Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

First, the D.A.

“Dumbledore’s Army.”

That group of courageous students committed to actually practicing their defense against the dark arts at a school in which the practice had suddenly been dismissed in place of pure theory.

Note: The wise Dumbledore acknowledged the reality of Voldemort’s return and encouraged vigorous practice while the incompetent Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge and his lackey Dolores Umbridge refused to face reality and thought pure theory was sufficient.

Moral of that story: As wise wizards, let’s embrace the practice. :0

That’s the first part of this Idea. The second part?

The fact that it’s a LOT easier to do our magic when everything is nice and bright and shiny than it is when it’s suddenly dark and the dementors are out in force.

(Have you noticed?)

But, OF COURSE, that’s why we train in the bright lights of the good days—KNOWING that we’re sharpening our skills so we can show up most powerfully on the dark days when it matters most.

Therefore, when those inevitable tough days come, we don’t want to whine and complain and drop our good habits. We want to rub our hands together and say, “THIS is what I trained for!”

I’m reminded of a few Stoic philosophers: Epictetus, Seneca and Ryan Holiday.

First, Epictetus. In Discourses he tells his students: “Bearing all this in mind, welcome present circumstances and accept the things whose time has arrived. Be happy when you find that doctrines you have learned and analyzed are being tested by real events.”

He also tells us: “If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?

I suppose there might be some who are sitting here losing patience and thinking, ‘Why don’t I get to face the kind of challenge he did? I am growing old in a corner, when I could be winning a crown at Olympia! When will I be nominated for a similar trial?’

This is the attitude that all of you should adopt. There are gladiators at Rome who get frustrated if they are not called out and matched with an opponent, all the while begging God and their own supervisors to be allowed to do battle one-on-one. None of you here shows anything like the same mettle. Which is why I would like to escape to Rome to see my favorite wrestler in action, he, at least, puts policy into practice.”

Then we have Ryan Holiday echoing the same wisdom in The Daily Stoic where he tells us: “Seneca writes that unbruised prosperity is weak and easy to defeat in the ring, but a ‘man who has been at constant feud with misfortunes acquires a skin calloused by suffering.’ This man, he says, fights all the way to the ground and never gives up.

That’s what Epictetus means too. What kind of boxer are you if you leave because you get hit? That’s the nature of the sport! Is that going to stop you from continuing?”

Here we are at the climactic end of the battle that started in the Department of Mysteries in the search for The Prophecy.

Dumbledore is dueling Voldemort. Two things we’ll discuss with this passage.

First, our heroic Dumbledore is, as always, super calm. That wizard’s cool as a cucumber!

Which begs the question: How did Dumbledore cultivate that level of equanimity? Well, I think Emerson captures it pretty well in Self-Reliance. He says:“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

Dumbledore and his radiant calmness is also the perfect embodiment of another gem from Self-Reliance: “The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.”

In other words, Dumbledore did the work. He mastered himself. His peace and calm comes from a lifetime of winning the small battles with himself. His calmness is the living personification of the triumph of virtue and goodness. It’s as if angels are escorting him through life.

He’s also, as always, super wise. Reminding Voldemort that there’s something worse than death.

What is that?

A life without precisely those virtues Dumbledore has worked so hard to cultivate and to teach his students at Hogwarts. A life of integrity. Courage. Loyalty. Love.

In fact, Hagrid touched on the importance of living for something more than just yourself earlier in the book when he told Harry: “There’s things more importan’ than keepin’ a job.”

What’s more important?

Again, virtue. Doing the right thing BECAUSE it’s the right thing EVEN WHEN it’s the hard thing. That’s what makes life worth living. The absence of that is worse than death.

That’s from a scene in which Harry is ragefully destroying Dumbledore’s office—torn apart by the pain of losing Sirius and his belief that it was his fault. Alas, our wise, calm, heroic mentor Dumbledore is there to counsel our shaken hero.

Harry’s greatest strength? It’s Voldemort’s greatest weakness.

Harry cares. He cares A LOT. So much that it hurts. A LOT. And, it’s that openness to life and willingness to experience the full range of human emotion that is Harry’s greatest strength.

Which reminds me of wisdom from Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. She tells us that we need to embrace four paradoxical practices. The fourth practice of “true belonging” and living an authentically heroic life? We need to have a “Strong Back. Strong Front. Wild Heart.”

We need to have the courage to stand by our principles = “Strong Back.” AND… We need to have the courage to keep our hearts open = “Strong Front.” Plus… A “Wild Heart.”

Brené tells us that: “The mark of a wild heart is living out the paradox of love in our lives. It’s the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid—all in the same moment. It’s showing up in our vulnerability and our courage, being both fierce and kind.”

Here’s to staying open to all the joy AND the pain in life as we use our greatest strengths in greatest service to the world.

Two more things here.

1. Dumbledore isn’t perfect. (Enter: Common Humanity.) 2. He’s willing to admit when he makes a mistake. (Enter: Leadership 101.)

We hit on the same theme in our Note on The Chamber of Secrets in which Dumbledore “ate his words.” It’s fun to see the themes that Rowling comes back to.

As Maslow said: There are NO perfect human beings. Sages and saints and truly great people. But NO perfect people. Not even one.

Let’s embrace our humanity and have the courage to admit when we fall short.

The Prophecy. (One of the two times Sybill Trelawney accurately predicted the future. :)

What power does Harry posses that the Dark Lord knows not?

The most mysterious force in the world: LOVE.

Which, happens to be the most absolutely essential force for a true hero.

And, as we learned in Natural Born Heroes, love is at the very etymological roots of the word “hero.” Here’s how Christopher McDougall puts it: “And what Plutarch taught them is this: Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.

When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that mean ‘Dies Trying’ or ‘Massacres Bad Guy.’ They went with hērōs—‘protector.’ Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.”

(btw: Let’s connect our prior idea about rubbing our hands together when the dementors roll in to this chat about heroes. Here’s another way Epictetus frames it : “What would have become of Hercules, do you think, if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar? — and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir him into action?”

Back to love. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner could have guessed the power Harry had that Voldemort lacked. In their research, they found that ALL great leaders have it.

In The Leadership Challenge they tell us: “Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services. Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.”

Back to heroes. Joseph Campbell taught us that, often times, the hardest part of the hero’s journey is not the quest and the battling of the dragons. It’s the RETURN.

In Pathways to Bliss he says: “The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself. The whole point of this journey is the reintroduction of this potential into the world; that is to say, to you living in the world. You are to bring this treasure of understanding back and integrate it in a rational life. It goes without saying, this is very difficult. Bringing the boon back can be even more difficult than going down into your own depths in the first place.”

You know what fuels that return? LOVE. It’s the ultimate secret sauce.

Love for the gift that is our lives. Love for the people with whom we’re blessed to spend our days. Love for the people we serve and love for all the anonymous people who make our lives possible. Love for the challenges and love for the celebrations. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.

Let’s keep this powerful, mysterious force alive in our hearts today as we go out and give the world all we’ve got!

With love,