J.K. Rowling's bookshelf
I wonder what J.K. Rowling has on her bookshelf. I specifically wonder if she has read anything by British theologian James Alison. JATB, any guesses?
In the meantime... I was not going to succumb, I was going to embrace holy patience and wait till one of my friends had finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but my friends were reading s-l-o-w-l-y, and when I did a recording session on Saturday, the wonderful engineer and I started talking about the HP books, and the next thing I knew, we were in a bookstore. Buying. WIthout regrets, I hasten to add. I read and read and read and read and I cried, too, of course, and I know how it ends, and am satisfied. No, I am not going to tell you why. Yes, you will have to read it for yourselves.
Today has been a day of relentless rain, a perfect day to stay in and read (though I went out and rehearsed). It is now tea-time, and your very own literate singer is in her apartment, having a mug of tea, and thinking about and missing the so-very-real characters in the HP series. Do not worry - I did this at the end of the Lord of the Rings saga, too, and that was worse, because I knew that Tolkien was dead, and there would be no more books from that hand, that heart. This little sniffly episode will pass, is passing, has passed, and here is why: I know that the only thing that prevents us from seeing miracles and magic in our midst every moment of every day is that we do not know how to see. I know that the whole bright world is flaming like shook foil, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. That every bush is afire with God. That the kingdom of heaven is among us. And that we need our eyes opened.
I have read that, when Capt. James Cook sailed his tall ships to the Hawaiian Islands, and anchored there offshore, nobody on the beach could see the boats. Sight happens in the brain, really - information of light and shadow has to be interpreted, and then, and only then, do we actually "see", because we know, from referencing previous patterns, what we are seeing. The islanders had no frame of reference for those ships, their brains had no way to interpret and categorize those shapes, and so discarded the information. No one saw the boats.
Even if this is not what actually happened, not factual, I believe it to be true. We all have moments when, for no apparent reason, a curtain in our mind moves aside, and we see a reality far more intense than that which we usually notice. Frighteningly beautiful. Sacred. Magical. Holy. Enlightened. Imbued. Whatever word you choose. Jesus talks about the eye being the lamp of the body, and that if that eye is clear and healthy (which it often is not) we fill with light, because there is nothing, no film, between us and the light. Which is the state mystics seem to live in, and which scares most of us silly, so we reach for our "real life" shades, and call the intensified living unreal and unrealistic when it is actually the Realest Real. I am reminded of the Three Stooges. Curly starts yelling, "I can't see! I can't see!" Larry asks, "Why not?" Curly replies, still panicked, "My eyes are closed!". Yep, that's us.
I think that books like these - Harry Potter,Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Wrinkle in Time - blow that curtain a little, move it away for a moment,. We love them because they help us to see things rain-washed, startling, and fresh.
LIke they were in that garden we used to play in. Remember?