Sgt. John Granger of the United States Marine Corps (stationed in Japan) was proud to say that he was perfectly normal, thank you very much. He was the last person you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious — especially invocational magic — and the last person you would expect to become a Hogwarts headmaster because he just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Granger found himself obsessed with the ideas of a Japanese food cult called ‘Macrobiotics,’ which in Japanese goes by the name Shoku Yo Do, the Way of Strong Food. He’s a lanky man with a winning smile, although it once topped with a very large mustache Clark Gable would have admired.

“I’d seen AIDS reversed, cancer cured, and heart disease cleared up ‘before breakfast’ by the application of Taoist natural science principles to food selection, preparation, and presentation. Not only did it change my physical life, it altered my perspective on the world from a largely conventional, empiricist, individual understanding to something well off the conveyor belt. I left Divinity school to study with Macrobiotic teachers, then joined the Marine Corps to get to Japan.”

His Japanese teachers in Boston required him to read Way of a Pilgrim and his UChicago mentors recommended Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Schuon’s Transcendent Unity of Religions, and Burckhardt’s Alchemy. He stumbled on some other books, most notably was Kallistos Ware’s introductions to Orthodoxy.

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“Just as the Marine Corps’ caste culture forced me into a vertical perspective, the iconological and sacramental life in the traditional Church began the transformation of my vision and understanding from a postmodern, rationalist perspective to a noetic one.”

He converted to Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which pushed him to teach Macrobiotics, “the Way of Communion,” in that context post-Corp. He went bankrupt on that initial effort, wound up at Whole Foods Market in Houston as a Store Trainer,  and when that went bust, a bishop asked him to help start a mission on the Olympic Peninsula, became a literal tentmaker.

Dude made yurts.

He fell “well off the conveyor belt” and grew “sensitive to how several alternatives to conventional institutions and memes were explicitly New Age but implicitly traditional despite the real efforts of their proponents. John Holt’s unschooling, for example, is packaged as a corrective counter to compulsory factory-style education and the Christian school-at-home movement but is, I think, best understood as a traditional vocation-focused education. Similar things could be said about Marily Moran’s Birth and the Dialogue of Love, Barry Kaufman’s ‘Option Process,’ and Gerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.”

Nonconformity touched every aspect of his life.

“By the time Harry Potter entered my life, it was Y2K and we were living in Texas. I was a Reader in the ‘Old Calendar’ Orthodox Church, married with six children (four delivered ‘home alone’), number seven on the way, I was an unschooler who didn’t have movies or television in our home, eating a first millennium Japanese diet of whole grains, miso soup, and sea vegetables, and riding my bike the seventeen miles to work as the Houston metro-trainer for Whole Foods.

“I was living the right-side up life in what seemed to the World as Upside-Down Land. If you flew into Hobby Airport in south Houston, you could see the twenty-six-foot tall tipi outside my front door in Pearland. My dream was to live next to an Orthodox Church in a yurt village where I could live with my clan without the use of an automobile.

“A young woman with whom I worked at Whole Foods urged, no, begged me to read the books to my children. I’d never heard of Harry Potter in early 2000 but really didn’t think that the story of a boy wizard going to school to learn witchcraft was something I wanted to share with my brood. Invocational magic, etc.

“I was blissfully unaware, living in news blackout and library entertainment land, of The Controversy.”

He means, of course, the freakout war that the politicized Evangelical community staged against Harry Potter — something I too missed deep in rural Illinois. I prefer to point people towards The Onion article that was taken literally at the time. He told his wife about his work conversation. “Mary said she was leary of them because the books seemed to be everywhere and stacked to the ceiling. Could anything that popular be any good? Contrarians as we were by that point, anything accepted and promoted by institutional entertainment, media, schools, health care, or faith groups was unwelcome in our home.”

“Mary said she was leary of them because the books seemed to be everywhere and stacked to the ceiling. Could anything that popular be any good? Contrarians as we were by that point, anything accepted and promoted by institutional entertainment, media, schools, health care, or faith groups was unwelcome in our home.”

