Hi there,
PARENTS, how are we all doing this Maycember?
Today I think I’m partly happy that school is ending so I can get fewer emails for a little while.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Molly, Lily, and Narcissa—A Tiny Mother’s Day Tribute
(Hi! If you don’t know the Harry Potter storyline by now, spoilers abound ahead!)
Molly (strong in battle)
Molly, you are the soft one, the hugging one, the screaming howler of a mother who just wants the best for her family. Your clock keeps a constant vigil over the whereabouts of the boys and that one girl. You took in the orphan boy and made him one of your own. Your kitchen hums with activity; your garden is full of pests; your house is brimming with life.
A confession, Molly. I use you as an example for my children. You’ve taught them about swearing.
Because you are the picture of manners and decorum when all is well. But when someone came for your baby girl, you let fly with an expletive and a spell to kill. That is a curse well-placed and well-used. It wouldn’t mean the same thing had you peppered your language with it every day. The time was ripe for a reckoning, and you brought it. Gritty motherhood exemplified.
Lily (pure)
Lily, we only know you through flashbacks. You were gone before we arrived. At the tender age of twenty-one, you died for your infant son. It was your willing sacrifice for him that sealed his fate: he was the chosen one, the hunted. The Boy Who Lived.
Your sister envied you in your early years; she resented how your parents favored you. She even wanted to go to school with you—something Hogwarts could not allow. You left her behind.
Your best friend loved you for his whole life, long after you were gone. You had left him behind, also, when he let resentment and hatred grow in his heart—when he called you that filthy name. You knew the time was over for your friendship.
But unlike your sister and your friend, you never left your boy. At the times when you needed him most, you were there. If you couldn’t be there bodily, you would be in his very veins: protecting, guiding, and making provision.
“You would be protected by an ancient magic of which he knows, which he despises, and which he has always, therefore, underestimated — to his cost. I am speaking, of course, of the fact that your mother died to save you. She gave you a lingering protection he never expected, a protection that flows in your veins to this day."
Narcissa (daffodil)
Narcissa, your name unfairly names you as vain.
In contrast, I think you finally looked at your reflection at just the right moment. After all the bargaining, all the rationalization, and all the promises, you couldn’t look yourself in the face and know you’d let a child go the way of death.
Stooping over a lifeless boy’s body, you thought of your own boy inside the burning castle, soon to face his demise. And you finally saw yourself.
“HE IS DEAD!” you shouted. It was a grand lie. “DEAD!” they shouted back, euphoric.
You saved two boys’ lives in that moment. You spared countless others, as you chose not to yield to evil. One sister was gone, fully mad over a tyrant; the other sister long since defected to the other side; your husband showed himself a power-hungry fool. You had the only thread to hold: a mother’s love. You clung to it with all your might. You told a bold lie and saved the world.
Such mothers are like sacramental echoes of the unfailing love of God, the Shepherd who goes looking for lost sheep, the Father who welcomes prodigals at the end of the lane because he’s already been there looking for them. Such mothers are preambles to grace, a grace before grace, a primal, natal grace. - On the Road With Saint Augustine
For the Anglophiles
Reads & Listens of the Week
When Andy Crouch and his compatriots at Praxis Labs talk about AI, I listen. I’m grateful for this Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence.
One of Boston’s most obscure monuments is about potatoes.
I enjoyed this episode of Good Faith with Sandra McCracken: How Music Makers Help Us Make Sense of God’s World.
And just in case you missed this: a beekeeper saved a baseball game a couple of weeks back.
“How to die is a question of how to live, but how to live is a matter of knowing how to love: how to find a love that isn't haunted by fear, a love that is stronger than death - figuring out how to love rightly and live lightly with all the mortal beauties of creation without despising or resenting their mortality either...” - On the Road with St Augustine, James KA Smith
Kelly! I found tears in my eyes at the end of that essay. A gift. Thank you.
Well this was great. And now I definitely need to re-read HP again ...