HPST Re-Run – Frustration: The Boy Who Lived (Book 1, Chapter 1)
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Hi, everybody. We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. Since we are taking this week off and reflecting on saying goodbye to the great Matthew Ichihashi Potts, we thought it would be fun for you to hear Matt on Book 1, Chapter 1, see how much he's grown in some ways and not grown in the 30-second recap. As a reminder, it was Matt's idea that we start Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts

Casper and I were happily teaching our Harry Potter is a Sacred Text local class. We got a little bit of press coverage and people were asking us if there was a way for them to come in on Skype. This is pre-Zoom years. And we were like, no, sad. We don't know how to do that. And Matt was like, hey, silly gooses, silly geese.

why don't you create a podcast? And so even though we are saying goodbye to Matt, formerly as a co-host on the podcast, he has been with us since the very, very beginning. So we thought we would remind you of that today. So we hope you enjoy this throwback episode and we'll talk to you in the new year. Chapter one, The Boy Who Lived.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of No. 4 Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. ♪

I'm Vanessa Zoltan. And I'm Matt Potts. And this is Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Series 2. 2.0. Coming at you. 2.0. Can I just tell you, when you started reading the chapter, I was like, oh crap, I have to do a 30-second recap. Like, it's still giving me stress. And I prepared, I looked at the notes that I was supposed to look over for this episode and just kind of skipped over the 30-second recap because I was like, oh, I'll think about that later.

And later was 15 seconds ago when you started reading the chapter. Yeah. So. You know that we're not supposed to prepare for the 30 second recap, right? I'm not prepared. You can see my notes. I'm not prepared. I think I did. That was the point of my whole conversation was. Look, Matt, nobody's expecting you to beat me in the 30 second recaps. Casper and I practice alongside of each other for five years. And

And even in his last episode, I reigned champion. So you're a newbie. Everyone's going to have really low expectations. I mean, you assume that I aspire to victory. I want only not to embarrass myself. Nobody's expecting that of you.

So, Matt, we picked this theme of frustration to talk about this first chapter based on our last conversation. And it is your turn to tell an opening story. What story are you going to be telling? So my story comes from when I was a teenager. I can't remember exactly how old I was. It was before I was able to drive. But it was after the point at which I thought I was better at math than my dad.

And I know this because it centers around a math argument with my dad. And we were driving in the car. I remember we were driving in the car and the price of gas had just dropped dramatically. And we were talking about when would be the best time to refill your tank in order to save the most money on gas. My dad said one thing and I said another thing. And we just started arguing about it, right? Yeah.

And I was convinced I was right, like absolutely convicted that I was right and that he was wrong. And I kept explaining myself over and over again, telling him that he was wrong and I was right because math. And what happened is I started to become resentful towards him because like you're not listening to me is what I was thinking. I have the truth. I have the answer. You're just not listening to me. And it became personal. It became about him personally.

not understanding me rather than not understanding math. And then he explained it to me one time and it clicked and I realized he was right. And what's funny is

My frustration at not being adequately heard didn't go away. Like, I immediately knew that he was right and had to admit it. But I was still kind of upset with him because he hadn't listened to me. Even though he—it's demonstrably true that he had been listening to me because I had been explaining to him the wrong thing. And he was saying, yes, I hear you. You're wrong. Right? Like, so—

So, I mean, just what got me thinking about is this, like how frustration can be or maybe is often kind of a limit to one's imagination, right? You're so convinced that you have the right way. You insist that the world accommodate your way of seeing things rather than acknowledging that maybe my way isn't the right way. And I should try to expand my thought to accommodate the world, which is actually the thing that I'm answerable to, right? Yeah.

So that's my story. And can I just say that your father was definitely saying that the tank had to be as empty as possible because that would be correct. I don't know why you don't remember this equation. I think it might be I am so chastened that I'm afraid to get it wrong again. And just like, you know what? I acknowledge that I do not understand math and that others should explain it to me instead of being frustrated at math. I'm just going to acknowledge that math knows math better than I do. Yeah.

Totally. Well, Matt, I'm so excited that you are about to start 30 Second Recaps because it is a practice of engaging with frustration. I think my strategy going forward with the 30 Second Recaps, at least to start as a newcomer to this, I'm just going to try to go through it fast.

And if I end up at 20 seconds, I'm going to gift those 10 seconds to the universe and our listeners. And if I, if I'm not done, then I'm going to hear the buzzer and just, you know, I took my best swing and struck out. I think that's just the only way to go. Cause, cause in a couple of times that I've tried doing the 30 second recap in previously, the timer gets in my head.

Okay, I'm going to go first. So I will lead the way. Would you like to count me in to my 30 second recap? I'd love to. Three, two, one, go.

