Okay, we’re among friends here, right, and I need you not to judge me for my taste, but years ago I used to love this fluffy TV show called “Fantasy Island.” Each week two guests flew to a mysterious tropical paradise to get a desire of the heart fulfilled. Their host would do the sometimes impossible and grant them their wishes but there was always some twist to the fantasy, letting the guests learn something about themselves or get something they weren’t expecting. A couple of weeks ago, at UCG Women’s Lunch that happens every Friday at noon, we played Vacation Fantasy Island, a handy game I made up for those times when you are getting your teeth cleaned or the sermon is boring or you are somewhere where it is impolite to scroll through your phone. You can just scroll through your mind, instead. Here’s how you play—where would you go on vacation if you had no limitations of money or time? Yeah, it’s low tech escapism from real life, and we need it some days, goodness knows, some dreaming, a little break from it all. Yet, it is easy to see that the quotation in our bulletin for today is true–It does not do us well to dwell in dreams and forget to live what is.
Harry Potter isn’t consciously looking for his heart’s desire when he stumbles upon the mirror of Erised in Book 1. He is busy in the process of growing and learning, trying on for the first time, the legacy of his long-dead father, and as is often true of such things, the Cloak of Invisibility has proven more challenging than expected and gets him into trouble. Trying to escape it, he runs down the hall, ducks into the door of an unused closet and amongst the other forgotten artefacts, he sees a giant, ornate and dusty mirror with its mysterious and indecipherable inscription. Though he cannot read the words and does not know if they speak a welcome or a warning, he quietly moves to stand in front of it. Is the mirror imbued with its magic as a blessing or a curse or just for entertainment, a sort of fun house mirror? Harry wonders.
He quickly learns that each person’s reflection and revelation from Erised is different. His friend Ron, open-hearted and over-shadowed, part of a large loving family of extroverted, accomplished siblings, in the mirror, sees himself as a champion, a scholar, the stand-alone standout, the hero of his own story. For his part, mostly isolated and never having had his basic needs met, Harry sees himself surrounded by the family he has never known—all of them alive, loving smiles of approval and welcome on their faces, his mother’s hand resting lightly on his shoulder. As Harry ponders its meaning, he says to his mentor, Dumbledore, “The mirror shows us what we want… whatever we want…” “Yes and no,” said Dumbledore quietly. “It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. . . .However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”
Ah, the mirror of Desire! It must be part of the human condition to find it so tantalizing—for there are so many versions of it out there. Mirrors of longing can reveal the truth and oh, how they lie. Mesmerize us, offer us a view, a choice, a mirage. Narcissus and other mythological figures gaze enraptured at their own reflection until they waste to nothing. Fearful kings and fairy tale queens, dictators and bullies, rage: “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest, richest, loudest, purest, greatest of them all?” The book of James in our Scripture for today warns us that if we are practitioners of privatized religion, claiming to know truth and freedom in our hearts, but not living in just and peaceful ways, then we are like those who don’t even recognize our faces in the mirror, forgetting who we are meant to be. I Corinthians teaches that unless it is love that strengthens, sustains, and motivates, then our insights into what really matters are reduced so that life is like looking in a wavy, clouded mirror, dim, incomplete. It is an important lesson Harry learns in front of the Mirror of Erised. For Dumbledore is right, of course, holding onto the past, envy, greed, and unrealistic chafing against what-is can lock him away from his real potential, lock us out of our real lives, but they also are important teachers, our deepest desires.
What would you see if you looked into such a mirror? You, up to your eyeballs in the deepest desire of your heart? You, with a fruity drink with an umbrella in it, kicked back on a beach on Fantasy Island? Or, maybe if you stood there, looking into the mirror of desire, you’d see something beyond daydreaming about exotic vacations. Maybe you, like Harry, have known your times of daydreaming about more noble and poignant needs….wishing that maybe this time they’ve really changed, or, that the diagnosis will be better, or no voices will be raised, the drinking will stop, the verdict will be different, the newest car or drug or facelift or partner will buy happiness, that you or I could go back in time and say, do it differently…that’s one of mine… if only wishing would make it so!
But it doesn’t make it so. Thus, I wonder what can help us look with courage at our longings and then learn to live with and beyond them? This isn’t Hogwarts magic, but I often return to the Serenity Prayer. For the enemy of serenity, it seems to me, is endlessly gazing into the mirror of unrealized ambition or longing that is like an endless loop of advertisements of all that we desire but do not have. For my own, your own, serenity, may we turn aside from that mirror with courage, accepting what cannot be changed, changing what can be and doing that work with courage–learning every day how to know the difference.
Desire is not necessarily to be denied. But it is not enough to stand before the mirror of desire and see only ourselves and our kind on Fantasy Island—for that is a mirror dimmed by narcissism. Harry’s desire to see his parents alive is born of loneliness and love and makes the reader’s heart ache—and not just for him, but for all of the children of the world who have been deprived of family, of home, of safety. It is that longing for justice and nurture for those most vulnerable that is the catalyst for compassion, the motivation for us to unite in just action for the sake of the world. Spiritual truth teaches us that love helps us see ourselves and others clearly, not in a mirror dimly, but face-to-face. It must follow that when we reflect upon our own lives and longings, that we also see others whose hearts’ desires also are for freedom and equity and security and the opportunity to love, belong, contribute, and have a purposeful life.
Harry was very young when he first began to understand the longings that had formed him, but even when we are old and facing the final vacation, as it were, we are still working on those lessons. For we are always learning from what we do not and never shall, have or change. We are always learning from what can distract or mesmerize, preoccupy, or tantalize us away from our highest selves. And in large and small ways, we are trying to learn how to fully live into and then at the last, to relinquish the greatest thing ever to be viewed in the mirror of Erised—our own one wild and precious life—all that we long for, we will ultimately be asked to let go of. I believe it is also true to the spirit of J.K. Rowling and to that of Jesus and the other saints and prophets to say that desire, when properly directed, motivates each one of us toward a passion for life and for the right, for wholeness, for justice, for love. But it is desire transformed into transcendence that is part of our realizing our divine spark.
The Irish teacher, Diarmuid O’Murchu writes: “We engage desire, not primarily by adopting a moralistic and legal coding, but by working co-operatively for the right relationships that facilitate liberation and growth at every level of life. Striving to get relationships right is the heart and soul of the New Reign of God. And it is not merely human relationships, but right relating at every level from the cosmos to the bacterial realm. Creation is forever held in the embrace of a relational matrix, and from that foundational source all relationships find their true place and purpose.”
The embrace of a relational matrix forms Harry Potter’s story and ours, with our longings and losses. You and I live, often seeing ourselves and others in a mirror dimly, sometimes seeing clearly only afterward the compromises and choices we have made. I find such grace in the learning opportunities we have every day, so many choices for gratitude, in spite of, because of, what we’ve longed for, gotten, or lost. Nikki Giovanni reminds us, “If I can’t have what I want then my job is to want what I’ve got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want.” The transcendence is found not in denying my desires or others’ desires, but in fully transforming them in the crucible of right relationship with Earth and each other, in learning again how to live a generous, compassionate, and grateful life. May we start with the person in the mirror. May it be today. Amen.