CLA Conference 2022 and Superbloom!

Tuesday, July 26, 2022


Superbloom at the Tower of London!


Earlier this month, I traveled to London to present a paper at the conference on Catholicism, Literature, and the Arts, hosted by Durham University and the University of Notre Dame. It was a wonderful week of personal and professional flourishing! I’d never traveled on my own to a foreign country before, and I’d also never given a paper outside of a seminar classroom.

Throughout the week, I delighted in designing my own schedule (i.e. spending as much time wandering museums, strolling through gardens, and sipping tea by the Thames as I desired), and in developing my ability to navigate a professional context with curiosity and gratitude, rather than fear and trembling. I discovered that the best way to approach a conference, when I’m anxious about making a good impression on everyone, is to flip the focus and think instead about serving others. “How can I give to others here?” was a much better question than, “What will I receive from this?” because it allowed me to look for ways to affirm the research others are performing, and it freed me from my own cramped expectations of how the conference should go.

With that perspective in mind, the conference experience opened up for me. The delegates were excited to share their research, and I learned so much from conversations that happened over tea and lunch breaks. And everyone was so friendly; they were happy to get to know me, too! When it came time to share my own paper, it felt like just that: a sharing of my work with new friends, rather than a fretful desire to please.

The conference was an absolute feast for the mind, and with a focus on all kinds of art (music, visual art, poetry, prose, dance) it was a feast for the senses, too. The parallel paper sessions and plenary events were thoughtfully designed to incorporate the conference theme of “the poetics of liturgy and place” and at times, it felt more like a spiritual retreat than an academic conference. Just wonderful all-around!

Regrettably, the week had to come to an end at some point, but not before one last adventure at the Tower of London on my final morning in the city. In honor of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the Tower moat has been bedecked with English wildflowers in a lavish display called Superbloom. For a small fee, you can purchase a ticket to walk around inside of it… and also, if you’re feeling especially adventurous, slide into a field of flowers (that might have been my favorite part). It was like a fairy tale come to life! The colors were so vibrant, the scents so sweet, the music – for they had tucked speakers streaming gentle yet soaring strings into the landscape – utterly transporting.

It was also a prayer. Perhaps it’s no surprise that I came off a conference about liturgy and place thinking hard about the transcendent significance of this place in which I now found myself. And as I wandered and pondered, delighting in the display, I felt the Lord speak two truths into my heart, truths that I would like to share with you now:

“You are worth more than many wildflowers.”


As I immersed myself in the cheerful landscape of flowers, stopping to admire glistening pearl dewdrops on pastel petals, and glittering traces of dappled gold on white flowers, I felt simultaneously delighted by the beauty of what I was enjoying, and in awe of the perfection with which each of these tiny flowers had been so intricately designed. My mind darted to Matthew 6: “Learn from the way the wildflowers grow. They do not work or spin… If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will He not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?”

If God delights in creating these wildflowers, how much more does He delight in each one of us! How much more intricately designed are we: masterpieces that stir the Lord’s own heart with delight at every moment! As beautiful as I found those flowers, we are infinitely more beautiful and radiant to Him. And if He takes care to fashion each one of those little flowers in exquisite detail, how much more is He designing our own hearts and the circumstances of our lives?

Which brings me to the next truth He whispered among the wildflowers:


“This is what I want to do in your heart.”


As I meandered through the fields of flowers, I picked up a short leaflet sketching the moat’s history. Though built to protect the Tower from attack, the moat silted over time and became a health hazard, so it was emptied and grassed over in the mid nineteenth-century. It’s been that way ever since – until now, of course, when Superbloom has given it new, beautiful life.

I was struck by the way the moat’s history sounds like the story of my own heart. I realized that I have often built my own moats to protect myself from vulnerability and attack, and subsequently closed down the parts of my heart most in need of healing. I have put up defenses to keep people – and sometimes even God Himself – from getting inside. And over time, those defenses, well-meaning as they might have first seemed, have become hazardous to my heart.

Can anyone else relate?

But here was the Lord, saying beside me, I can give you new life even here. I can turn this grassed-over moat around your own heart, which you have created to cover what you perceive to be dangerous waters, into a lavish display of My love. I can redeem it into something more beautiful than you can imagine.

