The first good of marriage comes in the faithfulness God creates between married couples. While we, as selfish people, might want marriage—and life—to be all about ourselves, married life requires that we’re constantly concerned about our spouse and not just about me, me, me. I’ve already talked a little bit about how unusual faithfulness is in our world. Because faithfulness goes against the grain in our culture, it can be a sparkling witness to the goodness of God. It lets husbands and wives show each other God’s goodness, and it lets married couples show God’s goodness to the world.
Jesus tells us about the importance of faithfulness when He speaks out strongly against divorce. Jesus reminded people that faithfulness was part of God’s good intention from the time of creation: “Haven’t you read…at the beginning the Creator ’made them male and female,’ and said, ’For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate” (Matthew 19:4–6). Jesus explains that divorce had been allowed because of the hardness of human hearts but that God does not intend for things to be this way.
Faithfulness is more than staying married and not cheating on your wife or husband. The good of faithfulness is also found in the everyday relationships of marriage. It isn’t easy to remain faithfully kind, day in and day out, year in and year out. It isn’t easy to remain faithfully supportive. It isn’t easy to keep faithfully doing part of the work of the household—taking out trash, paying bills, earning paychecks, washing dishes—work that has to be done for people to live together happily and peacefully. In every marriage, there will be slips in this kind of faithfulness, moments when spouses forget to be respectful and caring. Mutual service isn’t easy. Over time, though, marriage can be a boot camp for learning day-to-day faithfulness, and this kind of faithfulness can be a wonderful witness to God’s love.
The second good that comes of marriage is the good of having children. I’ll talk more about children in the next chapter, but for now it’s important to realize that the gift of kids is one of the very good gifts God gives in marriage. As selfish people, we might want life to be all about us, but being a parent requires that we love and care for our children.
In the gift of children, we see that marriage is not just about the two people who said “I do.” Marriage is also supposed to be good for other people. Marriage ought to show God’s love and goodness to children. This goodness of marriage can go beyond a couple parenting and loving children in their own home. God can use marriages to show love to other people, people outside of a family. Maybe a couple shares this kind of love in teaching a class, in serving people who need it, or in having a generous home where hospitality spills out to many people. At best, marriage lets a couple come together to show God’s love to the world in ways they wouldn’t have done alone.
The third good of marriage is found in the way it can direct people toward God. When Augustine talked about this gift in marriage, he said that the first two gifts—faithfulness and children—are good for all married people, but this third gift is a special blessing in Christian marriage. In the unity between married couples, we see a sign of the unity between people and God. Marriage is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that keeping a marriage going isn’t a hard thing too. Christian couples will find that they have to turn to the power of God if they hope for marriage to be any kind of witness of love to each other, to their children, or to the world.
Marriage, through God’s power, can be a beautiful witness to real love. Anyone who has been married for a while can tell you that real love doesn’t always look like the frenzied romantic love we admire in stories and movies and that we admire between Bella and Edward. Real love is based on God’s love. It trains us to be less selfish and to care more about other people—husbands or wives, children or strangers—and, even better, it trains us to rely on God and to rest in His perfect love for us.
THINK ABOUT IT/TALK ABOUT IT
What are your own feelings about marriage? Are they, like Bella’s, mixed? Do you despise or romanticize marriage?
What are the dangers of looking down on marriage? Of focusing all our dreams on marriage?
Do you know any inspiring examples of Christians who are devoted to God in the single life? in marriage? How might their lives serve as models for you of how to witness to God’s love?
Are there differences between a Christian understanding of marriage and the understandings we run into in the world? How does God intend for marriage to be good?
1. Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), 275.
2. Eclipse, 277.
3. Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 17.
4. Breaking Dawn, 49.
5. The U.S. Census Bureau makes these statistics available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html#history.
6. Mark Regnerus, “Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?” Washington Post (April 26, 2009).
7. Breaking Dawn, 6.
8. Christine A. Colon and Bonnie E. Field, Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today’s Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), 224.
Chapter 7
Monster Spawn or
Precious Child?
Children in the Twilight Saga
MOST READERS OF THE TWILIGHT SAGA aren’t surprised when the love story leads to a marriage, but Meyer throws her audience a curve ball when the newly married couple becomes parents. Pregnancies and children aren’t usually featured in teenage love stories, and Meyer’s loyal audience has had mixed reactions to this plot twist.
Bella gets pregnant on her honeymoon, and the baby, whom she loves, threatens to destroy her. The situation and her response to it raise a lot of questions for readers about our own feelings about parenthood and prompt us to think about God’s gift of children.
THE BABY WHO EATS HER ALIVE
The logic of vampire existence as laid out in the Twilight Saga—the fact that vampires are technically dead and cannot physically change—suggests that it wouldn’t be possible, but the newly married couple discovers that Bella is pregnant. Astonishingly and against all odds, Bella and Edward’s marriage results in new life. The vampire and the human are going to be parents.
