Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Inside the Ministry of Magic, or Harry Potter and the Mystery of Love

February 15, 2004
Palo Alto, CA
Reverend Amy Zucker

When J. K. Rowling's millions of fans reached the end of three years of anxious anticipation last June, and at last possessed their copies of her fifth novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, some of them may have paused long enough in their rush from the cover to page one to read the brief dedication. She had dedicated the book to her husband, daughter, and son, with these words: "To Neil, Jessica, and David, who make my world magical."

It's an easy line, a quick line that anyone might toss off, whether or not they had spent a dozen years of their lives thinking and writing about magic. It's the oldest cliche in the world to call love magic; we hear it in a hundred love songs that sing "This must be magic / This must be love¹," and "I'm under your spell²."

But I think Rowling meant much more than to say that her family is wonderful and exciting. The entire book - and, it seems, the entire series - is about love. It's not just the hearts-and-flowers love lovers celebrated yesterday, though that is one variety of it. It is the love of which Martin Luther King speaks in the centering quote in your order of service (and which it seems Rowling must have heard): "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." The love that fascinates Rowling is a deep and ancient force, as powerful and mysterious as any magic a novelist could dream up. Dante said that it moves the sun and stars–and as with the universe itself, when we seek love's origin we only uncover more mysteries.

Even Rowling's witches and wizards seem to find it beyond comprehension. Far beneath London's streets lies the Ministry of Magic, the rather ordinary, bureaucratic government of the secret wizarding world of which Harry is a part. And in one of the deepest floors of the Ministry lies buried the Department of Mysteries. Even other Ministry officials aren't sure what the people who work in that department get up to. They are called Unspeakables, and in more ways than one, they take magic - and love - to a deeper level.

Magic in Harry Potter's world is mostly quite ordinary. By that I mean that it is less a mystical delving into the nature of existence than it is a very practical, if improbable, form of technology. Much of Rowling's humor and inventiveness shows up in the parallels and contrasts between the magic Harry learns at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the tools with which we Muggles (non-magical people) are all familiar. I remember the exact moment the books won my heart: when, in the first volume I read, Harry's friend Ron was desperately trying to pad out a History of Magic essay that had to be three feet of parchment long. He filled up his roll of parchment with the largest writing he could get away with, measuring after every sentence and straining for that final two inches. It was so much like my own junior high experience, and yet with such a great twist, that I laughed out loud, and was hooked.

The students at Hogwarts learn to amplify the phenomena of our world; they make themselves stronger with Strengthening potions and happier with Cheering Charms. They study for their Apparating licenses when they're seventeen, so that they will be able to disappear from one place and reappear instantly in another. (Sometimes they flunk a couple of times before they succeed in getting their licenses.) They learn magical ways to circumvent the inconveniences of Muggle life, opening sealed doors with an uttered "Alohomora ," going undetected by wearing Invisibility Cloaks, and defying gravity with levitating spells and broomsticks. These things are all very interesting, and they do imply that time and matter and space are not quite the way our Muggle physics has described them. Nevertheless, one does not get the sense that students come to Hogwarts in order to explore the deep mysteries of life, Magic with a capital, mystical M. They are there to master a very particular technology: a fantastic, delightful, mind-bending technology, but nonetheless one that is firmly grounded in practical matters of everyday life.

But in the fifth book, Harry enters the Department of Mysteries, and so do we. It turns out to be the place where the Ministry of Magic goes beyond the administration and development of magical methods for doing things. Each room in the Department of Mysteries contains one of the profound mysteries of life, the ones that bedazzle and befuddle the wizarding world as much as they do us.

One room in the subterranean department is devoted to the study of death. In the middle of its great stone amphitheater stands an archway, a veiled door that apparently leads from nowhere to nowhere . . . except that once one passes through one never comes back out. From behind the veil come whispers that only some can hear, those who have seen death up close. We know the Unspeakables have not resolved its mystery because in the previous book, Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of the age, has said that "no spell can reawaken the dead³."

Another room contains a tank full of brains, and the mystery under investigation there appears to be mind. When one of Harry's friends touches a brain, it wraps tendrils of thought around him that make him cry out in pain. As the Hogwarts nurse later tells them, "Thoughts [can] leave deeper scarring than almost anything else⁴," which is only too true. Nor do we have the slightest idea how they really work, or for that matter, exactly what they are.

Another room contains thousands of glass spheres, each of which holds a prophecy. In this room, the Unspeakables study that great unknown, the future. Even though one might think that prophecy turns the future into something knowable, each person's fate is still a mystery. Harry himself has a prophecy with his name on it, but even when he hears its contents he doesn't know what his future will be. In the book's final chapter he is still wondering.

Yet another room is filled with the ticking of clocks of every kind. At one end of it stands an enormous crystal bell jar within which an egg hatches into a hummingbird, which flies to the top of the bell jar, regresses back into a damp hatchling and then becomes an egg once again - and so on, endlessly. Later, when a man gets his head stuck in the jar, it turns, terrifyingly, from a man's to a baby's, to a man's, to a baby's. The mystery studied here, clearly, is time.

