Harry Potter, Death, and the Christian Experience

Harry Potter is a kids book, right? Just a fantasy book about magic and wizards that caused a stir among some religious communities?

Not exactly.

Talk to the readers who made J.K. Rowling the first and only billionaire author by purchasing 400 million copies and you’ll hear a different story: these are stories about overcoming adversity, showing enormous moral character, coming of age, the rise of a fascist dictator, and the fight of good versus evil. Although placed within the container of a magical world and fraught with mythical creatures and powers, what captivated millions was what was beneath the surface. Love. Friendship. Fortitude. Adventure. Virtue. Life.

For millions, it is the best adventure series they will ever read, one that has touched them deeply in a way that can never be forgotten.

And yet, talk to Christian readers, and you’ll find that there’s something even more. While Harry Potter fits nicely into the teen/”coming of age”/fantasy book category with The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson—albeit not as well written—there is something fundamentally different about what J.K. Rowling has done. Beyond the teenager themes of self-idenity and overcoming difficulties present each series, there is one theme that, I would argue, defines the Harry Potter apart from the rest: death. From the very first page to the last, death is pervasive. The whole series is built around the murder of Harry’s parents. Roughly 100 characters are mentioned to have died throughout. Harry himself (spoiler alert) dies in the seventh book… until he comes back to life. For the Christian, an adherent of a faith that is built upon a death and so has a particular understanding of the experience, this is something that immediately captures our attention. Is Harry Potter subtly Christian?

My answer? No. Harry Potter is overtly Christian. In the way it understands death, in the role that Harry plays for his friends, and most importantly, the way we should live our lives, I think that J.K. Rowling had a strong understanding of Christian theology when she penned this series. For me, Harry Potter is not just an amazing series of well-told stories, it is a glimpse into our faith.

That was the focus of my talk last Friday evening at Immaculate Conception Church: Harry Potter, Death, and the Christian Experience. I’ve included the whole 30 minute talk as well as 12 minutes of questions. If you have any questions of your own, please don’t hesitate to ask!

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 Posted on February 13, 2017 by

 Theology, Video

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Is There Evidence of God?

Taking a step back from the normal focus of these blog posts, I want to address an issue that may at times seem overly simplistic yet fundamentally important: what is faith?

By its very nature, faith is a rather elusive subject. It is difficult to define, lacks a lot of agreed upon evidence, and is held by people with diametrically opposing opinions on some of religion’s most fundamental qualities. Some people have a lot of faith. Some people have no sense of what faith even is. And that’s just among those who claim to have it.

On the pendulum of perspectives, I find the two poles to be very common, and very dangerous.

On the one end, there are those who will say that faith is something that can and should be proved. What scientific, verifiable evidence does one have the the existence of God? In the group, there is a desire for certainty, a desire to know without a doubt that God exists and what we’re doing is what God wants. Naturally, this is a group populated by agnostics and atheists who find faith absolutely absurd because they have yet to see the credible evidence, but oddly enough, it is also quite common among the strongest of believers: there are people of all faiths who want (and sometimes believe they have) undeniable proof of their beliefs. Expeditions to find the lost ark of Noah; looking for scientists to perform tests on the consecrated host, relics, or the famous Shroud of Turin; sucked in by articles that begin, “Science has unlocked the mystery of…” For people in this category, faith is simply a subset of fact: there is enough evidence to convince you and another of its truth.

On the other end of the extreme are those who believe faith to be something entirely up to the individual, completely independent of objective reality or evidence. I can’t say why I believe, I just know that I’m right. In this group, there is no desire to test what one believes or “has faith in” against the experience of others or empirical data. I believe what I believe, and nothing could ever change my opinion. Faith, then, is simply believing something despite any evidence to support it, an assent to a doctrine or belief simply on principle. For people in this category, faith is simply a subset of opinion: there is not enough evidence to convince you or another of its truth.

