Priest from the LPR stood up for Harry Potter

What can you say? If Potteriana is a bomb, then it’s kind of slow, I would even say slowed down. The author of these lines has lived in the Donbass for six years and knows very well that if something explodes, usually you don’t even have time to understand what happened. And then the years go by, but it doesn’t explode. Already those who ran around with witch hats, brooms and magic wands in the 2000s managed to give birth and raise children, and the bomb itself lies peacefully in the ground, like a rusted shell from the Second World War.

But what has changed in us and around us? First and foremost, the Orthodox have ceased to live in fear of civilization. They are much less afraid of TIN codes, digital documents, world conspiracies (although mass vaccinations, after which many saw “chipping” from Bill Gates, almost woke sleeping phobias among both believers and atheists). Moreover, few people are afraid of overseas superheroes, villains and wizards. One of my acquaintances, a priest from Donetsk, made an Easter musical at Sunday school with children, and so there was Darth Vader and even the Imperial March sounded. And this villain (who is actually always the same, just called differently) was overthrown and defeated.

But back to fears. Remember the quote from the psalm: “The Lord is my enlightenment and my Savior, whom shall I fear?” So, in the mass consciousness of the majority of Orthodox, this religious “fearlessness” has almost become firmly established. If we admit that our country was, as it were, rebooted with Orthodoxy in 1991, that is, recently, we had to inevitably go through the neophyte stage, when you are afraid of everything and want to ban everything. It’s like a transitional age.

But he has long passed for the new Russia!

Yes, in 2001 the thesis that “the Orthodox are afraid of everything” had to be refuted. But not today.

I remember that Andrei Kuraev, during the first “persecution” of Potter, wrote that if the works of J.K. Rowling were banned, then very, very many books addressed to children would have to be thrown away – Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Pushkin’s The Tale of the Goldfish, “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky and “The Chronicles of Narnia” by Lewis, Andersen’s fairy tales and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and “all the books in which one of the good characters prays to the pagan gods, picks up a magic wand, experiences magical transformations (into a wolf, frog, horse), is exposed to evil spells and is protected from them with the help of amulets or good magic. But in the end, the children will be left with nothing.

This idea was confirmed by “MK” a priest from the LPR, the famous writer Alexander Avdyugin:

– Orthodoxy evaluates any event or work from the point of view of Christ, from the point of view of love and goodness. In Harry Potter, for all its non-nativeness, non-Russianness, the victory of good over evil is at the forefront. Throwing this book into the trash, and even more so calls to give it almost an anathema, are unauthorized. Then, logically, one should throw away Russian folk tales, children’s books, where the words “Christ”, “Orthodoxy”, “pray”, “cross” are missing, but there is a triumph of goodness. We can go so far as to ban Gogol with his “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, “May Night …”.

“This Orthodoxy is not according to reason, but from the evil one,” Father Alexander is sure.

It turns out that they wanted to hype the best way, but it turned out as always. When the information wave with the letter to Olga Lyubimova was just rising, the thought immediately came to mind: this is pure provocation! And it will give rise to such “insults to the feelings of believers” that you get tired of running around the country and issuing fines.

But no – as Archpriest Maxim Pervozvansky, rector of one of the churches in Moscow, editor of a number of Orthodox publications, authors of the initiative “our guys, they are not enemies”, assured, and we are dealing with just an unsuccessful attempt to attract attention to ourselves:

– This initiative is unreasonable and harmful. Forty Sorokov has existed for several years, since its inception they have positioned themselves as an association of people who defend Orthodoxy. It all started with the idea of ​​public support for the construction of Orthodox churches in Moscow against the backdrop of protests against such construction. In the future, they had many different promotions. They collected humanitarian aid for Donbass and took it there, for example. But since you have risen on the fact that you are a defender, you need to look for new reasons. But today, no matter how there is nothing to protect the church from, the topic of temples has come to naught … And how to manifest yourself? Their activity is informational. But their initiative works against us and gives reasons to people who are far from faith to say: “There are only morons in the church.”

“Rowling’s books (I’m taking her classic texts, of course, and not her subsequent deflection to the Western agenda with Dumbledore’s gay) are very good literature. They contain Christian ideas, and their reading child, teenager or adult is sure to learn. He will understand that the strongest thing in the world is love, and the sacrifice of Lily Potter, who saved her son, is a feat. That there is no need to be afraid of death, because it turns us into Voldemort. The main motive of which, all his black magic, the creation of Horcruxes and everything else, is a personal unwillingness to die. And what is the personality of Professor Severus Snape worth! He is always perceived as a negative character, but turns out to be positive. And from here follows the conclusion without any moralizing: do not judge by appearance, do not rush to condemn a person. And all this magic and sorcery serve only as an entourage, ”our interlocutor has no doubts.

Starting any fight with what children like, we risk making the mistake that the girl from the joke made when she offered the young man to choose: either she or beer. And he chose beer!

Not the fact that children will choose – in the case of the same peremptory formulation of the question – us, and not something that we want to deprive them of! Moreover, no one can ban Harry Potter from us better than Warner Bros did.

And in conclusion, I will give one indicative case from the history of children’s literature. In the early, neophyte USSR, they wanted – for reasons of correct class education – to replace “folk unreal tales with simple stories from the reality of nature.” And then the persecutor of magic, the teacher E. Stanchinskaya, as Chukovsky recalls, had a little son “from morning to night indulge in the most violent fantasy. Either he will invent that a red elephant came to visit him in the room, or that he has a girlfriend – a bear.

If you take away something real from a child, very soon he will have the same thing, but already imaginary.