August is a month of birthdays. Both of our sisters named Mary celebrate one, as well as my daughter Mary. My sons Dan and Paul also have birthdays along with a niece, Win Allen, June’s nephew, Bryan MacDonald, my grandniece Denise Bugey and June’s grandson, Paul Berger. But to top that off, if it is at all possible, is the celebration of our marriage, which has reached 24 years on August 15th. They certainly all make August an august month. In March Jottings of 2003 I wrote the following: “ American armed forces are attacking Iraq. The protests are loud and many. The pros and cons of the action fill pages of newsprint and email forwards. The attempt to unravel the reasons for the action leads only to frustration. The most difficult thing for me is to accept is the lack of open provocation– such as the invasion by Iraq of Kuwait in 1991. We have been asked to trust our President’s belief that we are in danger but we are not shown clearly where that exist. It has the ring of Vietnam and its domino theory of preventing the spread of communism. It would be so much easier if we had had a provoking action to show our need to defend. Without it we must fall back on the belief that our President really is acting in our behalf and not some hidden motive. We have noted before that our confidence in our leaders so acting has been misplaced in the past, so it makes doing so now even tougher. So we pray that we are not so disillusioned this time and until proven otherwise we will support our President. Faith in someone is often an unreasonable act but it is also sometimes necessary for sane living.”
Now two years and a few months later I find that it appears we have no proof that we are or were ever in “danger” from Saddam Hussein or Iraq. No “weapons of mass destruction” have been found, and no connection between Iraq and the terrorist organization that destroyed the World Trade Center have been demonstrated. As we said, “until proven otherwise we will support our President”, that proof has come. He has never shown how we had a right to the preemptive striking of the country. He appears more now to employ the concept of “Pax Americana” as the Romans did with their “Pax Romana”, i.e., attack and subdue those who fail to follow the direction we believe they should take. The President often reminds us that he is a Christian, or his image makers do so, but he has never made any attempt to show how his preemptive attack qualifies under Christian practice and belief of a “just war”. Once again “our confidence in our leader” has apparently been misplaced. We only pray that somehow soon we will withdraw and stop the killing of so many American boys.
I read the new Harry Potter book, “Half-Blood Prince”. I think I have read them all but wouldn’t swear to it. I’ll not soon forget however my mentioning reading the first one among some reunion brethren. All good Christians and retreat goers who as part of the VDC experience meet to encourage each other in our Faith walk. One of the members was quite surprised by my statement since he had been advised by his Pastor not to read it. Later in the same week I had a similar comment from the woman cleaning my teeth, i.e., that her church too had forbidden the reading of it. It was quite a revelation to me that such prohibitions were being promulgated in some Protestant denominations. It reminded me of “Index of Forbidden Books” created by Pope Pius the Ninth. He was the same Pope who decided his pronouncements should be considered infallible. Vatican I, that he controlled, was organized to create such a dogma. It finally did agree to the infallibility concept but limited it to matters of ‘faith or morals’. It was a shocker to me a former Catholic to see the doctrine being espoused by some Protestants who had separated partially due to the mandating authority of the magisterium (Teaching part of the church) rather than Scripture. I asked both the objectors if they had disobeyed and read the book. Neither had. I asked if any reason was given for the prohibition and it was vaguely stated to be because of the Evil actions in the book not being met by Christian beliefs to overcome it. My reading would confirm the opposite; it does carry the Christian belief into the winner’s circle. It is that love conquers evil. “…God whether I get anything else done to day, I want to make sure that I spend time loving you and other people because that’s what life is all about.” This is a prayer from the “Purpose Driven Life” by Warren and succinctly set forth what the Christian’s should be seeking. Harry’s journey is to build up his ability to love so he can conquer evil.
The book, and the series referred to as ‘cliffhanger chronicles’, received a full-page review in the NY Times Book Review. In the same magazine there is a section devoted to “Children’s Books”, so Harry’s stories are beyond being just Children’s stories according to these editors. In the review the writer asks, “Is there a book loving child on this planet who isn’t obsessed with Harry Potter?” The first five volumes have sold 207 million copies! The reviewer observes that JK Rowling’s gift is not so much language as for her ‘characterization and plotting’. She makes it easy to believe that the “good” wizard will vanquish the great evildoers.
