The Gospel According to JK Rowling
For over half of my life I have carried on a passionate and sordid love affair with Harry Potter. It began quite simply when he was eleven and I was nine. He was a scrawny orphan boy with a lightning-bolt scar and coke-bottle glasses and I was a not-so-scrawny fourth-grader with a wild, dark imagination that kept me chronically out of step with my peers. I was two years younger than the oldest student in my class because of a skipped year of kindergarten so I was always one of the smallest, but one of the smartest. In short, I was alienated on a number of different levels. To make matters worse, I loved to read. Preferred it even to recess. I would get in trouble and not care because I could have a book as I sat on the either scorching hot or freezing cold sidewalk. My teachers soon caught on and started taking my books away.
My mother introduced me to Harry, though in retrospect I don’t believe she fully understood the literate, Anglophillic monster she was creating. She had returned from a weekend at a conference bearing gifts of free stationary, candy, and bookmarks. In her hands she also bore my future- a relatively small paperback novel illustrated with a bright and whimsical cover. It took me a couple of months to clear my busy reading schedule, but I devoured the book quickly only to turn around and read it again. Christmas brought me the third book but not the second, and it killed me to have an oblong piece of the sun and a bumpy piece of ground, but no piece of sky to fit between them to bring the puzzle together. I read the first book again and again until my hunt for the elusive Chamber of Secrets was successful and I was finally able to read of Harry’s hunt for the elusive Chamber of Secrets.
I remember waiting for the fourth book to be released, then eventually going to buy my copy from a Wal-Mart that still exists in the evolved form of an Ace Hardware Store. The copy cost $24.95, and was the first one to Disapparate from the small cardboard display by the door. I read it all the way home, then re-read all four.
In the following period of time lies the alleged ‘Harry Potter Bible’ incident. I may have enacted a cunning plan- worthy of the most slippery Slytherin- to sneak one of the books to church. I took my Precious Moments bible out of its case and replaced it with the Goblet of Fire. It was all rather harmless until my Sunday School teacher discovered that instead of crying because of the power of God’s word, I was crying because of the rather untimely death of Cedric Diggory. The pastor may have been informed of the indiscretion on my part, and there may have been a whole sermon devoted to the blasphemous nature of witches and wizards. Specifically, those mentioned in Harry Potter. Instead of listening, I was more than likely reading my bible- the passage where Sirius Black spaketh to Harry through the flames to warn him of approaching evil. The word of the Lord Voldemort. Amen.
This happened just as Harry Potter was taking root in popular culture. People were protesting it, burning it, banning it, and claiming that J.K. Rowling was trying to corrupt America’s children to the ways of Satan. Never mind the children of Britain, who had been reading these books for quite a while and coming out unscathed. Our children needed to be shielded from such filth. I lost a best friend because of what her mother said about me and about the evils of Harry Potter. It hurt at the time, but then I learned that her mother was a professional party clown and I felt a little bit better about myself. In the lengthy wait between the fourth and fifth books I distracted myself with Anne Rice, which my mother didn’t approve of but didn’t stop me from reading. My mother would have let me read anything, simply because she was just happy I was reading. By this time she was no longer a teacher but the high school librarian, and since people rarely checked out books and read them, the content of the books were rarely questioned. Since my graduation she has added works by Anne Rice and Stephen King to the library with no restrictions and no protest, both of which would have fallen on deaf ears. She holds more seniority at the school than the principal and the superintendent combined with plenty of years to spare.
In the eyes of the church I had been successfully corrupted, but in my eyes I was just growing up. I was questioning authority and questioning my religious upbringing. I had branched out to new ways of looking at the world and what I had been taught didn’t mesh with the way my mind was beginning to work. By the time the sixth and seventh books came out in relatively quick succession I had read the first four Harry Potter books so many times the bindings had cracked and fallen apart. I grew up in two worlds simultaneously, two worlds struggling with the same questions of morality, love, fate, and friendship. There were times when it seemed like my life was falling apart and I wouldn’t be able to handle the hurt, but what I was facing paled in comparison to the murder of Harry’s parents, three-headed dogs, Dementors, or Dark Lords. Harry Potter has become such an significant part of my life that I can’t separate myself from the story- I can’t clearly remember a time before I met Harry, and I don’t foresee a time where he won’t mean something to me. Our lives are so thoroughly intertwined that I’m not sure where I start and the story begins.
I do acknowledge the fact that I have an obsessive personality, but just taking a look at popular culture shows the extent that Harry Potter has shaped the world. For the first time in a long time a book series united a group of people against censorship- religious or otherwise. Because of the hoopla raised over Rowling’s work, I made it my mission to read as many banned books as possible, and I’ve come to realize that a book isn’t worth reading unless it has been banned by someone. Being inflammatory simply means you’re pushing all the right buttons in a person.
J.K. Rowling did little to acknowledge those banning her works, but has done so much to acknowledge her fans. She gave us a magical, heartbroken, and triumphant mirror in which to examine our own lives. She gave us good guys, bad guys, and questionable characters. She gave us permission to use our imaginations and gave us permission to think. I will always hold a spot in my heart for the blasphemous, sacrilegious Wizarding World. There aren’t words enough to express my gratitude to J.K. Rowling, and so I will just worship her, wizards and all.
So instead of saying, “no, it’s just Harry Potter,” at a family reunion when an old man I’m pretty sure really isn’t related to me asks me as I sit alone, reading a book the size of my head, “Is that the Bible you’re reading?” I will say “Yes, yes it is.” After all, they’re both banned books and therefore inappropriate reading material for the minds of our youth, and obviously those banning books know what is best for the children. Or, as Albus Dumbledore says in the gospel according to the Order of the Phoenix, “Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.” The Word of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.
Amen.