So there's a very normal family, but they're having sort of an abnormal day. There's a cat reading a map and there are all these people in weird outfits. And Vernon Dursley is driving to work and he's finding this very stressful and overwhelming. And then he overhears the name Potter, Harry Potter. He goes home and he's like, should I tell my wife that I heard this name? It'll probably upset her. And then there's a split. And then there's this weird conversation that happens on a driveway. And it turns out that Harry Potter is this boy who fought off this man called Voldemort just before.

Wow, I did not do a good job. You think you didn't do a good job? I thought the beginning where you said very normal, abnormal day, that was very good. That's a skilled 30-second recapper. Matt, are you ready to do your first 30-second recap as co-host of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text? I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be. On your mark, get set, go.

So the Dursleys live at number four Privet Lane and they will have no truck with Privet Drive. Oh my gosh. I got the word wrong. Is it drive or lane? Drive. Yes. I'm 10 seconds in. This is awful. Uh, they live there. They put, have no truck with anything mysterious. They go to work. There were wizards everywhere celebrating, uh,

He decides not to tell them about hearing Harry Potter's name. The cat turns into a professor and Dumbledore comes and Hagrid comes with a baby on a motorcycle. And then they all cry because they're giving the baby and James is literally dead. And the episode ends with people celebrating and toasting Harry Potter again.

You're definitely hustling me because there's no way that you are naturally this bad. 30 second recaps, Matt. This is what I'm telling you about nerves, right? Like I said the first thing wrong and then I got in my head about being wrong and then I was lost. And this is also my instinct about not looking at the clock. By the time I figured out the name of the street that the Dursleys live on, I was at like 12 seconds. So...

I have seen you give talks in front of like really famous people and being great at it. I know, but they don't say beforehand you have 30 seconds. OK, so it's the timer. It's the timer.

So, Matt, the place I want to start is obviously with the Dursleys at the very beginning of the chapter. And I have a theory that there are productive forms of frustration, right? A sort of famous moment in my life of frustration has to do with you. I could not figure out how to structure my book. And I had been working on it for months by myself. And eventually it got so frustrated by that.

I started talking to everybody about it. And it was all that I would talk about because I couldn't be stuck in my head anymore. And so I talked to you about it and you in five seconds figured out the structure of my book, right? So I think that sometimes frustration can bring us out of ourselves or can make us more imaginative. And I was just thinking that in this opening vignette of the Dursleys, I wish that maybe Petunia and Vernon got frustrated with Dudley.

Dudley is throwing these tantrums. He's kicking his mother. Vernon is unable to like land a kiss on his kid and he just goes little tyke.

And I know that parenting young children is very frustrating. And the two of them just seem to be in a mode other than frustration in regards to Dudley. And we see that later, right? That Dudley grows up to be this bully. And I think in part that's because his parents never show him frustration. They are...

And that's obviously counterintuitive because we want parents to be patient with their children. But I wonder if also children seeing people get frustrated and seeing that there are limits to other people's patience teaches them how to live in community and that things aren't always about entirely them and their desires.

So I think that I would want to draw a distinction in everything you said, including like your own experience of your book and also in the parenting, like between affect and behavior. I mean, frustration is a feeling.

What you do with that feeling is what can be productive. The feeling is the feeling. And so like you were frustrated by your book. I don't think that feeling was productive or unproductive. I think your reaction to it was productive. Like my reaction to my dad in the car arguing about gas to my frustration was unproductive. I started to resent him. And even when he told me the right answer and I agreed with him, I still resented him. That's an unproductive use of frustration. Right. And so what you did is you went to folks and you started talking to anybody who would listen. I think that's the way you put it. Yeah. Instead of turning inward. Yeah.

And away from a possible solution, you actually said, OK, there is a solution. I don't have it. I'm going to go reach out to community or develop community around these questions. So, like, I wouldn't say that the frustration was productive. It's the occasioning kind of affect for your behavior, but it's a behavior, right? And I think I'd say the same thing for parenting. I mean, parenting is frustrating. It just is. What we want are parents who are loving and understanding parents.

When they are frustrated because every single parent is frustrated, every single person in any relationship. Right. Like you're always frustrated with the people you love. That's just because they're people and you are, too. And so the question is not how do I avoid frustration so as to have a loving relationship? It's when frustrated, how do I react lovingly? Now, the tricky thing with the Dursleys is like there's one read in which they are reacting very patiently and lovingly to patiently.

I mean, the way I read the Dursleys is that there's this tension inside the Dursleys, which is they are so desperate to be like everyone else. So desperate not to stand out. So desperate to be normal. But they also have, and this is a natural, I think, parental reaction, loving reaction. They're also absolutely convinced that Dudley is special and not normal, is the best, is the best child, right? Yeah.