In another issue of the New York Times in the “Week in Review” session there was a half page essay written by a young lady a college sophomore who tells how she became enamored and eventually overwhelmed with the series. It was entitled “Growing Up With a Dose of Magic” By her name, Kaavya Viswanathan, she appears to be of Indian descent but it is immaterial and never really an issue. She is an American girl going through school who finds Harry Potter’s stories, “…as my favorite through adolescence and into adulthood in a world that doesn’t feel so safe anymore…” She found Harry’s development followed her own. She learned that “life isn’t always fair”, that parents, friends and mentors couldn’t always be a shield, some things you had to experience yourself” In simple words she learned that not everything was perfect and the stories reflected that reality to her. She saw that good did triumph over evil by the acts of an ordinary boy acting in an extraordinary manner. Most of all she learned “the importance of love, friendship, and loyalty” The writer of this opinion essay, by the way, is now a sophomore at Harvard University and will have her own novel published next spring!
The Harry Potter series is often compared to the “Chronicles of Narnia” written by C.S. Lewis. They are considered Christian stories. Why? More to the point is that important to the quality of the stories? Walter Hooper, Lewis’ literary executor and author of a commentary on all of Lewis’ works (“C.S. Lewis: Companion & Guide”) asks these questions. Further he notes, “How have the Bible and Christian theology ‘influenced’ the Narnian books?” He warns, as does Lewis “to talk about ‘influence’” is dangerous for readers who are under the mistaken notion that if you have found a biblical or literary ‘influence’ behind a work there is no more to be said about it”. Likewise if you don’t find such ‘influence’ you dismiss it as not ‘worthy’, as some apparently have done. Hooper goes on to point out that Lewis objects to regarding “influences” in a literary work and in particular of fiction. [He was a teacher of Literature at Oxford and Cambridge.] By definition fiction is ‘an imaginative creation or pretense that does not represent actuality, but what has been invented” (The American Heritage Dictionary). So reading it to ascertain its “influences” is turning it into ‘non-fiction” where an analysis of where this writer is coming from or such, his influences, is a reasonable approach. Now unfortunately some fiction writers, such as Brown in the “Da Vinci” code advertise their fiction as fact, history, and other non-fiction attributes. The facts asserted in that book are not as they occurred and it is truly fiction throughout.
So looking at the Potter series and deciding to read it or not based on its ‘influences’ is really treating it as non-fiction. The written work of fiction is a work of art, a new creation. C. S. Lewis quotes a Wordsworth poem “The Table Turned” to show how our intellect can destroy a work of art. It reads, “Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things: We murder to dissect” (Italic added)
The bottom line is read fiction to enjoy the imagination and ‘characterization’ the writer creates, not as something else.
The columnist George F. Will is not one of my favorites. We might say this is due to the conservative “influences” in his essays. However recently he had me agreeing with him and smiling at his illustrations. He was writing from the National Constitution Center located in Philadelphia at the other end of the mall from Independence Hall where the Constitution was drafted. He writes, “Throughout, the center illustrates what (then) Professor Felix Frankfurter was tying to express more than 70 years ago when he said, ‘If the Thames is ‘liquid history’ the Constitution of United States is most significantly not a document but a stream of history’ But it is first and always a document that is to be understood, as John Marshall said… ‘chiefly from its words’” Will then creates history as he believes would be written by contemporary liberals with respect to the confirmation of John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The Articles of Confederation, ratified near the end of the Revolutionary War to Defend Abortion Rights, proved unsatisfactory, so in the summer of 1787, 55 framers gathered here to draft a Constitution. Even though this city was sweltering, the framers kept the windows of Independence Hall closed. Some say that was to keep out the horseflies. Actually, it was to preserve secrecy conducive to calm deliberation about how to craft a more perfect abortion right….” He likewise reminds conservatives of the fact that the Constitution was written to correct the defects of the Articles of Confederation, namely to strengthen the federal government. As Wordsworth noted “our meddling intellect” can even read things into a document! Pax Tecum!