On Harry Potter, Felix Felicis, and God

Is God a placebo?

I was recently rereading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, book six of J.K. Rowling's incredible series; and I was struck by how she described the effects of a potion called Felix Felicis.

A quick recap for those who haven't just reread the book. Harry has been given an almost impossible task by Albus Dumbledore: to convince Professor Horace Slughorn to give him a deeply embarrassing memory about how Slughorn accidentally contributed to the rise of Lord Voldemort. Harry tries various means to get the memory. Finally he plans to take a swig of Felix Felicis, go down to Slughorn's office, and hope that the potion will help him to get the memory.

But as soon as the potion touches his lips, his plans change. He dons his Invisibility Cloak and makes his way, not to Slughorn's office, but down to Hagrid's hut instead for a funeral for Hagrid's friend and former pet Aragog (a giant spider). On the way, he sees Slughorn; and, prompted by the potion, he whips off the cloak and says hello. Again prompted by the potion, he tells Slughorn where he's going and invites Slughorn to join him. Slughorn does.

Once in Hagrid's hut, the potion continues to guide Harry. It prompts him when to speak and when to be silent, when to tell the truth and what to say. It nudges him to cast certain spells. By the end of the night, it has set circumstances in motion so that Harry accomplishes his task: Slughorn gives him the memory he seeks.

Rereading the story, I was struck powerfully by how Rowling describes the effects of Felix Felicis. It's ostensibly a potion to make you more lucky, but it seems more like a very wise guide. It gives Harry clear whims on which he knows he should act. It helps him to see "clearly what was to be done." It tells him when to let a long silence hang; and when he does speak, it's because "the potion seemed to indicate that it was the right thing to do." The whole time, Harry feels like he's being guided. As he starts his walk down to Hagrid's hut, he thinks to himself:

"Why he knew that going to Hagrid’s was the right thing to do, he had no idea. It was as though the potion was illuminating a few steps of the path at a time. He could not see the final destination, he could not see where Slughorn came in, but he knew that he was going the right way to get that memory."

The whole description reminds me powerfully of how I have felt when I am hearing from, and being guided by, God.

As regular readers will know, when I talk about God I am not describing some distant figure far away in the heavens; nor am I merely describing a being who I might one day get to see in the afterlife. I am describing a relationship. The great theologian Richard Foster refers to God as the "ever-present Teacher and Friend." He says that, as we do the work of spiritual formation. "'He (God) walks with me and he talks with me' ceases to be pious jargon and instead becomes a straightforward description of daily life." 

The description of God walking with me and talking with me feels very similar to what Harry describes when he takes Felix Felicis.

Like Harry, when I have a task to accomplish, I'll often have a vague plan going in; but as I pray, that plan gets jettisoned and something far better takes its place. When I am deep in communion with God (and this is rare, but is growing more frequent), I can feel exactly what to say to someone, what questions to ask and when to stay silent, in order to untangle a knot in their psyche. It is as though an infinitely wise guide is showing me what steps to take in order to contribute to the accomplishment of His perfect will.

When I begin outlining an article and ask God what He wants me to say in it, I often feel Him nudging my mind in certain directions. Like Harry, I don't see the whole picture to start; when I am praying over an article or a story I'm writing or a speech I'm preparing, I'll feel as though God is "illuminating a few steps of the path at a time." When God has finished showing me the article or story or speech, I am left in awe; aware—and I mean this with no false humility—that what He has given me is far more beautiful than anything my thinking mind could have come up with on its own.

(To be clear, I do not wish to imply that what I say or write is "God-breathed" or anything of the sort. God speaks, but I can and do mishear all the time. But all the same, the process is quite remarkable. The parallels are so strong that I wonder if Rowling, who is Christian herself, wrote about Felix Felicis based on her own experience of hearing God's voice).

When I describe this experience of hearing from God, my atheist friends often refer to it as the placebo effect. They might be right, but I don't think so. I spent years dabbling with what I now consider to be placebos (for example, the Law of Attraction); and to me, the experience of hearing from God is utterly unlike any placebo I've ever encountered. Here, too, I think Rowling's description is useful to distinguish between the two.

Earlier in the story, Harry's best friend Ron actually thought he took a dose of Felix Felicis before a Quidditch match. Ron experienced the placebo. And to be fair, the placebo effect was powerful: Ron saved every single goal that game. It seemed as though he could do no wrong. He even reminisces about the experience.

"'It’s a great feeling when you take it,' said Ron reminiscently. 'Like you can’t do anything wrong.'

'What are you talking about?' said Hermione, laughing. 'You’ve never taken any!'

'Yeah, but I thought I had, didn’t I?' said Ron, as though explaining the obvious. 'Same difference really…'"

But of course it's not the same difference, as anyone who had actually taken Felix Felicis would know. Ron's experience is very different from Harry's. He is not guided or nudged by an external force; he's simply playing at the top of his game.

I think the difference between hearing from God versus experiencing a placebo is a lot like the difference between Harry's experience of taking Felix Felicis and Ron's experience of only thinking he did.

A placebo could have helped Harry to go to Slughorn's office and have a (slightly) better conversation with Slughorn. But only the real thing could have told him that the place he really needed to be that night was Hagrid's hut.

A placebo could have given Harry the confidence to cast certain spells, but it couldn't have shown him clearly what to say.

A placebo could have made Harry more persuasive, but it couldn't have orchestrated a positive Rube Goldberg cascade of events to make a man turn over the secret he had been guarding for decades.

In The Inner Game of Stress, Tim Gallway says that we have a Self 1 and a Self 2. I think of those as, respectively, our thinking mind and God. As Gallwey writes, "The problem in tennis—and, I came to see, in life—was that Self 1 was like a dime-store calculator trying to run the show, and in the process getting in the way of the performance of a billion-dollar super computer, Self 2." A placebo could help us to punch better numbers into our dime-store calculator. But it couldn't enable us to do quantum computing on said calculator.

Switching to God. A placebo could help me to have a better date with my wife, but it couldn't tell me—before I had even met her—to cut my trip to Barbados short so that I would be in town in April 2021 and we could have a magical two weeks together before she left for Kenya. Only God could do that.

A placebo could help me to write a better article about Critical Race Theory. But it couldn't tell me that what I really needed to deepen my analysis of CRT was to read Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. Only God could do that.

A placebo could help me to be more present and ask better questions with a friend. But it couldn't prompt me to ask about a memory that neither of us realized that he had repressed, and whose repression was making knots in his psyche. Only God could do that.

The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his life grappling with the difference between church and God. As his biographer Eric Metaxas wrote, Bonhoeffer eventually concluded that "religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something else entirely—God himself, alive."

That's certainly true of the Christian Church. We're a dead, man-made institution with something alive at our heart. I suspect the same could be said of other spiritual traditions. While I don't know Buddhism well enough to ever call it "dead", I think it too has something alive and beating at its heart. The same could be said of Judaism, of Hinduism, and of the more secular tradition of Timothy Gallwey. Spiritual traditions were made to point at something real. And regardless of what we call that something, I think we should recognize that it is not a placebo. It is, instead, the most life-transforming thing any of us could imagine.

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