Indeed, He has already begun! There was a time when I would have closed myself off at a conference, when I would have let past wounds keep me too afraid to talk to anyone, when I would have felt sure that they all thought I was stupid. I would have let myself think that I don’t know what I’m doing and that I really didn’t belong there among so many people clearly more practiced than me.

I did have a moment on the first night where I felt all of those things, but I didn’t let myself dwell there. More likely, it was God’s strength that saw me through. That I was able to let go and see so much good in the experience is a testament to the work that God is already doing in me to redeem what has been broken, to plant fields of wildflowers in my own heart, and to give me new life.

And He wants the same for you, dear friend. What brokenness can you surrender to Him today?



A Promise for Troubled Times.

Thursday, March 17, 2022

 



“I am with you always, until the end of the age.” – Matthew 28:20

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” – John 1:5

***

I was reminded recently, by a number of sources (isn’t it funny how a revelation will repeat itself, gently but insistently, until you claim it as your own?) that the goal of the Christian life is quite simply this: union with God.

Everything that we do as believers should draw us to that end: Union with God. Divine intimacy. A heart like His because it has learned to rest in it.

This unity with the Lord isn’t something that we achieve, earn, or accomplish. It’s more like a romance, a drawing ever deeper, an unfolding. I have to make the choice to seek Him out, but the fact is that He is already with me, making the first move, inviting me to blossom into the fullness of myself, and tending the garden of my heart, if I but assent to be with Him there.

God with us is the glorious good news of the Gospel, our greatest hope. And it also means that we don’t have to be afraid.

I once heard a priest say that Christianity is unique among the world’s religions because, while others tell the story of humans trying to reach the divine, Christianity is the only one that tells the story of how God did everything to come to us, even entered into this broken world Himself, in human flesh, to give Himself up for us and fill our suffering with Himself. So that we might find meaning in this weary, broken, wounded world. So that we might live with Him forever. Christianity is the great story of God’s “with-ness.” He comes to us. Every minute, every hour, without fail.

God with us means that we are never alone in our suffering. It means that He is here among us still, very much alive.

I know this, of course, but I never stop needing to be reminded of it.

The world is once again tiptoeing on the brink of catastrophe, and the unthinkable has already happened to so many. I stare into the terrifying unknown and increasingly find that the only thing I can cling to is the knowledge that God will be there.

Last week, when I was unburdening some of my anxieties on my sister as she drove me to the airport, she quoted my great-grandfather, who lived through the Great Depression and World War II: “It will be okay, because what other choice do we have?”

He meant that we would endure whatever we survived to see, that life would go on and we would figure out how to persevere. But there is a greater truth here:

It will be okay because the Lord will be with us.

In her new book Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, Joy Clarkson reflects that feeling like the world is about to end is in fact nothing new, and that our fragile existence has always been threatened by some type of tragedy:


I have come to expect the end of the world. I think it’s only reasonable to do so when all the generations before me have done it too. When I look to the future, I see the manifold ways the world could end, and when I look to the past, I see that the world has always been almost ending. (195)


In other words, our fears for what tomorrow will hold are merely the latest in a string of them that is as long as human history itself. But for Clarkson, the precarious fact of our existence isn’t a reason to give in to despair. Instead, it’s a reason to stare unflinchingly into “the finitude of the material universe” (196) and of our own lives with the knowledge that the Lord has vanquished death, that light will always triumph over darkness, and that “death is not the truest thing at the heart of the universe, but life, beauty, joy” (199). The most sensible response to a world that is falling apart, she argues, is to put it back together again with acts, no matter how small, that proclaim this truth.

Amen.

Zach Vinson’s song “Hold My Son” is an anthem to these small, courageous acts of love and creativity in a world that would have us believe that death gets the final say: “…I will pray that death is small beside the light,” he sings. And I will, too.

I like to think of it as turning to my sphere of influence and loving the people in that space as fiercely as I can. I can’t control what is happening on the other side of the globe, but if I want to see a braver and more loving world, it starts in my house. In the classroom. In the Writing Center. With small acts of kindness, tiny sacrifices, and my whole attention given as a gift in love to the person or task in front of me. It starts, too, with beauty and creativity, poured out in new melodies on the piano or words on a page.

These are the acts that make death seem small. These are the acts that affirm that life, beauty, and joy are the heartbeat of this world.

