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Along with revealing the back-stories of Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, and Petunia Dursley—all of which should satisfy longtime Potter fans—Rowling reveals another secret in the Deathly Hallows. It happens when Harry, Ron, and Hermione visit Godric's Hollow, to the house where Voldemort killed the Potters. There, Harry sees the murder through Voldemort's eyes. When the Dark Lord broke into their house, James Potter rushes to defend his wife and son, but it was hopeless. Caught without a wand in hand, he was no match for Voldemort.

Lily, on the other hand, had a choice. Voldemort wants to kill Harry, not her, and tells her to step aside. She could live and let her boy die. Instead, she lays down her life to protect him. The act of substitutionary sacrifice saved her son's life, just before the opening of the Sorcerer's Stone.

As Rowling said in an online interview (mugglenet.com/jkrinterview.shtml), the "caliber of Lily's bravery was, I think in this instance, higher because she could have saved herself. Now any mother, any normal mother, would have done what Lily did … but she was given time to choose. James wasn't. It's like an intruder entering your house, isn't it? You would instinctively rush them. But if in cold blood you were told, 'Get out of the way,' you know, what would you do?'"

Jeff Weiss, religion writer for the Dallas Morning News, said the first six Harry Potter books are remarkably secular. After the Half-Blood Prince was released, he wrote: "After 3,365 hardcover pages, we know an awful lot about the orphaned wizard, and as far as we know, neither he nor anyone else in the books has ever set foot inside a church, spent a moment in prayer or acknowledged (or even contemplated) the existence of God.

"In the new book, as in the earlier volumes, Christmas is a holiday of feasts, presents and decorations—with no whisper of Christ."

Writers such as John Granger (hogwartsprofessor.com), however, argue that Rowling's fictional world is loaded with Christian symbolism, but always in the background. In the books themselves, the only hint of Christianity comes in the form of Sirius Black, Harry's godfather. Since he has a godfather, Harry was baptized as an infant. (Rowling said the baptism, or christening, was "a hurried, quiet affair" (books.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_858.php).

But Christ begins to whisper in the Deathly Hallows. A few pages before the flashback of the Potters' death, Harry and his friends visit the last resting place of Lily and James Potter, in the church graveyard in Godric's Hallow, on Christmas Eve.

First they see the grave of Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore, the mother and sister of the late Hogwarts headmaster. It bears this inscription: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (None of the characters seems to know that these words are from .)

Not far away is the Potters' tomb, with a different inscription: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." The quotation is from , part of a long passage about the resurrection. In Godric's Hollow, Rowling begins to reveal that, like Narnia, her world has a "deeper magic." Love, expressed as substitutionary sacrifice—choosing to lay down your life for your friends—has a power that Lord Voldemort, like the White Witch before him, is blind to. That blindness becomes his undoing—with the help of Harry and his friends.

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51