Growing up, every night before bed, my mom read the Harry Potter books to me. This nighttime ritual of ours grew into a tradition that has been passed down through each of my siblings and has come to be a unifying factor in our family. Over the past couple of years, if I strolled through the living room at just the right time, I could catch a snippet of my mother’s soothing voice recounting the tales of Harry, Ron and Hermione or hear the animated gasps of my two youngest siblings, Noah and Reggie, as they listened in rapture. It was in those moments that I could travel the distance back to my childhood in a split second. Suddenly I’m seven years old again—scurrying into my pink-doused bedroom, worn blue security blanket rippling in my pudgy hands, bouncing into a nest of pillows as my mom cracks open our copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (SPOILERS AHEAD).
You see, tonight was a big night for me. If all went according to plan (and mom didn’t fall asleep while reading) I was going to find out who won the Triwizard tournament—a question that had been plaguing my seven-year-old soul for the last few weeks of our reading. Would it be Harry Potter? Would it be Cedric Diggory? Or Fleur Delacour or Viktor Krum? All seemed to be progressing well until the Triwizard Cup—secretly enchanted to be a portkey—transported Harry and Cedric to a desolate and eerie graveyard. A hooded figure raised his arm, a raspy voice crackled out, “Kill the spare,” and with a flash of green light, Cedric Diggory—possibly the kindest and fairest character in all of literature—was murdered.
The tantrum that followed was of massive proportions. With all the drama of a tragic Shakespearean star-crossed lover, I flung myself off of my bed and huddled into a heap of hysterics on the ground. My mother just gaped. “How could you not TELL me that CEDRIC DIED?” I screeched. “It’s not FAIR!” I gagged through tears. “Who else will I LOSE?! Who else DIES?!” I choked out between heaving, shuddering breaths. On the spot, my mother confessed to the deaths of other characters in the following books, pacifying my tears somewhat and mollifying my outrage.
I learned an important lesson about myself that night. I love reading—I love the escape and the characters and the endings. But most importantly, I love knowing the endings. I want—dare I say need—to know how it’s all going to turn out because, if I know that, I can prepare for the result. I can have a plan. I can be ready. With stories that are finished, I can enjoy the analysis and understanding that is entailed there. Life and faith, however, certainly do not work in the same way.
My senior year of high school in and of itself was a shining sequence of falling action. A crystallized conception of perfection, I had a community of incredible friends, parents who loved and supported me, and the grades and college acceptance letters to go along with it. Notre Dame, then, was my “happily ever after” following four years of plot building in high school. I wasn’t supposed to be made new here. I wasn’t supposed to have to acknowledge my incompleteness. I wasn’t supposed to undergo anymore character development. Stepping foot on campus, all I could focus on was my horizon. I saw the beginning, all the paths of possibility stretched out before me, and I ached to know the ending, what conclusion my path would lead me to. That future I had seen glinting in the lights of the Grotto candles as a prospective student—I arrived expecting the future, the ending of my own creation.
Where was my marvelous dénouement prescribed by senior year? Where was the girl I had thought I was? The girl who confidently marches into unfamiliar situations without a glance behind for her insecurities? Who can give and give of herself to school, to friends, to Church, and still have something left over for herself? She was there, the trap I unwittingly set for myself. She was the voice in my ear that whole first semester that whispered, “You are not enough. This pain furthers no plot point. This is your ending; thirsting and drowning at the same time, gagging in the despair that haunts your soul.”
When I returned home for winter break, I tried to melt back into my comfort zone. My best friend was home again after seven months of being away, all my other friends had come back and I was all too ready to wrap myself in that reassuring familiarity. When I went out to see a movie with a big group of friends, however, something was off. I asked two of my closest friends, Katie and Francine, about it later on, and they told me, “We’re not sure. We just didn’t really have anything to talk about with everyone—things are different now. We’re different now.”
The rest of the night, I wasn’t sure what it was about what they said that bothered me so much. Something about it, though, ate away at me, leaving me uneasy and sensitive until Katie and Francine forced me to confront it.
My walls crumbled, the façade shattered; I physically collapsed onto my bed, spilling out the demons that had haunted me for all those months. I reached a clarity in that torrent of feelings that I had never found before. It culminated in a climax of expression; that if I lost hold of that utopian senior year, if things changed and couldn’t go back, I never would find that happiness again. I’d spend my whole life searching for the completion I had once felt so powerfully.
The tears shed and the embraces given that night didn’t miraculously heal me, but, in that moment of vulnerability, I find that it was God working through my loved ones, teaching me to recognize his voice in my incompletion. A seed of hope began to grow in me, hope in my recreation, in a new happy ending. I had been so terrified of letting go of my cherished “ending,” that I had closed my heart off to any hope in a new “beginning.” By transmuting the suffering I had endured, however, I was taught to trust enough to hope again in a divinely inspired “happily ever after.”
God’s plan for me isn’t a novel I can pick up and read whenever I want. I don’t get to peek ahead at the end of the book and I certainly don’t get to coerce a confession out of him as I did my poor mother. Rather, I have to live the chapters day by day… and that’s where faith comes in. Faith in my author. Faith in the good ending—the hopeful ending that he has written for me. And there will be some twists—there already have been—and my happy ending may not involve everything or anything I expected it to. But my story has always and will always entail choosing to keep turning the pages in anticipation of the satisfaction I know my God has written for me.