And that's its own kind of frustration, I guess. I mean, if you carry it to the other sense of the word frustration, which means to impede or prevent, like they are frustrated in their efforts to actually help Dudley become the boy and man and grown up he might one day be because they already believe they understand who and what he is and therefore care.

cannot access the community around them or other solutions or other ways to react to his really awful behavior. So in that sense, I see what you're getting at with frustration because there's something about them already believing that he's flawless that makes them incapable of responding to his flaws.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to articulate this yet, but frustration has like a line to it. It's about boundaries to some extent. If Dudley is perfect, then that means that the world is completely broken because it isn't going to it

every moment acknowledge Dudley's perfection. And we see that as soon as Vernon leaves the house, he's frustrated by everything. There's a cat and it's looking at a map and that's upsetting. And there are owls and there are people in clothes that are annoying, right? People in the cloaks enrage him, right? So if your house is this place of perfection, as soon as you leave it, the world has to be

This place of constant frustration. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it makes me think about sort of this thing I keep going back to about frustrations relation to understanding. Like, how do we react to that which we do not understand? You know, if you're parenting a child with behavioral issues, you don't understand why their reaction is to be like, oh, no, I do understand little tyke. That's what little boys do. And he's the best. And this isn't the first paragraph of the novel, right? Like they resist mystery entirely.

They cordon off any kind of possibility that there are things that they can't understand because they're afraid of what they don't understand. The reason he's enraged by the people in cloaks and robes is because why would people be wearing, right? And you can hear him come to his little explanations. Oh, it's a fad. You can see him trying to make an understanding of it and eventually just putting it out of his brain because I can't accommodate it.

What I don't understand, it's related to fear and insecurity like that, which we don't understand is what causes fear and insecurity. And that's, yeah, so it's deeply related to, man, gosh, all this stuff in the first chapter in these books, actually. I mean, I was a little bit, I felt as I was reading the chapter and preparing for this week, I was thinking frustration. We're beginning on frustration. Why are we beginning on frustration? What is...

Why is this the theme, the first theme for our reading the book? Because you picked it. Because I picked it. Right. But then like seeing how deeply tied frustration is to the issues which are so much more prominent in the book, at least fundamentally.

more obviously prominent around fear and mystery and understanding and how we react to those things either with love or with hate, right? Like frustration is absolutely on that continuum and you can see it in this chapter and in all the major characters and the different ways they're reacting to fear and uncertainty and misunderstanding in this chapter. I mean, Vernon, it's so interesting. He gets like initially frustrated by people wearing cloaks and then he's like, oh, it's young people. Yeah.

And then when that answer doesn't suffice, when there are older people in it too, that's when he gets enraged, right? That is the limit of his imagination. He was like, okay, I opened my mind to the possibility and now you're asking me to do it again? No. And that is when he gets angry. Can I just say that the irony is,

of the gender queering in this chapter being the thing that makes the quote unquote bad guys obviously bad is

Can you say more about that? Sorry, I'm not following. Yeah. So there are all of these men in dresses, essentially, right, that upsets Vernon. He's like, why are all these older men in robes? And that is what really upsets Vernon. He's like, I don't like seeing men in dresses. And then Dumbledore arrives and he's in high-heeled boots. And we get a sense that this story

street is so square that the line is nothing like this man had ever been seen on Privet Drive. And I would say that men in robes and men in high-heeled boots, right, are two gender nonconforming ways of dressing. And the fact that that is in the very first chapter of these books and that Vernon, very much the bad guy of this initial chapter, hates it.

But anyone who is accepting and understands that the world is complicated is fine with it. It's just such an interesting way to start these books, given that we know J.K. Rowling's discomfort with this exact thing. I mean, it's like Freudian. Yeah, I think you're right, Vanessa. I hadn't actually thought of that reading. I think it's a great one, especially in light of everything you said and what we've learned of J.K. Rowling in the last couple of years.

But I hadn't thought of that. And part of the reason why is because I think that, you know, I'm a I'm a person that wears robes a lot as a minister. There are these certain kind of roles. One's traditionally restricted to men, by the way. Right. Where one one is asked to be a minister or to administer the mysterious or the inexplicable or that which is.

beyond understanding, right, that we do don robes to kind of signal that we are in this liminal space of like the sacred or where that which can't be easily understood where we approach it, right? And so I was kind of thinking about the robes in the light of everything I've been saying about the relationship between frustration and imagination. But I also think you're absolutely right. And it's really important to bring in the reading that you introduced as well.

Well, I think that Vernon, if he saw a priest in robes walking down the street in Little Wayne Jing, would also be upset, right? He would be like, that belongs in the church. I think that he is someone who thinks that everything has a place. And I think that often that is what

The most pernicious form of frustration is to me. I grew up in Los Angeles in the 90s, and so gay rights and movements around AIDS was like a constant conversation. And people would say, I don't mind what you do in your own bedroom, but don't throw it in my face.