In a world that is still so unsure, I know this with absolute certainty: God will never leave us alone in our suffering. He is not going anywhere. He will always be with us, until the end of the age.

That is the promise. That has always been the promise.

And in the promise that the Lord will be with us is this animating truth, pulsing through our existence: Love will always have the final word. This is not an abstraction or a clichéd aphorism or an empty platitude. It is the surest thing I know.

I don’t know what tomorrow or next week or next month or ten years from now will hold. But I do know that He will be there. That the Lord is still very much alive in this world, that the Holy Spirit is everywhere, and always will be. Turning darkness into light. Breathing life into death.

Press on in hope, dear friends. We are not alone.

God is with us.



Tabernacles, Too.

Monday, March 15, 2021

Personal photo

A year ago – on March 5, 2020 – I sat on this bench and stared at this church and took a photo just like this one, feeling something stir within me. I was visiting the Catholic University of America campus in Washington, DC, discerning enrollment in the university's PhD program in English in Fall 2020.

With ample spare time between lunch with a pair of current students and a meeting with the Director of Graduate Studies, I wandered into the campus library. As a visitor, I found the building map difficult to decipher and, in searching for the literature stacks, stumbled into the philosophy and religious studies reading room instead. Surrounded by so many motivated students, quietly toiling away in the study carrels before their spring break, I felt that I should read something, too – and that some extra prayers wouldn’t go amiss right then. So I pulled a lectionary off the shelves and flipped to the readings for Mass that upcoming Sunday: the second Sunday of Lent, Year A. The first reading explained how God called Abraham from his homeland to a land that the Lord would show him: away from all that felt familiar and comfortable.

I reflected on these words again at Mass the following Sunday, after returning home. Was the Lord calling me somewhere new?

Then, two days later, I sat with my friend Kat in the Colorado sunshine during our lunch break and shared with her all that was vying for attention in my discerning thoughts. “I just don’t know,” I said. “It would be such a big risk. How do I know if it’s the right one? And…” I hesitated to mention the part I was most nervous about, “what if I take the leap and God doesn’t catch me?”

Kat sighed thoughtfully – as she usually does before she’s about to drop some wisdom – and leaned back on the bench, stretching her legs out in front of her. “You know, I think we usually believe that we have to have all the answers before we can trust,” she said. “But trust is what happens when you jump. You build it in the not knowing. You build it when you allow Him to show up and catch you, moment by moment.”

We all know what happened after that. Three days after that conversation, we all jumped – every last one of us on this big blue planet. We didn’t know where we were going as coronavirus took hold of our hopes and dreams for the foreseeable future, and schools, venues, and restaurants closed in rapid succession. We were all called, like Abraham, to leave the familiar comforts of our homeland and journey to a place that God and God alone would show us, because goodness knows we were powerless to conceive of it.

It seemed so counterintuitive to look all this uncertainty squarely in the eye and add more uncertainty to it.

And yet. When the world got quiet, I could hear myself think. And more than that, I had created space for the still, small voice to speak to me. And God called me to leave my homeland and follow Him to Washington, DC.

So I did.

I wish I could offer some sort of resolution to the story, and say that after moving here, everything unfolded with ease and perfect understanding. But I left campus that day last March with more questions than I had answers, and I have them still. Trust is a dance I’m still learning to do, daily.

But here’s the thing I’m learning, a fact which isn’t a resolution but is maybe, at least, a promise:

If God is Mystery, then uncertainty is sacred. The not-knowing, the blurred vignettes of our daily existence: these are tabernacles, too. He is here. And as we are walking together, I am learning to trust Him so much more deeply than I would have if I had only stayed still in fear. Because trust is indeed built in the dark, but more than that, it’s built in companionship. And when I move without knowing, that’s when I allow God to show up by my side.

So I keep forging on. And because I know that He goes with me, I walk with confidence.


 

 




Mission Statement: To Seek and Share What's Beautiful.

Sunday, March 7, 2021


Photo by SPACEDEZERT on Unsplash


I think it’s time to update my mission statement, especially seeing as how I never really wrote one to begin with. Oops.

There’s an “About” page on this blog that comes pretty close, I think. But while it shares a little bit of my story and explains where I derived the name of this blog from, it doesn’t really describe what I want to do in an active, mission-oriented sort of way.

