Perfect Love by Rose of Sharon O’Donnell

She was washed into this world in a rush of light and garbled sound and has been overwhelmed by it ever since. This ball of earth, shaped by God’s fingers and tumultuous with his breath, startled her. Shadows danced and quaked. Music strained her soul. Hunger sank its teeth into her. It was too much. She found her own voice and wailed for comfort. She hid in my neck, nursed in my arms, and slept. But the world around her didn’t change. It kept flying through space and assailing her senses until, slowly, she grew to expect the world to poke and prod her.

She is now three and a half. She faces the wind and spreads her arms wide to see if it will knock her down. Shadows are full of things to be discovered. Music still strains her soul, but now it only asks her to dance. And though the world is dangerous and loud and sometimes smells like cows, she has found that it has much to offer her. So she swings between injury and discovery in almost every given moment. Sometimes, it tires her. And when she is too tired or scared to be curious she relies on the crude filing system ordering her mind.

Therefore the lives of ants rioting in the sidewalk cracks hang in the balance as she tries to figure out if these are good bugs or bad bugs. Good bugs don’t bite. Bad bugs sting or bite or leave itchy red spots. The locks on the file snap shut as one ant pinches her toe. She mashes her heel into the sidewalk. She doesn’t know about the ants and their unseen world of twining tunnels, their winged queen, the sacrifice of their own lives just so other ants can walk across a puddle. They are smaller than her and they bite. This is enough to merit violence. Her filing system replaces her wonder.

Curiosity is the answer to her indiscriminate violence. To stop and wonder at the gray spot in a thundercloud or the aphids on the columbines is a queenly thing for her to do. It is good to assume that there is a reason why and to wonder what it is. When confronted with ants, she must learn to ask, to search out the matter. Sometimes the answer might cause her to go cautiously around the teeming sidewalk crack. But sometimes—say, should she find them in my pantry—massacre would ensue with my blessing. Curiosity is the key to wisdom.

She grows. She dances and sings. She brings wriggling worms to her papa to ask what they are. She is jostled by wind and friends. The world sends her mail to be opened and packages that could hold anything. Where she used to startle in fear at a sound, now she hears a quail and imitates it. Where she used to cry with hunger, she now asks for more jam for her bread, knowing it will be given.

As she stretches the boundaries of her mind, she’ll find that her fears do not always mean that evil is near, nor do her joys always signify righteousness. I want her to know that questions should always be asked, but that the right answers are rarely obvious.

But in the end, the same breath that blows thunderheads is the breath that fills her lungs. The fingers that assembled the ants shaped her. The God who watches over her made her like Himself. He is the Knower and she is part of the known, and like the Knower she will always want to know. And this is good.

• Children’s Stories- why adults should read them
• Musings on curiosity and how it reflects the God we serve
• Examples of the theme of curiosity in architecture
• A handful of creative sketches (one involves an overly curious cat)
• The difference between curiosity and prying
• Curious Foods

Beta-Fish

Alone in his bowl, my fish clings, static,
to the inside of the surface-bubble.
After a slow moment, he gently unsticks
and spirals to the floor, sluggish, a damp kite.
The pet-store man told me that betas kill
each other. I put the small house on the morning
windowsill and watch the solitary cannibal
start again, swimming up, floating down.
Winter sky slips down the single-pane
and blurs the street behind my beta-fish.

Villains are not traditionally sympathetic characters, but there has been a recent trend in literature to change this. No longer is it sufficient to simply have an unquestionably wicked villain; rather, many postmodern fairy tales are rewritten from the villain’s perspective, trying to understand him/her as a person with thoughts, feelings, and a really rough childhood. One example would be Gregory McGuire’s novel Wicked, the story of the Wizard of Oz retold with the Wicked Witch of the West as the heroine. A similar thing occurred with the translation of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera to Broadway, where the novel’s creepy, evil villain becomes a seductive, pitiable tragic hero.

The same transformation has happened in recent vampire literature. Stoker’s Dracula is a true villain; the heroes in his novel are the courageous vampire-hunters, trying to protect their families and loved ones. The 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, which is based on Stoker’s novel, depicts the vampire as pure evil; he is hideous and frightening, with long fingernails and two fangs protruding from the front of his mouth. There is nothing pitiable about him.
But in recent vampire literature, such as the novels of Anne Rice and now Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, the vampire has been reimagined as a tortured hero. In Rice’s novel Interview with a Vampire, the story is told through the eyes of Louis, a young man who was transformed into a vampire, but is resisting the change. Louis originally refuses to drink human blood, out of a “lingering respect for life,” as he sardonically tells the vampire Lestat. But he soon realizes this will not be easy for him, and he becomes a tragic hero, meant to be admired for his noble intentions and pitied for his miserable condition. Rice’s vampires are not hideous monsters, but preternaturally beautiful, enticing creatures.

Meyer has followed in the footsteps of Rice, by writing a story with a “good” vampire as the hero. Like Louis, Edward and his family refuse to drink human blood out of moral qualms. Meyer also took some liberties with traditional vampire mythology, throwing out the old superstitions about sleeping in coffins and stakes through the heart, and, in a clever appeal to the sensibilities of the adolescent girl, having her vampires “sparkle” rather than incinerate in the sunlight. What preteen girl wouldn’t love a boy who sparkles – everything else she owns does. And like Rice, Meyer’s vampires are exquisite. Edward has a “sculpted, incandescent chest,” “scintillating arms,” and “glistening pale lavender lids.” He looks up at her from under long dark lashes, his voice smolders, and he causes Bella, the heroine, to forget how to breathe so often that we want her put on a ventilator.