And it was like homosexuality was something that was OK as long as it was in a bedroom and I don't have to see it. And so it seems to me that frustration is often about when something isn't in the place where you think it should be. And Vernon and Petunia sort of think it's OK that magic exists as long as it doesn't exist anywhere near them.

And I wonder if they would be more frustrated with Dudley if he had the same behavior stuff and was a girl, because they seem to me people who are gender essentialists and would be like, no, but girls are supposed to be sweet. It's good that he's tough and, you know, fighting affection and.

They are just people who really believe that things should be in their place. I mean, that's Petunia's whole job, right? Petunia's whole job is simultaneously keeping everything in its place, keeping the house as clean as possible, and yet sticking her neck out

where it doesn't belong, her ear where it doesn't belong and breaking that boundary. So we're seeing that tension in them that they want everything to be in their place. And yet they can't resist it not being in its place. You know, I'm not sure that the Dursleys believe that it's okay if magic be in the world as long as it has its place, because I think that

I think they would prefer a world without magic because the whole point of magic is it's out of place, right? Like it doesn't make sense. It's not really sufficiently magic if it is explicable, which actually brings the whole project of Hogwarts and the Wizarding World into different relief, right? Like what does it mean to have systematic magic or magic which can be studied and understood in a comprehensive and exhaustive way? But I think, again, what they're scared of is the idea that

of not being able to control or not being able to keep things in place. Right. I think magic's always kind of out of place, which is part of the problem there.

I think you're absolutely right that if Dudley were a girl that they would not accommodate this behavior or they'd be frustrated. They would react to their frustrations differently rather than explaining it away. They would correct it or discipline it in some way. And this is getting ahead of ourselves, but it makes me think of Hagrid because Hagrid shows up in this space, in this chapter, and he is the most openly emotional, obviously. He's weeping, which is not a typically masculine thing. His show of emotion, right?

is not typically masculine. And yet he's also like brutish, manly, lots of hair, lots of facial hair. He's got a big size. Right. And later on, he reacts with kind of stern force to the Dursleys. Right. And so like the Hagrid, this is interesting because the Hagrid that the Dursleys see is profoundly masculine in the classic and kind of toxic ways. Right. He's big and he's hairy and he's,

Not that there's anything toxic about being Harry, but that he's big and he has masculine features like lots of hair and he acts with force and strength and even violence in order to protect Harry. They don't see the other side of who Hagrid is, which is his deep, deep emotion, his deep willingness to show affection and to weep and to be really vulnerable to others and to children and to peers, right?

And this might be another one of those places where we can see the text reading back against J.K. Rowling. If we see the dress in this chapter as a form of gender queering, we can also see Haggard as a character who is pushing back against the forms of essentialism that Rowling is speaking in defense of in other contexts.

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I mean, to me, that leads us so beautifully to like the most frustrating part of the chapter for me, which is that they don't knock on the Dursley's door. That the magical people, right, that Hagrid, McGonagall and Dumbledore don't knock on the door and wake the Dursleys. Because a doorway and a driveway seems like a beautiful thing.

of like a liminal in between space where in the dark of night, these people could meet and Vernon and Petunia could see Hagrid crying and Petunia could be told by people who loved her sister that her sister died and that a conversation could really happen, a transition could happen

And this is a moment where frustration could have been really productive. Vernon and Petunia's frustration with the magical world and it being in their lives could get them to say hateful things in front of people who could actually correct them and make them less afraid of it. And instead, there's just like such avoidance of this fraught situation by Dumbledore that

I just, I can't imagine the decision that went into like, let's just leave this child alone.

the doorstep. Like, it's just a wild decision to me where he does not think that this should be any sort of conversation. Even places where death is part of the plan, right, in war, we have systems set up that people find out that their loved ones are dead in personal ways. An officer gets sent to your door to tell you if a loved one has died in war and

And yet Dumbledore tells this woman that her sister died in a note. I mean, I also want to be like forgiving of Dumbledore because I also, you know, I think that when they send that soldier to the family's house to inform the family, it's not somebody that knew the person that died. They don't send people who are in the fight with them. They send a person whose job it is to be an impartial person or a chaplain. Right. Dumbledore also dies.

knew and loved James and Lily. And I think all of them are in the midst of this severe grief. And so they're making bad decisions because that's what we do when we're in the middle of like awful moments and really conflicted moments. So this is a bad decision, clearly. And they should have done something else and should have anticipated other versions of this plan so they wouldn't have to react to their own like grief in the moment. So it's the wrong thing, but it's also sort of, it's just in the wake of tragedy, people do the wrong thing a lot.

That's the other thing that I find really hard about this chapter. It's something that will come up again, I think, at the end of the books after the victory, right? Which is like the overriding emotion of the characters we care about most in this chapter is sadness and loss. But the overriding kind of activity of the world is celebration. Right?

