So, where were you at midnight last Friday? Tucked up in bed with a Horlicks and a John Grisham novel, or standing in a motley queue of striped stockings and pointy hats, itching to get your mitts on the latest (and last) Harry Potter?

You may be thinking good riddance to Hogwarts, hippogriffs and horcruxes, or you may be feeling that curious sorrow that comes at the end of a particularly good yarn, when we find ourselves wishing that somehow the story would never end.

Perhaps it was because she recognised that many fans will feel a keen sense of loss once they hit page 607 that J K Rowling set the tone for The Deathly Hallows with two quotations about death. One, from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, is full of violence and rage:

Oh the torment, bred in the race, the grinding scream of death, and the stroke that hits the vein…

The other, from the Quaker William Penn, hints at a life beyond the grave:

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent.

As Christians, have we missed the point in our judgements of Potter? Like Muggles standing on Platform 9 at King’s Cross, entirely oblivious to the scarlet excitement of the Hogwarts Express, has the magic escaped us, too?

Some criticise Rowling for making her world too mundane. For all her wizards, giants, ghosts and goblins, there is no hint of the numinous, no sense of anything transcendent as there is in Tolkien and Lewis.

Nonetheless, she invites her readers to recognise that there are great forces at work behind the scenes that impinge on our everyday existence. And the demise of several beloved characters along the way encourages children to come to terms with the reality of death, the prospect of an afterlife and (as the quotes above convey) the conflicting emotions of grief and hope that they evoke.

Of course, it was never about the novelty spells and mythical monsters. The true magic in these books lies in the power that sacrificial love has over death. Just so, for us the potency of the church lies in our desire to lay claim to that same selfless passion and, in so doing, reveal to the world around us the majesty of God.

Jason Gardner

additional resources

To read ‘A Different Kind of Hero’, Mark Greene’s review of the sixth Harry Potter book (…and the Half-Blood Prince), go to licc.org.uk/articles.

Are J K Rowling’s books suffused with Christian symbolism? Read what Terry Mattingly thinks on gospelcom.net.

What will Rowling do next? John Walsh looks into the future (with a glance at the past) at independent.co.uk.

Is this ‘the next Harry Potter’? Get dug into Tunnels at guardian.co.uk.