And then there is a locked room. Harry has a magical knife that will open any lock - he's used it before - but when he puts it into the keyhole of this door, the blade melts. Surely this is the always-locked room of which Dumbledore speaks in the passage we heard earlier, and surely the mystery within is love: "a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there.⁵"

All of these things are mysteries beyond anything even the greatest of witches and wizards can comprehend, even as the wizarding world invents ways to defy the limitations of space and manipulate time. It's revealing that Dumbledore calls them "subjects for study." Perhaps even the Ministry of Magic is awestruck enough by them to regard them more as wonders to be studied than technologies to be exploited. In any case, I find it very moving that for all its bustling bureaucracy, political intrigue, and preoccupation with the wheres, whens and hows of everyday wizarding life, the Ministry has not forgotten that there is an unfathomable, beautiful, terrible, mysterious magic beyond all of it - and neither has Rowling. Of course, we knew that ever since we read the dedication.

So what does Harry Potter's experience tell us about the mystery that moves in our lives as love?

As Harry learns when he tries to use his magical lockpick, the mystery that is love is strong enough to dissolve metal. It defies approach - just what is the key to love? Has anyone found it?

He also learns that love can be destructive. It can turn our best-laid plans into chaos. Dumbledore recounts to him how he meant to tell Harry crucial information about himself, information that would have alerted him to the kind of deception his archenemy Voldemort would attempt. But Dumbledore did not tell him, even though Harry asked about it in his very first year. He delayed the conversation year after year for a very simple reason: the information was terrible and heavy, and he did not want to burden Harry with it because he loved him. He knew he must prepare Harry for his unique role in defending their world, and that preparation was part of a plan he had worked on for many years, but as he confesses to Harry,

I cared about you too much . . . . I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.

. . . . What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands.⁶

It is the most poignant declaration of love in the series thus far, and it comes at a moment when the slaughter has begun and Harry's heart is so bitter that he can barely take in the words or care about them.

Furthermore, it is Harry's love for a person very dear to him that leads him to go to the person's aid when he erroneously thinks the person is in danger - and it is that person's love for Harry that causes the person to come to Harry's rescue in turn, when it turns out that he has rushed into a trap. The result is the death of someone Harry loves, and he is devastated by guilt and grief.

Rowling makes it perfectly explicit: it was love and concern, not only betrayal and Voldemort's evil power, that caused the tragedy. With this painful twist, she brings us face to face with a hard and beautiful truth about love: it frequently turns one's life upside-down. The natural response to hatred is hatred; it is so much harder to call love out of oneself when assaulted by the hate that rampages through our world. When I think of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, I think how tired it must have made them to realize that they had to take the hatred that flowed continually their way and turn it into love. These men come to mind not only because they exemplify the triumph of love over hate, but because they both died as a result of their struggle–and because they had known that death might well be their reward. Love is hard.

But that is what gives it power, a power to drive out hate that nothing else has. Gandhi, by refusing to lift a hand against those who hated him, refusing to return violence for violence, angry words for angry words, transformed a nation. As a result, what could have been a bloodbath was an astoundingly, if not perfectly, peaceful transfer of power. His enemies could not defeat the love in his spirit and so he defeated their regime without weapons.

When we are surrounded by anger and hate (if not on that national scale, then in a personal relationship), occasionally, miraculously, love wells up inside and saves us from the evil that is trying to claim us. We may not succeed in loving our enemies, though that is the challenge Jesus issued; we may not attain the patience of a Gandhi or a King. But when someone approaches us with vitriol in her voice, or anger in his clenched hands, and we succeed in holding onto the love that guides us, we can drive out the hate that threatens our destruction.

Harry learned something about the power of love against the forces of hate in his first year at school, when he was only eleven years old. Ten years earlier, his mother had sacrificed herself to save him - in fact, begged Voldemort to kill her instead of her son. This being a world of magic, the love she gave him so filled his physical being that when Voldemort tried to throttle him ten years later, he found Harry's skin was too painful for him to touch. That is the "wondrous love" of which the hymn sings: the love from others that protects us from sinking down.

Just as wondrous, if not more so, is the love that flows out of us towards others - the love we give. In Order of the Phoenix, it is his own love for another that saves Harry. Someone he loves has just been killed before his eyes, and now Voldemort is possessing Harry like a snake wrapped around his body, trying to compel Dumbledore to attack him and thus destroy Harry. The pain is terrible, and Harry knows he is about to die of it. With this thought, the hope flashes into his mind that when he dies, he will see the person he loves and has lost. And, the book relates, "as Harry's heart filled with emotion, the creature's coils loosened, the pain was gone.⁷" As Dumbledore later explained to him, "That power . . . saved you . . . because [Voldemort] could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests." The love that filled him literally drove out the presence of hatred, which can no more comprehend love than darkness can comprehend light. We too may have such an experience, when we are brimming with fury for someone we care about but suddenly regain our perspective and find that the love we feel for them makes a flood that leaves no room for hatred.

Where does this wondrous love come from? That may be the biggest mystery of all. The magical analogue is that it is an actual physical force with which one person can imbue another, as Harry's mother Lily did for him. For us Muggles, it is most certainly a force that moves our hearts and our very bodies, if not the sun and stars, even though we no more know where it comes from than we can return through the archway of death or capture Time in a bell jar. And just as it cast Voldemort's presence out of Harry, it alone can cast out the hate that sometimes threatens us when life has been cruel.

Love is ultimately mysterious and utterly real. May its presence always bless us and make our lives magical.

1. ABC, "This Must Be Magic," Abracadabra, EMI, United Kingdom, 1991.
2. Too many to list . . .
3. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, London: Bloomsbury, 2000, 605
4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, 746.
5. Order of the Phoenix, 743.
6. Order of the Phoenix, 739.
7. Order of the Phoenix, 720.

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