Right. Everyone's happy. Everyone's toasting. Right. And McGonagall is frustrated by that. McGonagall is like, great, we finally defeated the Dark Lord, but we are going to be outed by the Muggles. Yeah, right. Because everyone can't contain their celebration. That's right. That kind of uncomfortable juxtaposition arises over and again in these books, maybe most notably at the beginning and the end of the series, where these events, which are terrible personal tragedies,

also occasion these public celebrations and public goods. And that just made me think about our world. Like right now, everyone in my immediate family has been vaccinated and we're super grateful and we feel like joy and a sense of celebration. But just reminders that in my home state, the virus is exploding again and people are continuing to die and will be continuing to die and hundreds of thousands lost. It's just...

It's this tension between private and public experience is one that we have to hold together and that the books from their beginning invite us to. Matt, it's our first Lectio Divina with you as our co-host. I'm going to say this for every section. It's our first voicemail with you as our co-host. It's our first credits. I'm very excited. So the sentence that I picked is the potters. That's right. That's what I heard.

So step one of Lectio Divina, we ask ourselves the context of the sentence and what is literally going on in the sentence. Matt, do you want to answer that? Do you want to do step one? Yeah, sure. So what is literally going on in this sentence is Vernon Dursley is going about his lunchtime routine on this slightly...

abnormal day which he is trying to pretend is not abnormal and some of these abnormal and extraordinary people are like around him chattering about the potters and their son harry and so this is this is obviously queuing things in his head which he has to actively suppress in the hours to come throughout the rest of the day not just for himself but also with petunia with his spouse

The thing that confuses me about this sentence is because we're only in the middle of this conversation that we pick up, are they saying...

The Potters are dead. Is that the previous sentence? The Potters. That's right. That's what I heard. Because it seems as though the subject of who is what's in question. Like, was it the Potters or was it the Greens? Yeah, I guess I'm reading it a different way, which is less like, who was it? Which family? But just like, no, not James and Lily. Like, these people were safe. We knew they were safe. They were close to Dumbledore. They're a part of the army. Like, this is not them. More like Dumbledore.

Grief denial. It's interesting, like the line after Mr. Dursley stopped dead, fear flooded him. Like there's something about the use of the language of fear and death, which is linking Vernon's experience of just anxiety about his relationship to this family, to the actual tragedy that went on even already before he consciously knows it. There's some hint that that this is going on, that something awful and terrible and tragic has happened.

There is such an interesting moment later in this chapter where Vernon asks Petunia, their son Harry, he would be about Dudley's age now, wouldn't he? And it's so funny because if children are the same age, they're always the same age. They don't become the same age at a certain moment.

And so it just seems like he's entering the possibility of this child being real into his mind in this chapter. He isn't quite sure that the baby's name, he doesn't really know how old, and yet he's like processing all of this for the very first time in this chapter. So step two of Lectio Divina, we ask ourselves what other stories this reminds us of, what allegories this reminds us of. So the potters, that's right. That's what I heard.

Matt, I'm so excited to have you on because you actually know the Bible. Is there a moment in the Bible that this reminds you of? I mean, I think that this moment of grief where people are trying to figure out what happened is just sort of like the end of every one of the Gospels and maybe even the Book of Acts, which is a story of the community that arises in the wake of Jesus's death, right? Because people are trying to figure out what happened. Who is he? Where is he? What happened?

And some of the disciples, they hear the story and they're like, no, that didn't happen. Or we saw Jesus and they're like, no, you didn't. Right. Like there's a there's just in the wake of news that no one is ready to accept. Every piece of news is hard to believe. And so you're trying to confirm. I mean, maybe it even points back to this conversation we're having about frustration. Right. As a failure of imagination, as as when you actually can't incorporate the news of the world into your world. Right.

Your only reaction is to say, "What? No, that's not how math works," or whatever. Right. I'm thinking about the TV show Veronica Mars. Logan Eccles, who's our bad boy hero, his mom dies, and he thinks that she's faked her own death in order to get away from his father. And so he launches this investigation to look into her death, and it turns out that she is dead.

The way that the show portrays it is that his grief is almost doubled, that there's this combined feeling of any optimism I've ever had in the world is false in the grief and the grief for his mother. It's just, I think, interesting to me, again, as like we're focusing somewhat on Petunia's grief in our reading of this, just that grief hits us in so many different ways, that we're not only grieving the person we lost, but we're grieving Petunia.

Our identity as someone who believed in goodness or our identities as a sister or... It's not just missing the person, but there's so many other things to grieve. Which makes me wonder about these folks. What was their relationship to the Potters? Are they...

well-meaning wizards who support Dumbledore and are afraid of Voldemort and so know about the Potters? Or did they know them personally? Like the wizarding community seems like it's a small enough world that people know each other personally, right? And so like, it just makes me think of like just walking down the street when you pick up conversations, like how close grief might be to the people who are just around you in the world, right? And

And you never know. Like we I began this reading assuming that these folks were just like gossipers. Right. Like, oh, who, who, who? But we don't know. Like these people might have might have known the potters personally or whatever. And like it requires attention to actually discern that because a word or a phrase or something you overhear is not going to tell you the depth of somebody's pain.

