A Great Homily

I just returned from the 11 am Tridentine High Mass at St Boniface Church/Indult Latin Mass Community on the North Side of Pittsburgh. The priest who celebrates the High Mass at 11 is Father Kenneth Myers, who performed Pauli and Lissa's wedding and baptized their first son. He is an avid Harry Potter fan - a number of weeks ago when I saw him after Mass he told me he had gotten Pauli's email about this blog on Harry Potter and asked, "are you for him or agin him?" and when I said, "Oh, definitely for him," he replied "So am I!" He did not, in his homily today, mention Harry Potter and I would think it a bit inappropriate if he did use Potter in a homily; but his homily fit greatly with distinct themes that Rowling has developed heavily as central to her work ... the theme of our approach to and dealing with death. Saints and Soldiers Father. Ken read a paragraph from G. K. Chesteron's Orthodoxy on death. He began by noting how appropriate it is that Rememberence Day just celebrated on Friday falls in the month of November, the month dedicated by the Church to the remembrance of and prayer for the souls in Purgatory .In Catholic Theology a person is not going to Purgatory if they are not going to Heaven, Purgatory is the "wash room" of Heaven ... no use getting cleaned up for Hell. Thus all souls in purgatory are known to be "Saints". This led to the comparison of courageous soldiers and those who have undergone death bravely. The passage used from Chesterton was on the paradox of courage - a most important Rowlingian theme - when asked she has said that she herself would be in Gryffindor because she prizes courage above all else. The soldier who is going to fight his way out of the thick or mortal peril must paradoxically crave life in such a way that this is manifest in a certain "recklessness" about death. He must (and I loved this quote, it is so rich) "thirst for life like water and drink death like wine." Black Death This is precisely the point Rowling makes in Sirius' death in book 5, and the conversation Harry has with Nearly Headless Nick when he is hoping to see Sirius as a ghost. Dying in the heat of battle fighting valiantly for what he believes in, but also like the gritty and dark SOB he is (sorry for the pun on his animagus form) ... Sirius died a "happy death" and therefore does not have to hang around as a ghost. In a recent conversation over Halloween weekend Pauli was comparing Nearly Headless Nick's character and Snape's first name, noting that death is a sort of severing and that the reason Nick is a ghost is symbolized precisely in that his head is neither whole with his body, as in life, nor completely severed, as in death. William Wallace's last prayer (from Braveheart): "I'm so scared ... please help me to die well." A Carpenter's/Roofer's Prayer (I have just been listening to Gillian Welch's Time (the Revelator) as I write this, and this line was just sung as I got to this point, so I thought it too fortuitous not to be mentioned, my being working roofing presently and all): "Lord, Let me die with a hammer in my hand." PostScript on "Coinage" If I can, um, I would here like to coin the term "Rowlingian," (as in "Rowlingian theme" above) if it has not already been coined in the 6-7 year steady deluge of global conversations and writing on Rowling (and even if it has been, I will now begin using it heavily on here and claim I coined it and the burden of proof will be on others LOL ... just kidding). (Geek Stuff:) The accent should be put on the "ling" syllable as a closed syllable (a closed syllable being one that begins and ends with a consonant, whereas an open syllable begins with a consonant but has only the vowel following it). This transforms the original opening closed syllable "Rowl" into the open syllable "Row" and the "l" now begins the closed syllable that is accented (actually it is a bit vague the way the name is originally pronounced ... in this new term it is simply much more absolute that "ling" is a closed syllable) ... this sort syllabic conversion happens a lot in Hebrew, where it is much more noticeable because of visible accent marks shifting - it happens in English to but we just don't notice it often - sorry, I'm bit of a language geek sometimes.