“A woman that Mary had helped reverse several chronic conditions in borderline miraculous fashion, a pediatrician struggling to get her head around Shoku Yo Do and Orthodoxy because of her Baptist faith and medical training, gave my oldest daughter Hannah a copy of the first paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I took it from her when I found her reading it and explained I would read it that night and explain to her in the morning why we don’t read trash like that.

“By the time I got to Harry’s conversation with Firenze in the Forbidden Forest, I knew the book was anything but trash. The alchemical nature of the stone, that there was no invocational magic, and that the author was smuggling the Gospel both subtly and brilliantly blew me away. I told Hannah in the morning that not only could she read the book, she had to — and I was buying the next two book in the series that day. Which I did.”

I asked him about that word smuggle. I have friends in Brooklyn that hate that idea: smuggling the Gospel. “Do you think that all art smuggles something?”

John said, “Art is representation which involves interpretation which is another way of saying ‘implicit meaning.’ So, yes.”

Encountering Christians in Houston who abhorred Harry Potter startled John: none of his Eastern Orthodox community seemed bothered in the least. His “Harry friendly” family avoided “skandal,” but in fact “that Protestants Christians didn’t like it may have weighed in Harry’s favor to that group.”

“The first interpretive moves I made were to explain to my co-workers at Whole Foods how silly The Controversy was given the evident Christian content of the books. I mean Harry comes back to consciousness after a three day coma at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone; how transparent do you like your fantasy fiction to be? Can you say ‘Resurrection after three days’?

“As unchurched and hostile to devotional Christianity as Whole Foods team members can be (very), they were more than receptive to the idea that Harry-Hating Christians in Houston had missed the boat on these books.”

When they moved to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and he read Richard Abanes’ Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick, a shift happened. It seemed from my research that Abanes provoked John at every turn. “John,” I asked, “Did you respond to him or did he simply prompt you to dig deeper?”

“I read Richard’s work and trusted in the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism to provide a response to the absurdities in it. Surely a Christian reader of Rowling’s work would be tagged by a reputable publisher to counter the transparent errors in the book. Or an academic would discuss the artistry and meaning that was driving Potter Mania.

“Nope.

“I had moved my family to the Olympic Peninsula at the request of a bishop and a priest planting a parish there (we were the equivalent of an instant congregation). The job I found there in a yurt factory disappeared six months and a day after I started when they filed for bankruptcy. In the months I looked for work, I was asked to give a Harry Potter talk by friends at the Port Townsend C. S. Lewis Society, which became three talks at the Carnegie Library in town.

“Stephen Schumacher asked me to write up my notes from those talks as a project for his wife who was recovering from a chronic illness and needed some engaging distraction. She designed books. The Hidden Key to Harry Potter was the product; it was largely a response to Richard Abanes’ book with an appendix that made my disappointment and disagreement with him explicit.

“Stephen said he would order five-hundred copies of the book from the printer but ordered five-thousand instead. Good thing. The books were gone in just a few months. I gave my first ‘Featured Speaker’ fandom talk at ‘Nimbus 2003’ on the strength of being a ‘published author’ and that lecture on Literary Alchemy was voted Best Presentation. Tyndale bought the book, changed the title (insert weeping and gnashing of teeth) to Looking for God in Harry Potter, and my Walter Mitty life as Potter Pundit began.”

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Meanwhile, John’s book comes out at Tyndale. He got some interesting responses:

“Connie Neal wrote two books, What’s a Christian to do with Harry Potter? and The Gospel According to Harry Potter, which tried to address the Potter Panic among Christian culture warriors by arguing (a) the both the for and against Potter readers had important points and then (b) that, if you wanted to and turned the pages at just the right angle to the light, you could see Harry Potter as filled with Christian content. It wasn’t there mind you, but, like looking at cloud formations, certain shapes in the story-line were suggestive.