People talk a lot in the writing world about “serving your reader.” Who is your reader? What do they need? How can you encourage them?

For a long time, I didn’t know the answer to that question because I was writing just for me. Or for a person just like me: someone searching for her place in the world. I’d write whatever stirred up in my heart and hope that it would resonate with someone else, too. It wasn’t an unhelpful way of proceeding, but it did feel a little as though I was missing something. What does the world really need? I wondered. And how can I serve it?

I realized that at the heart of the encouragement I hoped to provide for others lay the determination to show people that this moment -- whatever anxieties or fears it might hold -- is not the end. That there is Resurrection hope and glory on the other side of the longing, of the mess, of the transition. That there is a surplus of beauty worth clinging to in this world.

Recently, I logged back on to Instagram after a months-long fast to find a single post from a college acquaintance named Georgie about how she was choosing to step out in bravery, trying this new blog writing thing and sharing her heart with the world. Encouraged by her “yes,” I reached out to see if she wanted to be writing accountability buddies -- or just writing friends, more generally speaking. She agreed, and we chatted for an hour one evening last week about inspiration, fighting lies and impostor syndrome, and living bravely: what it looks like to call forth the good in other people and in ourselves, to champion others’ success, and to see the world for all that still shimmers within it.

In listening to me share my own reasons for becoming a writer, Georgie repeated something to me that I had known intuitively but never really owned about myself: that my “theme” is seeking beauty and sharing it with other people. “What a time to be doing that!” she’d said. We need beauty now more than ever.

But really, there is never going to be a time when the world does not need beauty. I hear this call -- this cry -- issuing from every human heart, and I want this blog to be a space where it’s answered. Where the dreamers and the romantics and the storytellers can be satiated. Where we’re brave enough to cling to the promise of hope and joy in the middle of the mess, where we refuse to settle for the gloom and dismay that the world often peddles us instead. 

To seek and share what’s beautiful.

That is my mission. 

Join me?


Becoming.

Monday, August 3, 2020




A spiritual director told me once that it’s a good idea to “gather the graces” from one experience before transitioning to another. 


And so, since I am moving in a week, I wrote some words on index cards -- the major themes and defining moments of the last five years, the movements of the Holy Spirit in my heart, the fruits grown in this season -- and I laid them on my bedroom floor. 


Words like Community. Prayer. Fear. Anxiety. Trust. Peace. Joy. 


And I saw in this smattering something I never did before, in all the time I spent feeling like I didn’t have my life together. I saw that becoming isn’t something that just happens to you all at once, when you attain the degree or find the right job or move to a new state. I saw that becoming isn’t an accomplishment you can wear; it doesn’t arrive in a StitchFix box on your doorstep.


Becoming, I realized, is not the destination; it’s the method of traveling. You don’t get from Point A to Point B without a whole lot of becoming in between, the kind that takes time and prayer and openness to what the Spirit is doing in your life, even if -- especially if -- you don’t understand it. 


This is all very good for me to remember, because, like so many others of my generation, I can’t help but feel that I should be Somewhere Else by now -- married, maybe, with a promotion or two under my belt in my chosen career. But Somewhere Else is a traveling circus that is very difficult to pin down. It thrives in imaginary expectations and has no basis in lived reality. I shame myself so readily for not having discovered my vocation at the end of college, afraid I wasted all those in-between years, without ever stopping to consider that maybe those dreams needed time to mature -- and so did I.


While a friend of mine reflected on her own life recently, she said to me, “If someone had told me the plan five years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for it.” And I have been clinging to that lately when I need a reminder that my life is right on time. 


If someone had told me to move to Washington, D.C. and pursue my doctorate in English five years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for it. I hadn’t yet become the kind of person who desired that. It took every experience I had in Colorado -- and all the ones that came before -- to rouse and shape these longings, and to help me excavate the yearnings I didn’t realize were buried in first grade phonics, in the eighth grade academic decathlon, in my Intro to Shakespeare midterm, in my post-college publishing ambitions.  


