Friday, May 26, 2006

Harry Potter and the Children's Meeting?

I'm off to Christchurch on Tuesday to do a 10 day swap with Stuart and Alison, the Resident Friends down there. Whilst I'm down I'll be meeting with a group of folk to try to help them focus on what they want as a Meeting in terms of provision for the teenagers/Junior Young Friends age range.

Seeing as I don't like facilitating on my own I'd roped Julian in to help me, well he'd landed me with this (altho' I do vaguely remember offerring...) so I was picking his brains when he was up here this week about where things are at in Christchurch Meeting. He was telling me about the things that had come up in a recent session on planning Children's Meetings and how he now had to work out how to incorporate a session on Harry Potter into the year as that had been asked for!

Well, as these things do, it settled into my subconscience and I started mulling over ways of exploring Quaker values through the Harry Potter books. Having read them more times than I'm prepared to admit to in public (well actually I've lost count so can't anyway, but lets just say it's more than a couple of times each and move on...) it wasn't difficult to find ways of linking into integrity and speaking truth to power just for starters (I'll take pity on any non-HP fans and spare you the details here...).

Ok, ok, some of you will have already spotted the rather embarrassing fact that it has taken me two days to remember the somewhat essential link between Harry Potter and Quakers, too busy looking for the complicated and missing the obvious I guess - d'oh! I'm so sorry Bryony...

1 comment:

Liz in the Mist said...

One quote I love from Harry Potter is in I think the 3rd movie when Dumbledore says something about having dark times but just needing to know when to turn on the light....