The myth and the message
Apr. 16th, 2009 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI still maintain that the Harry Potter mythos, in the form that JKR gave it, is not Christian. However, one of my favourite writers, Ilex, gave a terse and memorable account of one of its core contents that comes much closer to real Christianity than anything that JKR (to whom I will never deny respect, admiration and affection) ever did:
"Let's see .. humm. Oh, yes, survivors: you and me .. and Voldemort. But there is a big difference. Voldemort fears death, Harry. He craves immortality. He doesn't understand it is a hope, a promise that love gives us, that there is more after death. He doesn't know or understand love, so he has no hope; except not dying."
(Ilex, Lost and found... Love, chapter 9, link: http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/ilex/LAFL09.html
Ilex is not in any obvious way a pious writer, but rather a raucous, amused, muscular, optimistic lady with an enormous enjoyment of life. Nonetheless, the sense of love as life-giving, victorious, and redemptive, holds up her stories like a skeleton. And this brings back to me Hilaire Belloc's jolly quatrain:
Whenever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least, I have always found it so -
Benedicamus Domino!
"Let's see .. humm. Oh, yes, survivors: you and me .. and Voldemort. But there is a big difference. Voldemort fears death, Harry. He craves immortality. He doesn't understand it is a hope, a promise that love gives us, that there is more after death. He doesn't know or understand love, so he has no hope; except not dying."
(Ilex, Lost and found... Love, chapter 9, link: http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/ilex/LAFL09.html
Ilex is not in any obvious way a pious writer, but rather a raucous, amused, muscular, optimistic lady with an enormous enjoyment of life. Nonetheless, the sense of love as life-giving, victorious, and redemptive, holds up her stories like a skeleton. And this brings back to me Hilaire Belloc's jolly quatrain:
Whenever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least, I have always found it so -
Benedicamus Domino!