Becoming is slow work. It’s conversation and side-splitting laughter. It’s chai tea lattes and favorite cookie recipes. It’s your first job. It’s a master’s degree program. It’s renting your first solo apartment and drinking wine out of paper cups with your best friend when you haven’t unpacked your glasses yet. It’s writing papers and revising them. It’s going to therapy. It's early-morning prayer and afternoons in the Adoration chapel. It’s singing your favorite song at the top of your lungs, and breaking it down in dance class. It’s fruitful new friendships and awkward first dates. It’s your first year teaching elementary school. It’s desperation and jubilation, exhaustion and exhilaration. 


But mostly, becoming is simply this: showing up for your life, one day at a time. You can’t do that and remain unchanged. 


You cannot show up to your life, one day at a time, and remain unchanged. 


When I moved to Colorado, I thought it was just a place to be on the way to something else. I was sure I’d be here two weeks -- a month, max -- before going wherever it was I felt I really needed to be. And then I thought I would become someone. 


But looking at all those words I spread out on the floor, I think I finally “got it,” that these five years were a season of becoming. That they were necessary. That this wasn’t wasted time, waiting for something else to start. That, to paraphrase a favorite quote by Fr. Mike Schmitz: Who I became while I was waiting, was every bit as important as what I was waiting for. 


Hannah Brencher calls this consistent and mostly unremarkable unraveling, “slow magic.” I think I might just call it perspective.


All this to say, if you feel like nothing is happening for you in your life right now, I promise you this: something is happening. Something is happening.


Show up. Stay the course. Press on. And gather all those graces. Gather them often. Scoop them up and press them to your heart. 


One day you will see it, if you don’t already: that you’re not the same person today that you were then. That you were becoming, too. You still are.


And that’s the best part.


Thank You for the beginning.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Photo by Vanessa Bucceri on Unsplash


Lord, thank You for the beginning.

Thank You for the darkness ahead, yet to be illumined by the wild ways You're going to blaze through it, with a fire that torches everything I think I am, for the sake of refining, for the slow, deep work of continued becoming.

Thank You for the million unknowns, splintering in all directions from the flimsy rod of certainty. I am afraid to touch them, but You know better. You know that Your rod and staff promise a different kind of certainty, promise comfort in the valley. And You know that the uncertainties are invitations that offer the Holy Spirit space to breathe in and through and around me.

Thank You for the fiat, for the yes that's said in the fog. I could choose to fear that fog, or I could see in it the unmistakeable breath of the Spirit, overshadowing me as it did a girl from Nazareth 2000 years ago, who was given nothing in the face of her unknown except the promise that You would be with her.

And that was enough for her.

In her uncertainty, she praised Him. She gave thanks. She sang for joy. "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior... The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name" (Lk 1:46-47, 49).

My good friend Kat, paraphrasing Fr. Michael Gaitley, who was probably inspired by Our Lady's example, once explained to me that gratitude begets trust. She told me about an exercise she did in which she gave thanks for everything she couldn't understand. One thing after another, her heart poured forth a litany of thanksgiving, turning reasons to fear into subversive joy, into daring confidence, into bold trust in a faithful God who keeps His promises and shows up for us, every time -- even if we can't see how just yet.

And so, I thank You for the beginning. I thank You because I know that someday, my yes, this tiny, brave step forward, will make miraculous sense in the context of the glorious unfolding before me.

Retrospect assures me that I can trust You, that You're always at work connecting dots, making a bigger picture, asking only that I move my pencil from one to the next in humble submission to Your gentle hand. You've done this before. You know how it will end. You have never failed me yet.

And so, I breathe deep.

And I thank You for the beginning.

The Real Magic of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child": Takeaways From the Play

Sunday, January 26, 2020


I remember hearing once -- in a monologue given during the acting class I took in my first year of college -- that there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.

But the more I consume quality entertainment -- which I define as that which leads us to what's true, good, and beautiful -- the more I am convinced that there is really only one story: the longing to be seen, known, and loved -- and the desires for relationship or achievement that drive that longing.


A Father's Love

I saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts I and II in San Francisco last weekend, and, without spoiling anything for those who wish to see the play, I will say that it certainly lived up to the hype. To use a pun that is both one hundred percent intended and undoubtedly trite in this context -- the effects, the music, the costuming, the sheer wonder of realizing Harry Potter's world on the stage were all just so... magical. 

And yet, as impressive as all of those elements might have been, I believe that what makes the play so resonant is, first, that it points to something true: the longing to be in relationship, to be seen, known, and loved.