“She was crucified, figuratively speaking of course, by the Harry Haters. Her ministry of speaking at Church retreats and seminars evaporated.

“Then, when Deathly Hallows was published she shifted her position to ‘I’ve been telling you all along that the books were Christian, start to finish.’ [paraphrase] This won her a few fans in the Potter community and lost her what little credibility she had with church groups. Connie still has the scars; like Richard Abanes, she is forever identified with Harry Potter and The Controversy.

“I missed all that. Unlike Connie and Richard, my take from the start was from English literature rather than biblical exegesis.”

This also saved him from becoming an internet virologist, I suppose: focused on meaning rather than money, meaning rather than being mean.

“The Harry Haters largely left me alone because I wasn’t speaking their language. Christian Harry Potter fans thought my books and weblog were great. The unchurched thought it was a challenging idea, that is, that books drawing on Christian literary traditions might by default have Christian content, inside and out.

“There were questions and conversations — and very little bomb-throwing or character assassination. I escaped unscathed. For which, praise God. I can see what my life could have become if, like Richard, I had hunted every day for mentions of my name on the thousands of Harry Potter fan sites and culture war internet outposts.

“And, I realize now, even if I’d wanted to, unlike Richard’s unique last name, mine is the same of a major character in the book series. I never could have chased down mentions of ‘Granger’ to be sure I was being treated fairly.”

So a bit of liquid luck played a hand.

Why champion Rowling instead of some other author?

“Well, I never really chose to champion Rowling, I guess. I was tutoring homeschoolers in Latin and SAT prep in addition to working the scale at the Jefferson County dump in Port Townsend. I gave some talks on Harry Potter drawing on my contrarian background and familiarity with symbolism, Eliade, and alchemy.”

Talks became a book. Book became lecture dates. Lectures became to media appearances. Appearances more books, the Mugglenet podcast, and the whole HogPro community .

“Why Rowling, though, even today? I think it is because I know more about her work than almost anyone living, strange as that is to say out loud. I’ve done what I think is important, even ‘defining’ work about The Hunger Games and Twilight but I come back to Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga and her post Potter novels and screenplay because even her disappointing efforts are fascinating.

“I’m studying for my PhD now at Swansea University and the University of Central Oklahoma. I’m learning after fifteen years in the subject Rowling’s real debts to writers like Nabokov and Colette, whom she has named as favorites, and to mystery writers like Margery Allingham, P. D. James, and Ian Rankin whom she hasn’t. My researches into her probable source material for literary alchemy opened up the field of Perennialist criticism and ring composition.

“In other words, it hasn’t gone stale.

“And? I keep meeting the most fascinating, thoughtful, friendly readers. My circle of friends is so many times larger and more interesting than what it could have been outside of Harry Potter. Ask me and I’ll bore you to blindness with the list of eggheads with whom I correspond consequent to Potter related conversations.”

Featured Download: click here to get John Granger’s 12 Rowling Story Sources Every Potter Pundit Needs to Know.

He doesn’t think her other books excite readers the way the Wizarding World does, but I asked him about the Nabokov connection because — let’s be honest — it’s hard for most cut from the cloth of Abnes, Spartz, and Neal to see any Christian symbolism in a book like Lolita.

“Rowling’s primary debt to Nabokov, I think, is in her work as a subversive parodist who re-invents genre parameters to her own ends. With respect to English High Fantasy, she parodies Lewis in the way that Lewis did Nesbit — and delivers an as-powerful Christian message about and experience of choice, belief, and doubt as the Inklings ever did.”

“Rowling’s schooldays stories, an orphan Bildungsroman in a Gothic setting, are loving send-ups of these genres which Rowling simultaneously subverts and reinvents for her own ends. Lewis does the same with Nesbits’ The Psammead in his The Magician’s Nephew, baptizing the brilliant children’s story and re-orienting it.”

