What Would Dumbledore Do?

It’s fine to delve into the specific contents of our lives, but it’s not the content that matters so much as the “choices.” The contents are often out of our control, while the choices aren’t. But by “choices” we can go to a very deep level of choice – to a question of whether one chooses to listen to and follow the aspiration of one’s soul.

In the case of Albus Dumbledore, we can certainly examine the contents of his life: the talented boy whose family was shattered after his father sought vengeance against a group of Muggles who abused his sister. The student who excelled as possibly the greatest student in Hogwarts history. The recent graduate whose youth was robbed by his being forced to take care of his ailing sister after his mother’s untimely death. The man whose brother Aberforth woke him from his infatuation with a budding dictator which led to a confrontation that ended with his sister’s death. The man who would later become one of the most respected Wizards ever to live, a revered professor, the defeater of the Dark Lord Grindewald, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, an outspoken advocate of equal rights, and the only one Lord Voldemort ever feared.

We can also look at his quest to conquer death through the Deathly Hallows and gain absolute power and struggle with how that lines up next to the kind, compassionate man that we were introduced to. All of the contents of Dumbledore’s life can get us into a fine mess of trying to reconcile the inner complexities of a man with such a complex path.

Certainly Harry spent a great deal of energy on his journey hunting horcruxes trying to piece together who Dumbledore was- through stories from Elphias Doge, Auntie Muriel, Rita Skeeter, Bathilda Bagshot, an excerpt from a letter by Harry’s mom, Dumbledore’s younger brother Aberforth, and his own experiences with his Headmaster.

And yet. All of those are just pieces of Dumbledore’s biography. Be it his relationship with Grindewald or his penchant for bowling, they are all helpful in understanding his personality and the content of his life. But in declaring our loyalty to the spirit of Albus Dumbledore we are not simply talking about the biography of a wizened old man whose life was colored by loss and longing and contradictions – we are talking about his conscious connection with his spirit.

The contents of Dumbledore’s life in the end take a back seat to looking at what Dumbledore aspired for on the deepest level of his soul; and that was an intimate connection with the Phoenix and Phoenix Song – and therein lies the spirituality, psychology, and everything else to the Harry Potter novels and to all of its characters: Snape, Lupin, all of them. For Phoenix Song is the intangible song of ten thousand voices, none of them decipherable specifically–but each voice, each character is part of that larger song – and that song, all of those voices together, is Phoenix Song. And it’s a song of transcendence and of love. And in the recently popular Twilight series, while Bella’s love for Edward Cullen is in some way real – that is one voice in the ten thousand voices – that kind of possessive romantic love that our culture tragic-comically thinks of as the only kind of love. But it’s only one small part of the love we’re talking about – a love that goes beyond words, that goes beyond thought, that goes beyond any thing I can possibly say right here.

For when we are getting into talk of Phoenix Song and it’s song of ten thousand voices, we are getting into the realm of what people talk about when they say God or Jesus or Buddah or Vishnu or whomever. The names change – but the “thing” is the same- always. And Dumbledore’s quest at some point in his biography when he was a young man, was to in some way tame, control, or gain ownership over that Source of Divinity. The loss of his sister broke his heart open and he gave that up and decided that despite his ego, despite his Muggle Mindset, his quest would be to have an intimate connection and regular communion with Phoenix Song – the song of the ten thousand voices – that thing that is all things, and that is love itself: a circle where there is no outside.

When his heart broke open after the death of Arianna, Dumbledore saw clearly the idea that trying to stop yourself from dying because you fear losing your place in the circle is a sign of a profound lack of any understanding of who you are and what the circle is in the first place. And then we have Voldemort – and we see that Voldemort stands no chance. Not because of any cliche about how “good” always beats “evil” – it’s because reality trumps falsehood; because lies are lies and truth is truth, and there is only one Higher Truth- what Dumbledore would have called Love and yet what he remained connected to through his utter loyalty to Phoenix Song. And this is the main thing that Voldemort could not understand: he could not separate himself from the living web that he was part of and that through eternity he remains part of. And Dumbledore spent his remaining years after Ariana’s death trying to form an intimate connection with that entire living web while on Earth- and that incorporates all characters and all people and all beings. So in the end, loyalty to Dumbledore is not simply a matter of “oh I love this old man,” “he’s so sweet,” or funny, or powerful, or he rocks so much! Or, I love how he apparates and gets down to the bottom of hunting horcruxes.

It’s about the fact that after he tried to control life, desperately, he failed, he learned from that mistake, and then surrendered. And even then, he did not surrender seamlessly. Not completely. After all, even after telling Harry on numerous occassions that the dead we love still live within us, he still put on the ring so that he could see Ariana and his dead relatives once more. Dumbledore hadn’t surrendered completely. But he tried – he tried as hard as he could.

And so as far as biography goes, we can put aside the particulars of one old man’s personality – it’s the aspiration of his soul that is at the core of Harry Potter. And his pupil (and one can even say “teacher”) Harry reaches that aspiration without intending to. This will, no doubt require further discussion as it is central in our quest to being loyal to the spirit of Albus Dumbledore – to the spirit of Phoenix Song and how we view we who are – the most fundamental and profound question that is at the core of every seeker’s journey.