This sensational piece of theatre is really just about a father and a son who are yearning to be in relationship with one another.

Albus Potter, feeling inferior to and resentful of his father's fame, decides to steal the only remaining Time Turner and endeavor, along with his best friend Scorpius Malfoy, to save Cedric Diggory from dying in the Triwizard Tournament during Harry's fourth year at school. Ostensibly presented by Albus as a desire to do good for its own sake, to right an unnecessary wrong, to "spare the spare," it's also a bid for acclaim and renown of Albus's own.

And though he never claims he wants to do any of that to earn his father's approval (if anything, Albus seems to want to spite his father by correcting what he considers Harry's negligence) the show is filled with missed connections between the two characters.

Before Albus leaves for his fourth year, Harry gives him the blanket he was wrapped in when he was dropped on the Dursleys' doorstep, telling his son (on page 40 of the official script book) that he thinks it "could be good for the two of us..." On the same page, the stage directions reveal that he "looks at his son, desperate to reach out."

Though he gave James his Invisibility Cloak, and Lily a pair of wings -- gifts intended to delight and amuse -- his bequest to Albus is rooted in a desire for relationship, which Albus is quick to spurn: "What did you think would happen? We'd hug. I'd tell you I always loved you. What? What?" (Rowling et al. 41). The scene reaches a heartbreaking climax when Albus and Harry mutually wish they weren't related to each other -- and the rupture that ensues is one they each spend the rest of the play trying to repair. Albus gets in trouble. Harry chases after him.

Until finally, they reach an understanding and "melt together" on the last page of the script. The search comes to a satisfying end.


The Will of God

I've also been thinking a great deal over this last week about the moral of this story; what is the lesson we are meant to walk away with at the end? What else is the play about?

Answering these questions has led me to one of the play's final scenes (spoilers ahead):

Albus's and Scorpius's time-traveling exploits eventually lead them and their families to Godric's Hollow on the night Voldemort kills Harry's parents. As they stand at the edge of the stage, staring straight ahead, waiting and listening for the horror that is soon to unfold before them, Harry laments not being able to stop it. Albus points out that Harry technically is able to stop it, but won't choose to do so. And it's Draco who finally says, "That's heroic" (295).

I've been turning this over in my head all week, wondering what it is about Harry's choice to refrain from acting that makes it a heroic decision, when failing to do good in the face of evil is what we Catholics would call a sin of omission. When I recite the Confiteor at Mass, don't I apologize for "what I have done, and for what I have failed to do"? From that perspective, it seems that if any event were worth intervening in, this would be the one.

We could begin to justify Harry’s inaction by saying, "everything happens for a reason" and things that have already been done happened that way because they were supposed to. If Harry had decided to stop Voldemort from killing his parents, Voldemort would never have tried to kill baby Harry that night, which both reduced Voldemort to a shadow of his former self and gave Harry what he needed to destroy the dark wizard for good someday. But I think that Christian theology leads us to a still more satisfying conclusion here, too.

It wasn't just that "everything happened for a reason," as if James's and Lily's deaths were arbitrary events. Rather, Lily, in particular, had to die that night in Godric's Hollow, and she had to die out of love, out of sacrifice, while she was protecting Harry, in order to leave an indelible mark on his soul that would protect him in the years to come -- in order to give him the tools he needed to conquer the darkness. If events hadn't unfolded exactly as they did in Godric's Hollow, as Harry realizes just pages before, "[Voldemort would] have only got more powerful -- the darkness would have got darker" (279).

Lily's sacrifice mirrors Christ's ultimate sacrifice on the Cross, to save us from our sins and give us what we need to overcome the darkness in our own lives. If Christ hadn't died for us, the darkness would have continued to spread. Instead, the greatest evil -- the Crucifixion of God Himself -- led to a far, far greater good: our salvation. He had to die so we could be free.

I don't think the lesson in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is that "everything happens for a reason" so much as it is that "all things work for good for those who love God" (Rom 8:28), and that suffering always leads to a greater good when it is surrendered -- as it is when Harry realizes that he could act, but won't do it.

***

Special effects and costuming and staging and music aside, there's real magic in this show, and it ushers us toward what's true, good, and beautiful. I'm still blown away. Go see it if you can!!