But there is one aspect in which Meyer wanted to depart from Rice’s vampire mythology, and that was the link between vampirism and twisted sexuality. Rice’s books are steeped in it; there are many sexual encounters in her novels, as well as homoerotic undertones. Not so with Meyer. In fact, she has been hailed as a proponent of chastity by many conservative moms, Mormon and Christian alike. Meyer’s characters consciously wait on sex until after they are married; even though Bella claims to be ready, Edward insists on doing things properly since that is how he was raised. For this, the books have been compared to Austen novels and held up as modeling conservative values.
However, although the books claim to promote physical chastity, the same cannot be said for emotional chastity. As one reviewer, Stephen Greydanus, noted:

Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art . . . At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery. [1]

Christians are called not just to sexual purity, but to emotional purity as well. Daughters need to be taught to guard not just their “carnal treasure,” but also their hearts. High school crushes may seem harmless, but emotional restraint is a muscle that will atrophy unless it is exercised. The habit of giving free-reign to one’s thoughts and desires cannot suddenly be switched off after marriage, when emotional fantasies become adulterous. In other words, if Meyer is truly trying to promote chastity, she’s not doing a good job of it. Bella spends all her time fantasizing about Edward, and the teenage reader is being powerfully invited to do the same. There is no real purity and restraint.

Further, Meyer sets up a twisted vision of love in her novels. Edward is a character who appeals in every way to teenage girls: a guy who powerfully desires you, and yet is self-restrained and will never pressure you. Teen girls talk about how they love Edward’s “protectiveness” over Bella. Yet in reality, Edward is not a protective hero. He sneaks into her bedroom at night, spies on her while she’s sleeping, and constantly endangers her by his presence. In the fourth novel, Breaking Dawn, the morning after the wedding night Bella has bruises all over her that Edward caused. He is regretful, but she says, “No – I’m fine, it was perfect.” As Gina Dalfonzo of National Review Online aptly noted, this “should send a chill down the spine of any parent with a daughter.”[2]

Meyer’s version of love is enticing to teen girls, getting them to think that real relationships – and real men - should be wild, exciting, and dangerous. When Bella is asked by Edward to marry him, her response is disgust. The idea of marriage doesn’t fit with her idea of Edward and of their relationship. She says that she can’t imagine applying the bland term “husband” to Edward.[3] This low view of marriage and of human love hardly fits with a Christian view of real life. Marriage is wonderful, but it also requires a lot of sacrifice. And it doesn’t involve one’s heart stopping every few seconds. One can hardly imagine Edward and Bella working on taxes, or taking out the trash, or changing dirty diapers. And yet these mundane, oh-so-human details of life, when done in faith, are blessed by God beyond what we can imagine. It is a glorious thing to be human. Chesterton spoke of it as “the pride of the house of Adam, which holdeth the stars in scorn.”[4] We were created to rule over the angels.

Yet the theme that ultimately prevails in Meyer’s novels is a distaste for human life. But this is only consistent with the author’s religion. In Mormonism, being human is not a glorious thing – it is the lowest state. The ultimate goal of Mormonism is no longer to be human: to become gods. Traditional Mormonism teaches that God himself, Elohim, was once a man like us. A familiar catch-phrase is, “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

This is what being a Mormon is all about – becoming a god to billions of worshipful souls through whom one’s own godhood is sustained. The ultimate reward is a powerful motivation for Mormons: ‘Godhood is to have the character, possess the attributes, and enjoy the perfections which the Father has . . .’[5]

In Mormonism, in order to become a god, you also have to create an eternal family which will be with you in immortality. And that is precisely what Edward’s “father” Carlisle does: he turns people into vampires in order to create for himself an immortal family. And Edward, in the end, creates his own immortal family, beginning by turning Bella into a vampire. Here Meyer again departs inexplicably from traditional vampire mythology: vampires are undead and have no bodily fluids; they can’t have children. But Edward manages to impregnate Bella with a part-vampire child. For Meyer, procreation between humans and vampires is not impossible, as it is in most vampire mythology. It is interesting to note that according to Mormon theology, Elohim – God – had sexual relations with the human Mary, and she became pregnant with Jesus. Perhaps this is the basis for Bella’s pregnancy through a supernatural creature.

Throughout the Twilight series, Edward is described with the epithet of “god-like.” And it is true: Meyer’s vampires are very much like gods. They have supernatural strength, power, and beauty. And Bella’s goal through the entire series is to become like them, to leave her weak, plain, human self behind. When once accused of misogyny, Meyer is famously quoted as replying, “I am not anti-female; I am anti-human.” This sentiment proves true in the end: Bella becomes a vampire and is at once happier, preternaturally beautiful, powerful, and all that she wanted to be. Human life, human love, is worthless.
But ultimately, the threat of these novels for teenage girls will not be a temptation to want to form immortal families or join the Latter Day Saints, but to let their emotions run wild rather than guarding their hearts. It would be difficult for a teenage girl to read this series and not fall for Edward. The temptation is to think that this is what true love is like – passionate and dangerous – and to subconsciously look for a guy like Edward: beautiful, dangerous, perhaps even abusive. Stephen Greydanus insightfully noted that this may stem from a cultural crisis of masculinity. It takes real men, real human heroes, to shatter this false image of love and exemplify true Christ-like love to a fallen world.