"Religion: The Auror's Journal"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

When we are young, we are taught things and expected to believe them, to take them into our hearts and hold them true, no matter if secretly we might think that there could be or should be, another way.

Sometimes... any other way.

My mother told me that one day, if I were blessed enough, her god would save me. She believed this, and she expected me to believe this, but I never did. Her god couldn't save me from who I was- and I didn't want to be saved from that. My magic was all I had, the only thing that offered any escape from a place where nothing I could ever do would have been enough to make my mother love me, my family accept me.

When my Hogwarts letter came, and after my parents had spoken to the representative the Ministry sends to the homes of all Muggleborn students, to explain... After they had shown him their polite faces, their kind and loving facades, and after he had gone away convinced, they told me that I was evil, and my mother dragged me to her priests again.

No, I never had much use for my mother's religion, and I never believed. Not in that, at least.

What I believed, mostly, between shouted sermons and violent attempts at exorcism, was that there had to be a place where I fit, where I was not "crazy" or "abnormal", where I wasn't strange Penny with her curse of magic and true sight, but someone else, someone seen in a different and more honest light.

Hope was my religion for so many years, and it was hope that kept me afloat and above the sea of despair that otherwise might have drowned me. I did not believe in much, but I believed in hope.

For a long time that was enough. And then it wasn't, as I felt the weight of the war bearing down upon us. What I found then seemed to be less a religion as I had known it in my mother's hands, and more a thing of real faith, true belief.

To me it was the truth.

At a certain point religion and magic become inexplicably, inseparably linked. In a way belief fuels magic, is necessary for it. Magic is complex and often difficult, but the easiest way to fail in casting a spell is to disbelieve. You can doubt yourself, your own courage and resolve, but you cannot doubt your ability to cast the spell.

You cannot doubt the magic, and this is especially true of Aurors. Others might survive such doubts, but an Auror very likely would not.

I learned about faith out of necessity, and took it to heart because it spoke to me.

On those long dark nights in the war, waiting for the sword to fall, it was good to have gods- and goddesses- to pray to. It helped.

I understood we still had to take care of ourselves and each other, but it helped