On Friday our school community gathered in the Cathedral for an inspirational address by Rev Corin Child in which he used an extract from Harry Potter to encourage pupils to look upwards and outwards...

“To whom will you compare me?

    Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
²⁶ Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:25-26)

‘Welcome to Hogwarts,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘The start-of-term banquet will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you will be sorted into your houses. The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your house will be something like your family… While you are at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn your house points… I hope each of you will be a credit to whichever house becomes yours...’

Feeling oddly as though his legs had turned to lead, Harry got into line behind a boy with sandy hair, with Ron behind him, and they walked through a pair of double doors into the Great Hall. Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles which were floating in mid-air over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets.  At the top of the Hall was another long table where the teachers were sitting…  

The hundreds of faces staring at them looked like pale lanterns in the flickering candlelight. Mainly to avoid all the staring eyes, Harry looked upwards and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars. He heard Hermione whisper, ‘It’s bewitched to look like the sky outside, I read about it in Hogwarts: A History.’   It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn’t simply open on to the heavens.

I begin with an extract from the first Harry Potter book simply because Norwich School is sometimes compared to Hogwarts. One of the questions we ask leavers when we’re putting together their yearbook is “What was your earliest memory of NS?”

One pupil wrote in reply: “Feeling like Harry Potter in Hogwarts during Cathedral whilst people walked around in their House coloured gowns.”

Another wrote: “Going to assembly and listening to the Hockey report, hearing something about a half-court dragon press and thinking: I really am in Hogwarts, they weren't lying.”

Clearly there are some parallels. We do indeed sort you into houses, which we hope will become something like your family, even if we don’t have a talking hat to do the sorting. And the Cathedral nave does bear a resemblance to the Great Hall. (Although a couple of years ago I remember a member of staff returning from the school trip to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio in London and remarking, ‘I was impressed by the Great Hall film set, but it occurred to me that it wasn’t as impressive as our Cathedral.’ So if we’re being accurate we’d have to say that NS isn’t just like Hogwarts, it’s better!)

But there is one detail, one bit of the comparison that I want to pick up on, and that’s the idea of a ceiling that seems to open onto the heavens. I think that’s a stunning image JK Rowling comes up with as she sets the scene for this central part of Harry’s school life. The idea that when the pupils gather together, they are always looking upwards and outwards beyond the Great Hall.

It is a fitting image of what we hope you will experience when we gather in the Cathedral, and especially on Fridays when we listen to a reading from the Bible and give our assemblies a spiritual theme. We want you to find yourselves looking up and looking out. Or in the words of today’s reading, ‘Lifting up your eyes and looking to the heavens’. When you come in here for assembly, it is your official time out to pause for a minute and think big things, about your life and the world you live in.

I hope you enjoy your time here in cathedral; I hope you even come to realise that there is a little bit of magic in it.