Yeah, I mean, next is step three of Lectio where we ask ourselves what this reminds us of in our own lives. And I know I've told this story a million times on the podcast. Apparently this profoundly impacted me. But I don't think I've told this snippet of it. My friend...

Brandy died when I was in high school. We were on the soccer team together and we had soccer practice one day. She got hit by a car while crossing the street that evening and I didn't know about it. This was before Facebook and stuff like that. And I got to school the next day and she

She was in the grade below me and a bunch of people in my grade were sitting around a table gossiping about it, not in a mean way, but like sharing this information. I joined the conversation and the whole table looked at me like, oh no, somebody who actually knew her is now joining the table, right? It was switching from gossip to personal. And really I'll like never forget the kindness of

Oliver Grigsby, who was just like so gentle and kind when he told me. And he seemed to know that it was like a transition from an abstract idea of someone in our high school has died to someone Vanessa knew and was friends with died. It's like the nuances of these things are wild. Yeah. Oliver Grigsby needs a blessing today, maybe. Yeah. He was so kind.

What about you, Matt? Is there something that it reminds you of in your own life? The potters. That's right. That's what I heard. You know, I'm just giving an example from the New Testament about like in the wake of grief and loss, people are trying to confirm the story. But even 2000 years later, we just had the Easter season and talking to my kids and they're like, but wait, really? Jesus didn't really do that, right? Because that doesn't happen, right? There's these kinds of after these traumatic, world-changing, life-changing events and stories, which are spread by word of mouth, right?

Because, you know, you have a vision of the world, which you're trying to fit the news of the world into. When it doesn't fit the world, you know, you have to confirm. You have to restructure how you see the world entirely based upon this new information. And that takes work. And your brain isn't one's brain usually isn't good at making that turn or restructuring itself so immediately or quickly. I'm wondering if something is lost in the fact that like now when someone famous dies, like

we all find out at the same moment. So there isn't this us telling each other moment. Like when Christopher Plummer died, an actor that both Peter and I really love, we were in different rooms and we like both got the notifications on our phones and we like went to each other and we're like, oh, that's so sad. But I also think that there's something beautiful about this sharing of information. If like one of us found out

And the other didn't to go and say, hey, did you hear that there's like some caretaking in that, that I wonder if technology is bringing us away from. That I think that's that's possible. But also just to point it back to the text and the conversation we were having earlier about like maybe don't give the news of your sister's of a person's sister's death in a letter. Right. Dumbledore, like maybe this is news that needs to be delivered.

Personally, especially when everyone, McGonagall especially, but everyone there already knows this is not a family well-equipped to handle this news. This is not a family that is good at accommodating radical changes to their worldview. So maybe we need to, if not for them, at least for Harry, maybe we need to escort them into this transformation a bit more gently. And that's all...

considering the fact that Dumbledore is grieving too. And so he's making bad decisions, but it's a bad decision. Yeah, I know. I mean, the Dursleys are going to emerge is so awful and abusive. And so I don't want to give them too much slack for that. But

how you are told something, when you are told and in with what consideration you are told matters. And so I can imagine Petunia already has resentment towards the magical world. And then the magical world just leaves her a note and a kid. Like, why would she have any respect for this world? Yeah. And that world is the one that

Killed her sister. Killed her sister. Like, yeah. I mean, and then they don't even give her the message well, right? Yeah. They took away her sister. They killed her sister. They don't tell her well. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. Again, like we want to be, this is not to apologize for or defend their behavior later or their behavior presently. Right. It's just to kind of understand that this is what, this is what loss does. Like it hurts pervasive and replicates and...

Among people and in their lives. And yeah, it doesn't turn everyone into child abusers, right? Like no, it doesn't. That's it. So step four of Lectio Divina, we ask ourselves what this conversation with this text makes us feel called to do in our lives. And so I'll read it one more time. The potters. That's right. That's what I heard. There's so much pain in our world right now. I mean, like, I mean, every person, you know,

has this person that has been lost in the past year and a half know someone who knows someone or know someone who knows someone, right? And this level, you know, the question I was asking before about what's the degree of separation between these, the people having this conversation and the potters, like you only know that if you stop and pay attention, if you don't keep walking like, like Vernon Dursley and pretend it's not part of your life. And so what it says to me is like, I have to pay more attention, right? Like everyone's dealing with loss, right?

in hundreds of thousands of cases of death, but also loss of all kinds of things. And it's not enough to just kind of know that's the case or suspect it's the case and then move along with my day. I actually have to spend time paying attention to folks and hearing how deep that pain is and listening to it and trying to hold it.

