The long awaited review of The Boy Who Lived

 I tried to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon back in college, half a lifetime ago, I got halfway through book 6 and gave up, not because it was a difficult read or I wasn’t used to reading long books (hello Wheel of Time, gave up that one too after about 9 books!), but rather I found it depressing and not all that interesting.  Lately I was staying with friends and had nothing to read, she had the series so I gave it another go.  The first three books are okay, but obviously the first work of a young writer, Rowling hits her stride in book 4 and never looks back.  She has great characters in almost everybody but the title character!  After all that time traipsing around in Harry’s head I don’t know much more about him than that he’s a generic angsty teenager, which I already have plenty of experience with in my own kids except they have a personality too, it is a sad day when Neville is more personable than Harry! The plot sort of meanders hither and yon, while there are some unique plot points, many feel trite or completely random, and ironically the characters themselves admit that most of it is luck.  The world building is intriguing but shallow, sort of like the scenery for a play, cool at a distance but no actual depth.  And the whole series the mood is very depressing and angsty, moody and uncertain, it is always November and never May!  Can’t we see Harry have even a happy couple of months, maybe one uneventful game of quidditch?  But my biggest issue with the series is its indifferent metaphysics, what the heck drives the characters, powers the world, does anything mean anything?  Star Wars has the force, Lord of the Rings and Narnia are Christian spinoffs, Wheel of Time has a complex dualistic Ferris wheel, Spider-Man has pseudoscience, but what drives Harry Potter, teenage angst?, dumb luck?, the modern bureaucracy? 

It is one thing to write a silly little story with no depth or deeper meaning and leave the philosophy, religion, and metaphysics well out of it, but it is quite another to delve into life and death, morality and ethics, the soul, the supernatural, etc with no thought or direction at all given to the underlying worldview.  But it is secular post modernism you proclaim, no it is not, we have right and wrong, good and evil, where does that come from?  Professor Umbridge and the Dursleys are secular post modernists, they define their own reality, but outside the bureaucracy everybody else seems to have set ideas about an external right and wrong.  While we have a few mentions of churches, a couple bits of scripture, and celebrate Christmas and Easter, this is not a Christian book, the only mention of any sort of deity is surprised ejaculations referencing the first person of the Trinity without any sort of belief or reverence.  You can’t be a secularist and admit you have a soul (major theme in the last book).  But you can’t be a deist and have no idea who or what your god is.  If you are going to deal with serious topics, you should do it in a serious way, but there is no depth, no meaning, no purpose, no reason to keep going, which is why I gave it up in the first place.  The mood is so bleak because we are depending on luck to get us through, there is no hope, no purpose, no reason we should expect things to get better, no point in living even if they do.  No, I was not happy with this series, it is trying to be Lord of the Rings, but instead of echoing the gospel and the Hope therein, rather we have something based upon the gospel according to modern, post Christian man, a superficially happy mishmash of cultural relativism but with no meat and no depth and no meaning.  While many are ravenous for real depth, they rave about these books thinking they are the real thing, little knowing it is diet soda masquerading as the real thing.  But so shallow is our cultural understanding of anything, few are those who realize splashing in the shallows doesn’t mean you understand the ocean’s depths; their feet are wet so they must be expert seamen.

The Modern Vision of Music

 It has often baffled me how Taylor Swift can be the voice of our culture and multiple generations, but then I went to a junior high choir concert the other day, the band played a song apparently written by someone with mental health issues and meant to inspire people against suicide, which was sadly appropriate as after the song selections for the choir I was feeling rather depressed and nihilistic.  I remember singing one or two such songs back in my own early choir years of similar persuasion but this time it was every...single...song!  We at least had a few Disney or show tune pieces in there, my elementary aged daughter has an upcoming concert with several painful (but chipper) childish ditties, but why was the junior high selection so extremely awful?!  The better question is what does one sing about when the whole point of our existence is pointless?  We are a culture and society happily building legos on the deck of the capsizing Titanic!

Music throughout time and history, culture and place has been a language, an art, an expression of feelings, sentiments, events, myth, legend, history, story, notions, and the essence of being far beyond what simple words can say.  But like real art, Modern Music has replaced music as it should be.  Now it is a discipline without rules, without borders, without meaning, a banana duck taped to the wall of life!  The hum of my fan has more meaning than any random song of modern selection.  I can understand why the kids weren't enthused to be singing (not that they are enthused about anything not of their own choosing!) about looking into their own souls for meaning (if they have one), finding all their future in dreams and hopes centered on a chaotic, meaningless universe, and finding all their purpose inside themselves and in their own visions.  Ye can be gods!  Yes, and what petty, miserable gods we be!  No wonder a vocal artist with mediocre talents who mostly whines/sings about her pointless life and relationships is the epitome of our culture.

Some guy calling himself 'The Preacher' wrote about this a couple thousand years ago, and his book is still a best seller, so it isn't just a modern phenomenon, but something that wrings the heart of every mortal under heaven.  John Lennon's 'Imagine' is the grand hymn to this worldview, and just as despair inducing as any of the lesser songs presented by our local student vocalists.  We don't need to imagine, we live, as functional materialists, in a world where we assume 'there is no Heaven and no Hell,' but the problem is, nothing means anything in such a world!  Our whole existence is based on the random fluctuations of subatomic particles set off at the explosion that began Stuff, (did you know hard core secularists are Calvinists!?) and nothing means anything because there is no meaning, point, or purpose, yet some deep part of ourselves demands there must be.  So either the secular realists are wrong or some deep part of our being is.  Back before the heady days of advanced scientific discovery, The Preacher remarked, 'God has set eternity in the hearts of mankind,' now obviously he didn't understand astrophysics or subatomic particles so what can he know?

But then what do all these all knowing scientific philosophers know?  How is it Order arose from Chaos, or Something from Nothing, why isn't Chaos increasing to the point of Vacuum instead of being held in check that Order and Life can exist?  Why does my deepest yearning turn towards Something, Meaning, Purpose like a compass needle to the North Pole?  Why am I discontent in the 'Son of Man' revealed in Phil Collins' "Tarzan" soundtrack (catchy music, but if you actually dissect the lyrics there's nothing there!) but find boundless hope, desire, and interest in an itinerant Jewish carpenter of the same title who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey some two millennia ago?  The crowds that hailed Him as King wanted the same things we brilliant moderns demand: I want it my way.  They killed Him a week later because He  said that wasn't the point of life at all, ironically fulfilling the entire point of this reality!

But our songs are still about nothing, as are our sad little lives, but they don't have to be.  I am in no way saying that music is in any way artistically good or bad based on the meaning or contents, but rather that it can be intrinsically pathetic, even with the most catchy beat in the known universe, if it doesn't mean anything.  I will be the first to tell you that there are some (lots actually) of really horrible Christian attempts at music out there, but I'd rather sing a 45 minute chorus of the worst Christian song I can think of than listen to 2 minutes of the inane drivel that passes for modern music (okay, maybe a little longer if it is Bon Jovi but only if you are working out to it and not really contemplating the lyrics), just like I don't own any modern art pieces, unless you count where the kids have left marks on the wall.  But I'll leave you to choose the soundtrack to your own life, be it 'Amazing Grace,' or 'Imagine,' and your workout will proceed accordingly!