User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-70.145.155.177-20110723043254

It was when Harry cast his Patronus.

When I read the first two books, I considered the books as fun children's stories. They were well-crafted, with funny and interesting characters, a lot of humor, and a certain playfulness with mythology. I saw them as entertaining, but not life-changing or particularly meaningful. I spent the entire third book expecting more of what had come before: fun mysteries and kooky characters, but no real depth or horror. Sure, the basilisk and the back of Quirrel's head were frightening, but "Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort?" I still thought the stakes were low, that no one would get hurt, but also that nothing would change and no deeper questions would be addressed.

And then Harry cast his Patronus. Having gone back in time to save the wrongfully accused--a hyppogriff and his godfather--Harry waits for his father to show up, the last of the marauders. He knows his father is dead, but so many impossible thing had happened that night, that Harry wanted to believe one more could happen. And it does. Harry, realizing he is the only one who can save everyone, casts the patronus: a stag, an avatar for his father in Animagus form. In that moment, I saw exactly the significance of magic in Rowling's world. She wasn't just having fun with mythology and adventure, although there was plenty of that. She was building a way to talk about the big questions: life, death, growing up, losing innocence, life after death... And I hadn't even read the most significant parts of her series yet.

See, Harry didn't know about his father's Animagus form. He didn't know the first time he cast it on the Quidditch field. But it was still a part of him, regardless. He never knew his father, but he knew his father at the same time, because his father was a part of what he was becoming. We could see that the spirit of his father would always protect him (and not just his mother's self-sacrifice). We could also see that he was becoming his father. He was becoming a man.

It's moments like these that resonate with me. I still laugh, cry, enjoy the adventure... But the moments that reach into people's souls are what stay with me. Harry resisting Voldemort's possession with love for Sirius. Dumbledore, weakened by poison, telling Harry, "I'm not worried, Harry, I'm with you," in perfect mirror to what Harry said previously. Harry standing by his parents' grave, puzzling over the verse "The last enemy that shall be defeated is death," and Hermione refuting Harry's assumptions about Deatheater ideas (wanting to live forever) with talk of life after death. Snape's Patronus, and his heart-rending sentiment, "Always." And, finally, the moment when everything crystallized for me, when I turned the page after Harry has willingly let Voldemort kill him, and seeing the chapter title "King's Cross." Time and time, in more examples that I can name, Rowling addresses the hard questions that haunt humanity, and she builds this mythology with a power to relate to everyone.

So what does Harry Potter mean to me? I will leave it to Dumbledore from the third book: "You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him." The ones we love are a part of us, a part of who we are. We may lose those we love, but we never truly lose them. They live on, even if we can only experience them in our head. And, as we all know, just because something is happening in one's head doesn't make it any less real.