Even as I wrestle with my own, right? Try to hold in a way that can keep it from replicating into the sorts of hurts that we see replicating in this chapter. Hold it in a way that can not diminish or suppress or ignore it, but contain it at least. Hold it. Hold it. Right. So that's what it's saying to me. What's it saying to you, Vanessa? I'm someone who really likes making decisions based on facts.

And like something I will say to my family is like, well, let's look at the numbers. And like that is a financial decision, not an emotional decision. And I think this makes me feel called to allowing for decisions to be emotional of like we don't have to decide every single thing about my parents retirement based on the numbers.

that these decisions are more than just the numbers and that we have to double check, right? Are these really the numbers? Is this really why? I guess I want to double check myself. Yeah, I quoted Toni Morrison last week and I'm going to do it again. Toni Morrison may show up a lot in this podcast because she's the best American. But in the same essay I discussed last week, she says the distinction that we need to make is not between fact and fiction, it's between fact and truth.

Because truth requires human intelligence and facts don't. Facts just are. And I think what she means by human intelligence is we can look at numbers and those numbers are facts. But to know what they mean, to make a decision about them,

to understand what the risks at choosing one over the other are and to acknowledge the consequences of taking those risks is not a fact question. That is a human question. It's an intellect. And as you're saying, an affective and emotional question. And that's not to say, therefore, we choose one thing or the other. It's that in making a choice, we realize we're making a choice and that there are costs to the choices we make. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Matt, thank you so much for that beautiful Lectio. Thank you. Thanks for introducing me to the community's Lectio practice. Our voicemail this week is from Dallas. Hi, Vanessa, Matt, and Ariana. My name is Dallas, and I'm from Philomath, Oregon. I'm calling in about Casper's final episode on the theme of transitions.

Vanessa, you mentioned that Petunia hasn't received word of her sister's death until she sees the letter from Dumbledore and Harry on the doorstep almost two days after the fact. This reminds me of a major transition in my own life when I had a professor ask to see me at the end of finals week one term in undergrad. He told me I had failed my piano class for the second time and wouldn't be able to continue in the music education program.

In that same meeting, we also talked about potential future career options, and so I was able to transition to becoming an arts administrator that very day. This meeting and petunia circumstance has me thinking about who we can trust to help us with our own transitions in life. This professor happened to be the only person I would trust in the university to help me navigate this transition.

I'm wondering who the ideal person in Petunia's life would be to inform her of this major transition. I don't think it would be Dumbledore after he rejects her request to come to Hogwarts. And maybe that's why he left a note. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks for all your work on the podcast. Bye. Dallas, hi. It's so good to hear from you. Dallas is in our Tuesday night classes, Matt, and is a wonderful person.

I love this question that Dallas is bringing. And I wonder if Dumbledore doesn't remember this letter exchange from so long ago. I would imagine that as an administrator, he deals with a lot of these types of things. Dumbledore remembers. Yeah. He totally remembers. He shouldn't be giving the news or he or he should. But even more so in person. See, that's what I think. I think.

You know, I want to take seriously what Dallas said about not trusting anyone else at the university to deliver this news. But I think it's the latter thing you said, Vanessa. I think it's even more so Dumbledore has to deliver this message carefully. And by carefully, I mean like with care, right? Not just like judiciously so I don't step on any toes, but like this loss is an ongoing one. It's a loss that's associated with

with Dumbledore, right? And there's a sense in which like, I don't know, I feel like only he can really deliver this news of this death, but he has to do it differently. He's got to do it differently. Because I don't think there's another person close enough to the Potters, to Lillian James and to Harry, or to the magical world, you know, whose sort of authority Petunia would recognize who could deliver this message. And so he has to be the one, even if he's

poorly equipped to do it, like from an emotional perspective. Yeah, go ahead. No, I just also wonder if the Minister of Magic should come. I think that that is something that Vernon at least would respect. Yeah, maybe. I'm cynical about when government officials show up to provide condolences. Like, I think that's usually more about the government official or the people who are not experiencing the immediate loss.

And that's not to diminish that. I think sometimes communities who are also suffering their own sense of loss in the wake of a tragedy, it means something to people who are less close to the tragedy to see a government official show up and offer condolence to the family. I think to the family, the person who delivers the news should probably not be the president. Right. Like. Right. Emotionally, it's Hagrid. Totally.

Totally. But you can't have a giant walking in your, like he would terrify them. But emotionally, the person with the right, like emotional sort of capacity to actually be there for them and to tell them what's going on and encourage them to love Harry and to tell them how good James and Lily were, like the person who could do that right now is Hagrid. But because of who the, not because of who Hagrid is, because we love Hagrid, because of who the Dursleys are and their own perceptions of what a half giant is.

would mean, signal to them, he becomes a poor deliverer of that message too. Wouldn't Hagrid make it about him and like his sadness? Yeah, you're right. Hagrid might. Boy, this is tricky. Boy, what a rich question, Dallas. Like, because I think in the one, there's the official response, right? But I think about like the tragic deaths that I've experienced in my life. Like I haven't been the person to receive the official phone call. It's been my mom or my dad who has then come to me to tell me.

