Becoming Harry Potter: Bad Blooded #MNBHP
You mustn’t blame yourself for the way the boy’s turned out, Vernon. If there’s something rotten on the inside, there’s nothing anyone can do about it…. It’s one of the basic rules of breeding. You see it all the time with dogs. If there’s something wrong with the bitch, there’ll be something wrong with the pup—”
Aunt Marge, PoA
According to Marge, Harry has been born “bad” from the inside out. The badness is not the way he was raised or from personal choice, but from his breeding. Harry has bad blood and there is just nothing anyone can do about it.
I hope by now alarms are going off in your head. As we Potterheads well know, it is not what we are born but what we choose to become that matters. Marge, in pointing her finger at Harry for his internal badness (he is a Horcrux of Voldemort), completely misses the badness within herself. She is so busy pointing out the speck in Harry’s eye, she’s missing the plank in her own. We are all born with both dark (bad) and light (good) within us. What matters is the part we choose to act on.
Harry may have badness within him, but he chooses to act in the light more often the dark. He chooses the side of good far more often than bad.
CHALLENGE:
Let’s try to be less like Marge who is more concerned with the flaws of others than looking inward to fix her own darkness. It is easy to slip into a pattern of thinking everyone else is wrong and we are right; of focusing more on others’ problems than our own. We need to admit that we have, to some extent, bad blood inside us. That is the first step.
Then we need to develop the light (good blood) within by choosing the light. To do this we must ask ourselves: What needs work in me? Greed, stinginess, lying, a bit of laziness, cowardliness, unforgiveness, bitterness, etc. Pick one area and focus on ways to turn that darkness into light. For instance, this year I’ve decided to work on the quality of generosity. I came to this decision through much thought and prayer. From here, as a Christian, I turned to the Bible for a verse of inspiration that will fuel me on my quest to choose generosity more often that stinginess or greed. (I chose Matthew 25:40, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”) If you are not a Christian (or even if you are), perhaps you will choose a famous quote from the Potterverse or another story.
What darkness are you going to turn into light in 2015? Share your answer with us using #MNBHP.
Next Week: Becoming Neville Longbottom: Boggart Master
