The little door - the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Yesterday I went to Harry Potter world. One of the great things about having children is that you can indulge in things you might otherwise miss as a sophisticated bachelor about town. There are many more difficult things about children, as Helen and Martin already know! Having said that, I saw one man, who didn’t obviously have a partner or children who with great delight was riding a broomstick in a greenscreen room while the technology created scenes from the Harry Potter film around him. I didn’t judge. Though that may be why he doesn’t obviously have a partner or children. But what was charming, was the apparent joy everyone was taking in magic. There’s a very evident unsupernatural magic in the astounding and vast technical and imaginative efforts that go into creating the films, but by and large people were there principally to enjoy the imaginative world of witchcraft and wizardry.

What really struck me as peculiar though was the incredibly large gift-shop. Throughout there was a kind of Jack Wills vibe. Jack Wills is a clothing shop which opened around the millennium but basically traded off an inauthentic old-fashioned trad British look, a sort of fake Ryder and Ames, if you’ve ever been to Cambridge. Chariots of Fire but with more hoodies. The Hogswart’s vibe available-in-store is a similar pastiche of cathedrals, public schools, and Oxbridge, with a hint of London Blitz, and people were buying up scarves, robes and knitwear by the armful – All seeking a little magic through merch. If you’ve read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, or seen the excellent BBC adaptation – not the film (awful), – you’ll remember Charles Ryder speaking of the little door in the wall. He finds it at university, leading to a world of beauty, aristocracy, fine wines and big houses. There are no shortage of places in Britain that have this sense of age, power, meaning, beauty and possibility; Places that create an immediate sense of nostalgia for a hidden, exclusive world. Places where the feeling of old magic runs deep; That reignite our sense of possibility, meaning and specialness in the world. and when we turn away to the ordinary businesses of living, making money, bills, putting the rubbish out; we feel a sense of loss – a little bit like stacking chairs after choral evensong.

I should perhaps have warned you before starting off with Harry Potter. I’m told my predecessor took a dim view of girls dressing up as witches. JK Rowling herself, though, had a comprehensively Church of England schooling, and I’ve heard the series described as a Christian allegory, But, whatever you think, a grey world stripped of magic and wonder is a greater threat to the Christian faith than those whose interest in the dark arts is overly-enthusiastic. We live in a rather depressing era where the dullness of a Dursley-esque Dawkins is more harmful than the villany of Voldemort.

I bring this up because today we celebrate St Michael and All Angels, which I think matters for two reasons. The first is about how we look at the world around us – Our Weltanshauung, as the Germans call it (for short) – What is key for us as Christians is that there are more things in heaven and earth than in Richard Dawkins’ philosophy. And I think this is common even for atheists. I’ve met many who beat their chests, crying out science! Science! But are fascinated by ghosts, or read their horoscopes, avoid ladders or salute magpies. We are all Nathaniels: There are stranger things, but also greater things to be seen than these. The view of the world as a machine can be attractive – as it suggest we might see it, know it, control it, completely. But creation is not a machine, and remains full of secrets.

Angels, themselves, come in many forms: There’s the angel of the Lord, which is effectively how God communicates to the Hebrews in the Old Testament. There’s the archangels Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel and Raguel, named in the Bible and Apocrypha; There’s the angels of popular culture: of Robbie Williams, City of Angels, Highway to Heaven and Dogma. Throughout our tradition, epitomised by writers like Dante and Milton, there’s layers and ranks of angels ascending and descending, like on Jacob’s ladder – A cosmology in creation of dominions and powers above and below. It might be seen as mythic, but the contrast is with those who cannot think beyond a universe which is simply material, but does not matter.

To me, angels are a symbol of that hidden door: That in certain places we might find a holiness, or a greatness, or a beauty, a peace that is more than architecture and atmosphere; That there are those awesome places – where we might say: ‘this is the house of God’ or ‘the gate of heaven’. In certain ideas, in poetry, music and writing, we might be changed by a sense of truth or insight, a grasp of what is really important; In certain people we recognise something like a soul, there is a communion; those forms of love that help us transcend our mundane nature; In sacrament and worship, we are more than a small club of well meaning people in Putney, more than the sum of our parts, more than bread and wine; more than water declaring that this is not just a child, but a child of God. and a joined congregation of saints and angels meeting in the eternal praise of God.

The second reason why I think angels matter is because they point to a struggle between good and evil. St Michael defeating the dragon, that old serpent and fallen angel, Lucifer. As with Voldemort, evil is no longer the principle enemy of Christ. T.S Eliot wrote: “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.” This isn’t about one of those cats – Mr Mistoffelees or the master of depravity, Andrew Lloyd Webber, sorry, no, MacCavity – Eliot is writing about the poet Baudelaire, Who he appreciates for his penchant for evil. Eliot’s point is about moral seriousness. He’s saying our decisions and actions matter.

If we were to consider some robot invested with AI: It will almost certainly be smarter than us. Better at maths. Able now to write a million books just like Harry Potter – as the million monkeys required to write Shakespeare are now hard at work in the internet – Our robot would be stronger – a better employee, without needing breaks and sick-leave. It’s entirely imaginable that before long we’ll have a robotic work force. But running algorithms isn’t the same as making moral choices. Robots are not good or evil, capable of salvation or damnation. Robots don’t and will never matter.

The materialist might be able to analyse your biology – map your genes, trace your family tree – gleaning your relationship with your mother from the couch; Might track social and national trends; In short run the data on your previous choices, your biological, psychological, sociological position; And across the nation they might predict elections, nudge behaviour, predict a housing boom, But they cannot make an individual choose, They cannot take away your freedom. They can’t in this moment take from you, your ability to choose good or evil. Humans are not machines, as much as this might make life easier. We have this ability to dream dreams – for good and ill. We are not expendable; to be human is to do evil or good. To rise with St Michael, or fall in with the devil.

Harry Potter is the classic Bildungsroman for our times – A novel of education. He chooses between Slytherin and Griffindor, He discovers himself through his family, his school, his friends, his enemies, by making mistakes and finding his courage. He knows Good and Evil. He discovers that little door that unlocks holiness, and vice, beauty and terror, magic and mystery, and a vault full of golin-gold. As today we give thanks for this non-human world, and all the magic of creation, let us leave space for those things which may exceed our understanding, but point to what is eternal. And we remember the eternal significance of our actions, praying that our choices would be of God and his goodness, and for little Jack and his family that they find in this world all the magic and meaning and goodness it has to offer. And we pray that our worship would lead us to that great choir that forever sings his praises. Amen.