Naturally, I find both expressions to be lacking. Faith is by no means a subset of fact, something merely waiting to be proved correct: what would there to have faith in if we could simply know it with scientific certainty? And if faith was simply a personal set of beliefs with no connection to experience or reality, then faith is merely a construct of the individual and has no connection to the lives of others. Surely, neither answer can be correct.

For me, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. There is evidence to guide us in understanding, but not so much on the scientific/certitude level. We have the confessions of others, we have our personal experience, we have a world that points to order and intelligence. Can any one of these things be verified beyond even a shred of doubt? Of course not. Does that mean that they don’t exist. Of course not. Thus, statements of faith are those things for which there is enough evidence to convince you, but not enough to convince another of its truth.

So, do we have evidence that God exists? Yes… and no. That’s the topic of the newest “Ask Brother Casey,” found below or by clicking here.

 4 Comments

 Posted on January 25, 2017 by

 Prayer, Video

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What Are We Waiting For?

The liturgical year is one of the greatest gems of the Church. Over the course of the year, we ritually live out the events of salvation history, calling to mind what God has done for us and what God will continue to do. For those who fully enter into it, each season offers a chance to experience God in a different way, focusing on a particular experience of our lives with God and how we are to respond to it.

In Advent, of course, our focus is on what is to come: we wait in joyful anticipation for the coming of our Lord Jesus.

But what does that actually mean?

For many, the focus is what immediately follows Advent: Christmas. What we await is the birth of our Lord, the Incarnation of God as a human being. And who can blame us? It’s no doubt the greatest mystery of all of human history. The Creator became the created. Think about that. God, the all-knowing, all-powerful being that holds together all of existence… came to be a meek, poor, vulnerable creature in a volatile time and place in human history. God took on our humanity (or did we take on His? Look for a video the day after Christmas…) No doubt, this is something to celebrate.

At the same time, though, that event took place in history, meaning that it is long past. Nothing, in effect, will be different come December 25. At Christmas, we celebrate a remembrance of that amazing encounter—and rightfully so—but in many ways, it is just that: a remembrance. Christmas is not the day of the year in which Jesus actually comes in a way that He is not already present to us now, and it is not somehow special because it is the exact date that it happened, like a birthday (no one knows when Jesus was actually born. The date was set in the third or fourth century.)

For many, then, Advent is kind of a strange season if they think about it. If what we celebrate on Christmas has already happened, what are we waiting for in Advent?

  • Some pretend to be surprised, holding back the information they already know so that they can be like the people of Israel who heard the Good News and rejoiced. But how could we forget what we already know?
  • Instead, others try to make Christmas out to be something more than it already is, a day in which Jesus is actually born is some way, that his presence to us on that day is somehow unlike it was was on the previous day. But how can (or why would) Jesus be born anew every year and then leave again?
  • Finally, and probably most common of all, some don’t think much about it at all, simply seeing the season of Advent as a cute ritual of lighting candles and holding back our excitement so that Christmas will be that much more joyful. But why would the Church devote four weeks of the liturgical year to something that’s simply cute or enjoyable?

In my latest YouTube reflection, I want to offer a slightly different approach. Advent, although immediately preceding Christmas, is not primarily a waiting or preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, but in fact quite the opposite: because we already possess the Good News of the Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, what we await now is not His first coming, but rather His second. Unlike the people of Israel who longed for a Messiah, we already have one. We cannot forget this fact, it cannot be taken away from us, and it cannot happen again. Thus, we wait and hope in the Advent season, not because we do not know what will happen, but precisely because we do.

For this reason, Advent is indeed a time of waiting and hope as we have always celebrated, but the knowledge of Christmas gives meaning to our hope and forces us to look beyond what we celebrate: to a world when Jesus will sit on His thrown, the Kingdom of Heaven will be established, peace and justice will reign, and the weak will be lifted up. For three weeks now that has been the message of our Old Testament readings at mass. Really, that has been the focus of our waiting. We do not await a child born on December 25, we await a King to bring justice to our world.

