As I heaved through an Insanity workout at 5:30am this morning, my mind wandered to prophecies (naturally) prompted by a conversation with my illustrious and deep-thinking housemate.

I don’t think I’ve before appreciated this – but remember how, in Harry Potter’s final installment, it is revealed that the prophecies foreshadowing Harry’s significant role in Wizard-dom history actually applied to two characters within the world? In a stunning reveal, J. K. Rowling implicates Neville Longbottom as an equally eligible future challenge to Voldemort’s preeminence. If I remember right, Voldemort simply had to make his best guess; he targeted Harry and, in doing so, sealed the vastly different life trajectories of both characters (and, arguably, his own eventual fate).

For a secular, mainstream franchise like Harry Potter, Rowling’s willingness to invoke a niché plot element like prophecy is interesting anyway. And in the above sequence of events, I think she takes that a step further into a very real, sophisticated struggle with the concept of prophecy – one that’s relevant in my life because the Gospel and the Bible makes use of prophecy as a (albeit minor) tenet of Christan faith.

Prophecy can be significant. If someone said something would happen in the future – if they named happenings, details or elements they shouldn’t be able to know or predicted specific sequences that weren’t controllable or manufacturable – that then came true, we’d take notice. Sure, self-fulfilling prophecies and beliefs are powerful and in the same instance a bit arbitrary. But in those rare, but sometimes certifiable, instances where a human pronounced something with certainty that then became reality later, it causes us to think.

Reality is a scrolling screen with incredibly limited forward visibility. Though we often live life as if we we know what will come next, we don’t. Our contrived certainty is a product of enough things in this life being sufficiently dependable that we can make sense of the world around us. We live as if we’ll finish school, keep this job, marry, continue breathing, be able to rely on the status quo, or carry on like we think we will – and oftentimes those things end up more or less true.

Prophecy is a weird deviation from the conventional assumptions we collectively deem reasonable. In theory, prophecy is an exlusive peek behind the curtain. An insight into things we normally don’t see. Certainty where we normally only have probability.

Except that, for all practical purposes, prophecy is hard. It’s confusing. Mystic. And difficult to interpret. For every example of an eerily accurate prophetic validation, there could arguably be countless prophecies recorded in history that are cryptic, unconfirmable, suggestive, or could apply to a host of things. Interpretation is not always DIY. So why do we bother with them at all? And why did J. K. Rowling include them in her book?

-LS