The first sign comes when Bella starts eating ravenously. Then, in an extremely short amount of time, she feels the baby move. Bella loves the child immediately and unconditionally. “From that first little touch,” she says, “the whole world had shifted. Where before there was just one thing I could not live without, now there were two. There was no division—my love was not split between them now; it wasn’t like that. It was more like my heart had grown, swollen up to twice its size in that moment. All that extra space, already filled. The increase was almost dizzying.”1 Her love for Edward connects easily with her love for her child.
Bella’s gigantic hunger is an early indicator that this baby will make huge demands on her body. Edward instantly senses a threat to his love, and he reacts the same way he has reacted throughout the Saga. He’s ready to do whatever it takes to rescue and defend her. Furious and horrified at the realization that Bella is in danger, Edward is convinced the baby is unnatural, a monster. Bella completely disagrees. She’s surprised, of course, and she never really wished or imagined she would be a mother, but when it happens, it seems completely natural.
Their honeymoon cut short by the unexpected pregnancy, which progresses much more quickly than the ordinary human rate of nine months, the couple hurries home.
It doesn’t take long for the pregnancy’s threat to Bella to materialize. Edward and Carlisle plan to end her pregnancy before it can do her harm, and Edward tells her, “We’re going to get that thing out before it can hurt any part of you. Don’t be scared. I won’t let it hurt you.”2 Bella, though, is determined to protect her baby at any cost.
She finds an ally and defender in Rosalie. Ro
salie and Bella have always rubbed each other the wrong way. They never understood each other, but now they are united in their determination to defend the baby. When she became a vampire, Rosalie lost the opportunity to be a mother, and this is one of her deepest regrets. In becoming pregnant, Bella has what Rosalie has always dreamed of, and Rosalie stands by her.
The situation is extremely serious. The half-vampire baby seems to be sucking the life out of Bella, nearly killing her as it grows. Bella’s loved ones are only able to pull her through her pregnancy and give her the strength she needs to survive by providing her with human blood to drink. Even before she becomes a vampire, Bella turns to blood for her own survival and the survival of her child.
When Jacob finds out about Bella’s condition, she is weak and dying. For once, he agrees with Edward about something and suggests that Edward force Bella to have an abortion. Jacob calls the baby “monster spawn.”3
Eventually Jacob’s werewolf pack finds out about the pregnancy, and they see it as a dangerous and unnatural threat, a threat they are obligated to eliminate. The werewolves decide to destroy Bella and her baby, and this causes Jacob to leave his pack and join the Cullens in defending Bella. He may be horrified by the pregnancy, but he’ll still do anything to keep Bella safe.
Bella’s vampire baby can only be born by causing its mother’s death. Something about the vampire pregnancy has changed Bella’s womb so that birth can’t happen normally, which means her baby must be born by vampire C-section. Rosalie starts the operation, but she has to turn away from the human blood, and Edward literally chews the baby out of his wife with his strong vampire teeth. It’s hard to imagine a more gruesome and grisly birth scene. There are broken bones and gushing blood. The birth is beyond dangerous for Bella. She gives every appearance of being dead. Edward and Jacob are certain they have lost her, but at the moment when the child’s birth is killing her, Edward finally transforms Bella into a vampire by plunging a syringe full of his venom into her heart.
The baby girl is named Renesmee for Bella’s mother, Renee, and Edward’s mother, Esme. Bella celebrates getting through the difficulty and dangers of becoming Renesmee’s mother: “I had done it. Against the odds, I had been strong enough to survive Renesmee, to hold on to her until she was strong enough to live without me.”4 After she’s born, everyone in the family is completely devoted to the child and will do anything to guarantee her safety. Even Jacob, who had planned to kill the baby for hurting Bella, makes a complete turnaround. When he sees baby Renesmee, he imprints on her, finding his soul mate.
Just as the pregnancy progressed more quickly than is usual, Renesmee grows rapidly. Half vampires, apparently, have no long years of dependency to get through. Everyone who knows Renesmee loves her, and the whole family will do whatever they have to do to keep her safe.
LOVING LIFE
God is the creator of life, and as God’s children, we give thanks for God’s good gifts. This truth is the basis for a Christian attitude toward all life, an attitude in which we protect life and acknowledge God as the one who controls life, including the lives of those who haven’t yet been born.
In the time of the ancient church, pagan Roman society was indifferent about the lives of the vulnerable. Ancient Romans would expose unwanted infants, leaving them outside to die, and abortion was common. Our society is also indifferent about the lives of the weak, and contemporary Christians, like our ancient brothers and sisters, must work to live in ways that express love and care for all life, for the lives of the vulnerable, and for the lives of the unborn.
