What Harry Potter Teaches Us About Heaven

What was your emotional reaction upon the completion of the world's largest selling movie franchise in history?

There's a universal human phenomenon out there: we love a good story. It is the story that communicates the depths of human experience to us. It makes us, as Chesterton so ably points out in Orthodoxy, feel like normal people in an extraordinary world. There's interesting literary analysis out there as to why Harry Potter is one of the best of stories, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

But this isn't that blog post. Lots of people have analyzed the sublime content that makes up the Harry Potter narrative. I want to discuss something more simple than that. It's this: when big things that enrapture us end, we feel a little disappointed that it's over.

Admit it. When you finished reading The Deathly Hallows, whenever that may have been, you were a little sad. You enjoyed the journey. You couldn't sleep or eat those last 300 pages. You were a part of the story as if you were there. And because your whole world revolved around these characters for a few days (I know of no one who read The Deathly Hallows over a period of weeks), the bottom dropped out on you, and you were somber for a few days. Don't get me wrong: you were thrilled Harry vanquished the evil foe. But you were enthralled when you were reading it. When the reading stopped, so seemingly did your life for a second.

Then the movies came out, closely following behind the release of the final few books. And the movies were good too. And now you've seen the final film. And now there's nothing left. Now there's nothing left to look forward to. It's all over. Your world is no longer intertwined with Harry's.

I think it's this univeral human fiction which has given rise to so much fan fiction; people never want the story to end so they continue to write more of the story.

Isn't this interesting? It's like we're designed for an amazing story but an earthly consummation of the story seems less fulfilling. But what if there were a consummation that made the entire journey worth it, and the goodness never ended? What if we felt a part of the entire story and had a stake in its ending? What if, could it possibly be, the ending was better than the journey? Would we have any language that could possibly come close to describing such a thing?

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

 He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

Revelation 21:1-7, NIV

We All Hope in Something

I read this Guardian interview with Stephen Hawking, and decided to address it in my sermon yesterday at Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church. Here's some prominent excerpts from the interview:

You've said there is no reason to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper. Is our existence all down to luck?

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

So here we are. What should we do?

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

When I ruminated upon Hawking's thoughts, I came to a series of conclusions.

First, I believe Hawking is mostly right about fairy stories. I think most of what humans put their faith and hope in really are fairy stories. Most of the things we use to comfort us are fleeting. But not all of those things.

Second, notice that Hawking is not a careful philosopher. In rapid succession, he says that the universe is created from chance and that we should seek the greatest value of our action. But, in a universe created by chance, in which there is no plan or purpose, there cannot be an eternal, outside-of-time value system that makes one action filled with more or less value than any other. In other words, the idea of chance and value do not go together. Hawking's worldview is internally inconsistent.

Lastly, the charge that Hawking levels against people who believe in an afterlife is a remarkably short-sighted one. Why? Because we all hope in something. Atheistic thought, in which the world is here by accident, truly permits a do-what-you-want kind of lifestyle. It isn't that all atheists are completely selfish people, but atheism permits it. If there is no God, and there is no ultimate moral reckoning, then we can do what we want. In other words, atheism is it's own sort of fairy story, allowing for one's entire hope to be put into sensual desires. We all hope in something.

As a brief aside, despite the fact that many of the new atheists (see here for example) attempt to construct a reasonable universal morality from sociology and brain chemistry, they can only tell us that we have a moral system. They still cannot answer the question why certain things must always be right and certain things must always be wrong. Survival of the fittest and evolutionary biology does not answer for altruism, or completely selfless actions that harm self.

Returning to the matter at hand, I began to muse upon the fact that we really do all hope in something. Even the hopeless hope in a world without pain, or sadly, a world without themselves. But we all place our hope in something beyond ourselves. It's a truly human thing to do.

The trick, then, is to hope in the right thing. Or to hope in the right person.