. In the teacher education program they asked us to write down why we wanted to be teachers. I think I wrote something about how I wanted to teach kids to learn from stories. That was my idealistic fervor; standing in a public school classroom months later I would learn how hard that is to actually do. But at the time I was thinking of Desi. She was one of those kids who, as a student in school, would be unspectacular, complacent, bored – maybe even problematic. But as a student of life, she was eager for anything she could get. We were looking at the city lit up across the bay from our beach, and out of the blue she said, It’s amazing how it’s so busy and noisy over there, but from here it looks quiet and peaceful. I suppose if we were in a story, she would have been talking about herself, because next she started talking about not being able to believe inside, even though outside she was doing all the ‘right’ things.

I go to church, she said. I lift up my hands in the songs, I sing everything so much, I’m just trying to give it all to God, but after it’s just nothing. And I can’t read the Bible. It’s too hard. I like Harry Potter better. I guess that’s bad. She looked down and kicked the ground like she was waiting for me to agree with her. But I didn’t. I still don’t.

***

I’ve already finished the latest Harry Potter story. Like a kid, I hardly even waited until I’d gotten it home from the store. I started into it that night and was finished two days later. It only took so long because they were working days. When I finished the last page and closed it I felt the sweet-sad feeling I always have at the end of a good book, like I’d lived a whole life and now, leaving, I would miss it. I won’t give up the plot, but I’ll tell you what I love about Harry Potter: I love that it’s not really about magic. The magic in the stories at its most innocent is for repairing broken teacups and at its worst for the blackest murder. We’ve done as much ourselves with superglue and high-powered sniper rifles. It’s neat, or fascinating, or horrible, but it only boils down to power and then begs the question: so what will you do with it? This is the question on which the whole story of Harry Potter turns: So maybe he’s the greatest wizard of his age, but what will he do? It’s the same question for the rest of us. Here we are, with our varying degrees of power and influence. So what will we do?

That night on the beach looking out at the quiet, buzzing city, I told Desi that it was alright to close her Bible for awhile and keep reading Harry Potter. I told her to pay attention to Dumbledore, the old Hogwarts Headmaster. I told her to see the twinkle in his eye, the way he insists on giving people second chances, the way he keeps saying that those obsessed with power don’t understand that it cannot stand against love. And now, Desi, if you were here at the end of this book with me, I’d tell you to see that Dumbledore believes in forgiveness and grace and love with his whole life. One day you will pick up that Bible again and discover that what you loved so much about Harry Potter was also in that other heavy black book all along: Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends. Love conquers Evil, and if it doesn’t, nothing else will.

***

I don’t know exactly what love is. It’s probably a lot of things, but the best I can come up with is that it is an Influence. It stands behind whispering while we face decisions. Dumbledore tells Harry that his mother had the chance to run and save herself but Love made her stay between Voldemort and her son, so that she died and her baby became The Boy Who Lived. The most noble of our stories are about this – the ones who die for those they love. The most anguished of our stories tell the dark side of this – how we betray the ones we love. And the best of our stories tell us that we have the capacity for both acts, and life is balanced on our choice. Love is the thing that leads us, choice by choice, always turning us away from ourselves until at last we are really living. Whoever wants to find his life, must lose it, must give it up. This is what love whispers, usually with no explanation, because it is a truth best left to stories and the ones that believe them enough. There, in the stories, you can see love working and know it’s true, without knowing how, or how you know. But the story bolsters your belief and you gather courage to return again to your own life and in your small way choose to love. There is a shift in the pattern of the world. People, like the otters in the zoo, lift their heads. Something new has happened.

***

After three years as a relief worker I’m about to step back on to that path I started on when I wrote with naïve enthusiasm that I wanted to teach kids to learn from stories. I needed three years in this desert to learn what I meant by that. I came here wanting to be a hero, really, and on the surface I’ve succeeded. People are impressed. I’m an international relief worker, going to some of the hardest places in the world, doing the most noble of things, giving up my comfortable life to help people. It’s an exciting story, but it doesn’t make me a hero. True heroes are not made by the glamour or glory of their surroundings. They are not made by wars, or disasters, or deserts, or mountains, or perils, or storms, or fire. They are made by choosing selflessness over self. They are made by their insistence on love. Three years of aid work have not given me any more compassion for the people than I had when I left the shores of Canada. What they have done is force me to see that I must choose, and I must choose every day: Will I do this thing the way that gratifies me or the way that insists that I die a little so that someone else can live a little more? And three years later I can barely get out the door of the house on the right side of this choice, let alone doing it in the face of the world of pain and loss that I see around me. But I also know who I am. Someone has loved me and died, and I am Harry Potter, I am The Boy Who Lived. So now: What will I do?

I’m going back to university. I’m going back to pass once again through the veil of academia and so please the powers that be that I am one who is qualified to teach the nature of life to the ones who follow. What they won’t know is that my qualification began years ago with a 13 year old girl on a Vancouver beach and continued through three years in hard, desperate places. They tell you at university that the most important thing is to find your question. Now, reading Harry Potter in Medan, I have my question, and despite what scholarly dressings they hang on me, it will remain the soul of my qualification to teach. Here are the stories, here is what we are. So now - gather courage - what will we do?