Glen Stassen and David Gushee, teachers who’ve done a lot of thinking about ethics in the Christian life, challenge Christians to realize that loving life means loving life at all its stages. We’re tempted to “choose death rather than life,” not just at the beginning of life but also in the middle and at the end. Stassen and Gushee, though, hold out the hope that Jesus gives us “ways of deliverance” that show us how to “resist those forces that diminish and destroy life.”5
Abortion often happens when mothers feel a sense of desperation. When women have no support—emotional, financial, or spiritual—they sometimes feel driven to abortion as the only way out of what seems like a hopeless situation. The church needs to find ways to offer real support to parents in these situations. Stassen and Gushee maintain that “the best way to be prolife is to deliver people from the causes of abortion.”6 Though Bella is determined to protect her pregnancy, her situation is also one full of desperation, and her one support is in Rosalie. Perhaps her story can challenge us to create situations in which pregnancy brings not desperation, but hope.
I am compelled by Bella’s strong determination to protect the life of her unexpected little one. In our society, it is becoming more and more common for mothers to be advised to have abortions when the babies they are carrying are seen, like Bella’s half-vampire/half-human daughter, as being “abnormal.” Parents are offered genetic screening, and babies with Down syndrome and other genetic conditions are often aborted. It takes courage to go against social pressure and to love and protect vulnerable children as Bella did, and Scripture continually presses us to protect those who are most vulnerable and to defend those who have no defenders.
PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH, AND MOTHERHOOD
Bella is a brave mother, but other messages in her story are quite disturbing. The story plays up fears that pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are dangerous and that they might just destroy you. It’s not uncommon to have some fear that motherhood might ruin our bodies, rob us of our freedoms, and make us lose ourselves, but it’s hard to imagine a more terrifying portrait of pregnancy and childbirth than the one we find in the Twilight Saga.
Pregnancy is not a disease, and childbirth is not a medical emergency. In a society where many people have never seen a baby being born, the gory vampiric C-section in Breaking Dawn may seem especially terrifying, but the birth of a baby can be an incredibly precious and happy event. It needn’t be violent or dangerous.
Yes, babies change our lives, but no, they do not destroy us. Sure, pregnancy can be uncomfortable, but babies do not suck the very life from their mothers. Birth is certainly a dramatic experience, but it is not a kind of death. I don’t want to idealize pregnancy and childbirth, but I do want girls and women, especially girls and women who haven’t had babies, to know that there is so much that is good and precious about this part of female life. In the New Testament, being a mother is depicted as both a “calling and privilege,”7 a gift from God.
There is some truth mixed in with the lie that motherhood destroys the mother though. Having a baby is a dramatic change in life. Pregnancy is not the cute and comfortable romantic thing that it looks like in the media’s depictions of movie star moms. Among other things, pregnancy involves lots of trips to the bathroom, weird aversions to foods, nausea, and medical care that invades any sense of privacy you might have. Babies aren’t just cute. They’re also messy, drooly creatures who fill up lots of diapers. Unlike Renesmee, they don’t grow up immediately. Babies need years of constant care, and it takes a long time before they’re capable of saying “I love you” back to their moms and dads. Babies aren’t cute accessories; they’re living, breathing, needy human beings. Being a parent requires tremendous time and energy, and it isn’t something to take lightly.
Yet despite the way children change us and the demands they make on us, this isn’t a bad thing. The daily responsibilities of caring for children force us to love someone besides ourselves and to recognize our own selfishness. God can use parenting as a way to teach us to be less selfish, to train us to reflect God’s love more closely.
Of all the events in the Twilight Saga, Bella becoming a mother has drawn the most disapproval from readers, and this has come from both fans and critics. Some have seen Meyer as glorifying teenage pregnancy. Others have regretted the way the story makes childbirth seem terrifying. For fans, though, I think feelings about this are more complicated. For those wh
o’ve identified closely with Bella throughout her story, her sudden pregnancy and devotion to being a mother may be difficult to relate to. Motherhood just seems too foreign and too far away to many readers.
It can’t hurt, though, for us to spend some time thinking about God’s intentions for parents and children. Pregnancy should not be romanticized or glorified, but it also shouldn’t be despised. In God’s story, pregnancy makes sense as a good divine gift, a blessing that is part of marriage, something to be embraced and protected. We don’t have to fear that pregnancy will mess up our bodies, because we know that bodies exist for the glory of God. I’ve never felt more pleased with my body than in seeing how it could nourish my babies. In God’s story, the pregnant bride isn’t devoured and destroyed by husband and child. Instead, husband and child can be seen as gracious gifts, as part of God’s intention for a life meant for His glory.
LOVING CHILDREN
If thinking about Bella’s unexpected baby gets us to think more about what it means as Bella does from the first, to love children, I hope that the ways we love children will be shaped by God’s witness to us in Scripture. In looking for a biblical lens to help us focus our understanding of children, several big themes can help to shape our thinking and our actions. First, children are an important gift, a gift that comes from God. Second, God places parents and children in a relationship that He intends to be good for children and to teach them about God. Finally, Jesus treasures children and shows us that there is something about children that reflects His kingdom.
Touched by a Vampire Page 9