That is what this liturgical season is all about. We are called in this time to remember what God has done throughout history, but also to focus our attention on what God will do one day. We are called to prepare ourselves to receive Jesus into our lives, but also to realize that we already have a foretaste of the encounter we await. We are called to hope for a better world, but also to focus our attention on how we already possess the answer to that hope and are capable of laying its foundation with our own works of peace and justice.

Advent is a wonderful season of the liturgical year. In fact, it might be my favorite. It is a time when we most realize that the world we seek is not the world we have. And yet, it is a time when we are reminded that things will change, and that we can do something about it. We cannot bring about the second coming of our Lord, but because we already possess him in our memory and in our breaking of the bread, we can in fact bring Him into our world, even if it is just a foretaste of what’s to come.

So I guess my question is this: What are we waiting for?

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 2 Comments

 Posted on December 12, 2016 by

 Favorite, Ministry, Theology, Video

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Evangelizing Through Social Media

Five years and some change ago, I made the decision to start a blog. Ugh. I had become one of them. You know, those people that think what they have to say is so interesting and important that people will want to follow them. Those people that think that just because the little button on the blog page says “Publish” means that they’ve actually contributed to some meaningful or respectful cause. Yeah, those people.

I was not thrilled about the idea, and was very self-conscious. When I first thought of the idea as a means to keep friends and family in touch with what I was doing (at their request), I resisted. When I found that it was, in fact, the easiest way to do so, I apprehensively began writing, but was not keen on sharing it too publicly. Maybe if down the road there were people who were interested in the friars and wanted to know what life was like… maybe they could read some of the posts.

As with most things, though, I was immediately stretched beyond my comfort, and have been stretched ever since.

The fact of the matter is social media is a powerful means of connecting with people and spreading information. Even though I was just some random person living in the armpit of the US—by which I mean Wilmington, DE—people wanted to read my posts and ask me questions. Over the next three years, I started to get messages from all over, asking me about being a friar, wanting to know what my personal experience was like, and requesting prayers. I accepted this new endeavor, as it were, as a sort of ministry through social media.

But as in most ministry experiences, just as I was beginning to feel comfort in what I was doing, I felt a push to stretch further. What about really stepping out there? Writing a blog with a few hundred followers is one thing, but its impact is minimal. People don’t read that much. They spend their time watching, and sharing, easy to consume videos on YouTube. What about making videos, the voice inside asked. Ugh. I don’t want to become one of them. YouTubers are even worse than bloggers because they think that they’re so special people not only want to know what they’re thinking, they want to watch them ramble on about nothing. They think that just because they’ve posted a video with their expensive camera that they “make movies.” Yeah, those people.

Once again, I was not thrilled with the idea. But once again, there I was, buying a camera and filming a road trip across the country. Almost immediately, it expanded to regular reflections, and before I knew it, I was completely engrossed in the world of making videos: watching YouTube for tips, taking a film class, and all the while becoming more comfortable with the new ministry.

I share this bit of background as a means of exhortation. Why not do the same? What I have done over the past five years or so is not the work of an expert with loads of education in the field, its simply the result of being honest to who I am and open to where that might lead me. With the amount of time that people spend on social media sites, that’s where we as Church need to be. Why not meet people where they are, replacing what they’re consuming with quality messages? Why not evangelize through social media?

Knowing, of course, that there is not one right way of doing this, I do think that there are some common principles that we should always keep in mind. This most recent video shares seven of them.

For those on email, click here to watch the video.

 Posted on November 23, 2016 by

 Ministry, Video

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Kids Ask Great Questions

Have you spent much time with a child lately? Children have a very special perspective on the world: they see things differently, say things we don’t expect, and ask very interesting questions. This week, I decided to tap into that creativity for a segment of Ask Brother Casey. Going around to all of the classrooms at the Catholic school connected to the parish, I told the students to write down any questions they wanted to ask me—anything—and I would answer them on the Breaking In The Habit Youtube channel. They were happy to oblige…

For those on email, click here to watch the video.

 

 1 Comment

 Posted on October 23, 2016 by

 Video

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Breaking In The Habit

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