And they were also grieving in those moments because of people we lost were people that we both loved. But I'm glad that they told me and not like the other phone call, right? Or the more official phone call. And so maybe, yeah, maybe I want to sort of change my comment from earlier episode or just like nuance it a little bit and just think that, boy, the roles of delivering a message are so different and who should get them and how they should get them is so complicated. And right, there are limits to the degree to which a non-grieving person can deliver the message because sometimes...

Even if you're grieving, you're responsible for doing it well. Bad news is hard to give. Thank you so much, Dallas. Every week we read the names of people in our community who have been lost to COVID. This week, we remember especially Ward Pep Brinkerhoff, 59, a father of three and the handiest of men. Philip Morrisberger, 87, who was a painter. Brett Van Hecke, 50, who never sought attention and always put his family first.

Mary Mollica Ward, 51, who was a teacher, an artist, a mother, a co-worker, and a friend. Gerald Rubenstein, 86, a grandfather who was a generous host with a raucous laugh. And Ruth Glass, age 94, a loving mother and grandmother that let perpetual shine upon all of them.

So Matt, it is now time to offer blessings. Who would you like to bless this week? So this week I would like to bless the old wizard that Vernon Dursley runs into as he leaves work, the wizard in the violet cloak.

And the reason I want to bless him is because, you know, we've focused a lot upon some pretty sad stuff in this chapter and really tried to call forward a lot of the hurt and really anguish and tragedy that's in the background. And I guess even in the foreground of everything that's going on in this chapter. But there's also there is just a lot of joy and celebration everywhere in this chapter. And as I think about this old wizard in his violet cloak and.

Like, I wonder if he has ever in his life been out in Muggle society, out in the Muggle world, just being a wizard with his cloak on, just full of joy and unabashed.

and ready to celebrate. And even running into a cranky muggle can't ruin his spirit. He's being who he is. And maybe for the first time in his life in public, being who he is. And it just, it fills me with joy and it makes me want that feeling for everyone. So I wanted to bless the old wizard in a violet cloak this week. So who are you blessing this week, Vanessa?

I want to bless Vernon's secretary who gets yelled at by Vernon. She's done nothing wrong. He is upset about this news on the street.

And I just think about all the times that that's true, that we're like yelling at the person who's there, but not the person who we're mad at. Or like we can't even quite figure out who to be mad at. So we're yelling at the person who's there. I want to bless the secretary for that. I feel like in COVID, we've all taken things out on the people who we happen to live with, that it's like not their fault. And it's happened to all of us.

So I want to bless the secretary. I just hope that she knows this isn't about her because sometimes I can take these moments so seriously and spiral and wonder, what did I do? And I would like hate to think that the secretary is like, oh, no, what did I do now? And that instead she knows like, oh, my boss is just a jerk sometimes. So I want to bless her out of hope that she doesn't take this personally.

So, Matt, next week, we're going to read chapter two, The Vanishing Glass. What should our theme be? It should be something fun. Yeah. Well, you know, Vanessa, in your blessing just now, you mentioned hoping that Vernon's secretary just knows he's a bad boss, a joke of a boss. And we've kind of focused on, like you said, on some difficult things this week. How about hope for next week? Why don't we read The Vanishing Glass through the theme of hope?

Great. I like hope. I don't like hope, but I hope that I like hope. Yeah. I hope that you like hope too. And I like hope. I think that there are good forms of hope and bad forms of hope or maybe useful forms of hope and unuseful forms, but we can get into that next week. But anyway, yeah, let's read, let's read about hope or think about hope for next week. Okay. So chapter two, the vanishing glass, we will do through the theme of hope.

You have been listening to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And you can find listeners who are discussing the episodes of the podcast in our Facebook comment room. Join our local groups and come join the community of people supporting us on Patreon. We have new perks. You can leave us a review on iTunes and send us a voicemail. We are a Not Sorry production. Our executive producer is Ariana Nettleman and our music is by Ivan Paizao and Nick Bull. We are distributed by ACAST.

Thanks this week to Dallas, who sent us such a rich and wonderful voice memo, to Molly Baxter, to Julia Argi, Nikki Zoltan, Megan Kelly, Kasper Ter-Kyle, Stephanie Paulsell, and of course, everyone who sent in the names of their loved ones this week. Thanks, everyone. We'll talk to you next week. Matt, you're officially a co-host. It officially feels great to be an official co-host. Mazel tov. Looking forward to next week. Thank you. Thank you.

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