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New Testament Reading—Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-46
The moment I realized that the King’s Treasure would require nothing less than risking my life was the moment I saw the giant troll outside Professor Snape’s office. From our Care of Magical Creatures Class, I knew that trolls fed on flesh and didn’t care whether it was animal or human flesh that they were eating. Yet, none of this prepared me for the smell and drool of the troll. For a week, we had been preparing to steal the King’s Treasure. When I say, “we,” I am referring to Dumbledore’s Army. For those of you have not read the Harry Potter books, Dumbledore’s Army began with Harry Potter as our leader. He was our Messiah, and we—the Hogwarts students who knew and loved him—were his disciples.
The story of this giant troll and the King’s Treasure, however, isn’t a story you will find in the Harry Potter books. Those books rightly focus on Harry. They are to Harry what the gospels are to Jesus. This story isn’t about Harry, but it is about a lesson he taught us. It’s about a lesson that we only truly learned through experience. The story begins during the bleakest and worst period in the history of witches and wizards. The evil Lord Voldemort had come to power. Severus Snape, who we then saw as his lackey, was the headmaster of Hogwarts. Harry, Ron, and Hermoine were off finding horcruxes to bring an end to Voldemort. What remained of Dumbledore’s Army was forced into hiding within Hogwarts itself. For months, we lived in a secret, invisible room known as the Room of Requirement. A tunnel to Hog’s Head Pub enabled us to receive food and occasionally the Daily Prophet, the newspaper of the wizarding world.
During those hard times, we survived physically, but spiritually, we suffered. We felt demoralized and powerless. Our minds were consumed by self-doubts. Who were we to challenge the reign of Voldemort? We were students barely trained in basic spells and charms. And, who was I but a clumsy and awkward teenager? I wasn’t a leader like Harry. What was the point of living in these wretched conditions? There was nothing we could do while hiding.
But then a story appeared in the Daily Prophet. It was about the King’s Treasure.
For years, the King’s Treasure had been the stuff of myth and legend. Children were raised with bedtime tales about a chest hidden in a vast field until the day it was found by a passerby. The passerby quickly hid the chest back where he had found it before running to retrieve all of his money so that he might buy the field and have the treasure. According to this story, the chest contained the most powerful magic in the world. Different versions of the story tell of different powers. Some say that the King’s Treasure had the power to rule over the hearts and minds of humans. Still, others say that the chest possessed a power that if unleashed would remake the entire world according to the will of its owner.
All of this seemed a fairy tale until that day. According to the Daily Prophet, the King’s Treasure wasn’t simply the stuff of legend. It actually existed, and it was now in the possession of none other than Voldemort. In the hands of Voldemort, it would ensure his position as the supreme ruler over all the earth. Not since the emperors of Rome would the world have seen anything like. In reading between the lines of the Daily Prophet, however, there seemed to be a hitch. Instead of being put to immediate use, the Daily Prophet reported that they were studying the chest in order to learn how to best harness its power. In other words, the King’s Treasure had not yet yielded its power to Voldemort. It soon occurred to us that the most likely place for them to safely store and study the King’s Treasure would be in Hogworts. Under Snape, Hogwarts had become a fortress and no one else among Voldemort’s circle would be more knowledgeable than Snape in figuring out how to unlock the power of the King’s Treasure. Our hunch was confirmed when Peeves the poltergeist reported that Snape was spending an inordinate amount of time in his office and that his office was being guarded by a giant troll.
From that moment on, Dumbledore’s Army focused on one task and one task only: stealing the King’s Treasure from Snape’s office. It was in devising a plan that we remembered a lesson Harry taught us, a lesson for making a potion known as spiritus multiplicus. Perhaps, the best way to describe the spell in English is to say that it is a spell of positive contamination. When consumed by one’s enemy, it has no immediate effect. Like a poison it travels through the body until it reaches the heart, but unlike a poison it causes neither death nor illness. Instead, it seeks out whatever warmth and goodness is in the heart and causes it to slowly multiply until that warmth and goodness takes over the entire heart. And, yet, spiritus multiplicus was more than a spell. Harry explained that it was a metaphor for our very purpose as Dumbledore’s Army. In essence, our purpose was to muster as much spiritus multiplicus as we could possibly produce and then inject all of it into the heart of the wizarding world before it was too late and there was no more warmth and goodness to be found. We were to be the yeast of the wizard’s bread.
For those of us who remained at Hogwarts, it seemed that there was no better place to begin injecting spiritus multiplicus into our society than the giant troll. We were aware of the risk we were taking. Who knew whether this giant troll had any warmth and goodness left in his heart? Still, our plan brought us back to life. It gave us a renewed sense of purpose that we had not felt for months. It was for this purpose that I was willing to take risks, even if that risk involved a giant troll.
At midnight after Snape and the other professors had gone off to bed, we used a spell to launch a large, juicy slab of contaminated meat into the direction of the troll. Once the meat was consumed, we watched and waited. We couldn’t approach the troll before knowing that the potion had worked, but we also couldn’t wait until the effects of the potion were so obvious that Snape would have the troll replaced by another one. Since trolls only grunt and do not speak, we would have to watch his body language. Our plan was for me to whistle at a distance behind the corner while a lookout observed the response of the giant. The song that I whistled was the familiar lullaby Rock-a-Bye Baby. Under normal circumstances, a troll would have stomped his way toward the sound of the whistle, but if spiritus multiplicus had its effect, who knew what would happen.
At first, it seemed that our plan had failed. I was told later that the troll let out a loud groaning grunt as his ears twitched and his head titled toward the music. But then something most unusual happened. The troll began to smile and his grunt became more like a cooing giggle. Our lookout motioned for me to come forward. Slowly, I walked toward the giant whistling each step of the way. He was captivated by the song. When I gradually moved toward the door to Snape’s office, to my surprise he opened the door for me. Once inside, I whistled and pointed to the chest. As long as I whistled, he cheerfully did anything my gestures suggested. The King’s Treasure was ours, and he would carry it away for us.
I later wondered why. Why had this giant troll been so willing to help me—me, a perfect stranger who might ordinarily be another piece of juicy meat? I can think of no other reason than this: the lullaby had triggered a basic instinct that had been buried deep within the heart of the giant. It had triggered the instinct to love and once that instinct had been triggered it became more important for him to live in harmony with the music than to do as he had been ordered by someone who embodied the opposite of love.
All these years later I am still struck by what I learned from that giant. It seems that there is still something for us witches and wizards to learn from him and from Harry’s lesson about spiritus multiplicus. After the demise of Voldemort and after the peace that followed the final battle of the Second Wizarding War, we eventually found ourselves again living in an age of war. You muggles who don’t live in the world of magic probably understand this with what you experienced after World War II and the defeat of Hitler. I am not sure what things are like for you now, but among witches and wizards, this past year has been a year of leaks and revelations. In every issue of The Quibbler, we seem to learn of the secret crimes committed by the Ministry of Magic and even our famed newspaper the Daily Prophet. For years, reporters for the Daily Prophet like Rita Skeeter have illegally eavesdropped on the private conversations of famous and ordinary citizens alike. For years, many knew of these crimes of our government and media but hardly anyone dared confront them. Hardly anyone took the risk. Is this what happens when those from the most powerful institutions in a society begin to collude and conspire? Is this what happens when power becomes centralized and controlled in the hands of the few? But perhaps you muggles don’t have these problems. As for us witches and wizards, my hope is that we can muster enough spiritus multiplicus to make a difference before it is too late. Amen.