He believes people get the symbolism wrong because they don’t understand “traditional signifiers have transcendent referents. Modern critics are not believers, for the most part, or they are nominalist doctrinaires when it comes to writing so the closest they get to the experience of story as translucency are allegorical and satirical point-to-point correspondences, especially those of a political or historical connection.”

On a meta note, I asked him if criticism is every helpful or constructive:

“I do my best, Lance! Really, though, all human life is narrative, the story we write about the life we’re living and how every day’s events confirm and incarnate that adventure in our day and night dreams. Critics, if they’re doing their job, make us understand story better which should make us better story tellers ourselves about our selves.”

And for burgeoning authors — what advice would he give to encourage them down the Rowling and Lewis path?

“PLAN. Then spend more time planning. Especially with respect to structure (both Lewis and Rowling are ring writers).”

But the Harry Potter critical community still has obstacles to overcome in order to be taken seriously. Johns thinks since academic organizations have grown complicated with semi-absolute taxonomy borders, Harry isn’t read seriously by anyone but the Kit Lit crowd.

“That probably reads like a slam on the children’s literature wonks, which is a shame (almost all the really important work for years came out of their departments). But critical confinement to an ill-fitting categorization is what it is — a mistake that restricts critical consideration. The Kid Lit experts are not going to get the Nabokov influences or the Colette or the Doyle.”

He also points to ignorance of Rowling’s post-Potter writing:

“Very few Potter Pundits I know have read Casual Vacancy, Cormoran Strike, or Fantastic Beasts with anything like the attention they have given Harry’s adventures. If I’m right and the Strike novels are commentaries-via-correspondence with their Potter numbers, this is a sin of critical negligence of the first order. If they aren’t a parallel series? It’s still negligence.”

Lastly he pointed to “Cross-Generational Blindness and Critical Dispersion: There are at least three generations of Potter scholarship to date — the Pioneers (98-07), Post Publication Pundits (07-15), and now Generation Hex, the academics who grew up reading the Hogwarts Saga. And there is more critical literature on Rowling and her first books than for any living author ever. As a rule to which there are few exceptions (Beatrice Groves — and who else?), folks writing about Harry Potter don’t do their due diligence and read what’s been written. One part of that negligence, not the larger part but an aspect, is that there is no J. K. Rowling Society at a major university that sponsors a conference, publishes a journal, or reservoirs and updates a bibliography.”

Perhaps he might form one?

Who knows. I grew curious at the end of our time as to what he might expect from Generation Hex as they grow up and age into the creative fields themselves.

“Rowling is a writer who has read widely and with great appreciation. Reading Oxford University’s Beatrice Groves’ Literary Allusion in Harry Potter reveals her Rowling’s studied familiarity with Chaucer, Gawain, Milton, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, and Shakespeare. And that’s not to mention her admiration for Vladimir Nabokov, Colette, Margery Allingham, Roddy Doyle, and the Inklings. I don’t expect much from the Harry Potter community at large as they grow up because I have seen no indication that that Rowling’s fans appreciate the artistry and meaning of her work or that they have done the reading and thinking necessary to create something akin to the Hogwarts Saga. Writers of her own generation who are wide readers as well — Lev Grossman, Stephenie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth — get what she has done, I think, and are able to write well, consequently, because of their own diverse and rich reading backgrounds.””

Featured Download: click here to get John Granger’s 12 Rowling Story Sources Every Potter Pundit Needs to Know.

The train of the community begins to move and I walk alongside it, watching the soon-to-be Dr. John Granger’s thin face and others like him, already ablaze with excitement. I keep smiling and waving, even though it’s a little like bereavement, watching the community glide away and come of age. His features emerge once more from the last trace of steam evaporating in the autumn air: the Hogwarts Headmaster.

John’ll be alright, I murmur to myself.

As I look down at our interview, I lower my hand absentmindedly and touch the last book with the phrase “lightning scar” to be written. The scar of having prevented his daughter from reading popular trash had not pained John for nineteen years (give or take).

All was well.