"I am a Christian because of Owen Meany"

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving REVIEW

“Watch out for people who call themselves religious.”

The narrator of John Irving’s novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany goes by the name of John Wheelwright. I suspect that it would be a mistake not to make the connection to the Puritan minister, John Wheelwright who was banished to Exeter New Hampshire (Phillips Exeter is the real Gravesend in the book and John Irving’s alma mater). One senses that the narrator, writing from Toronto, is himself a person who, like the author, feels banished for caring too much about his faith.  

The hero of A Prayer for Owen Meany is the irascible, Owen Meany – a diminutive but forceful presence who speaks with a high voice but an uncompromising veracity. In many ways, John Irving has imbued Owen’s life with all the accoutrements of a Christ figure. His parents insist that he was virgin born. Owen challenges the temple establishment even as a child, confounding his “superiors” with his understanding of human nature and the world. Owen is an iconoclast who “always hated the sermon part of a service” and exposes hypocrisy wherever he sees it. “They make themselves appear moral, he says of America’s leaders.” “I thought he was a savior,” he says of JFK,  “… then they use the power just to get a thrill.” He says all the things of hypocrites in political and religious leadership that Jesus did.

And the spiritual leaders in the story are people who have lost the faith that they insist that others have. “God had stopped speaking to him,” John Wheelwright says of pastor Merrill, “and he had stopped asking Him to.”

 Similarly, Owen sees himself, Jesus-like, as an instrument of God. His arms are not his own. They are tools of the Almighty given to do the Almighty’s will whatever that might be. His arms have been donated to God to do with as He wills, even to the point of amputation. Owen Meany rests in the knowledge that it is not himself so much as God that rules his actions and their outcomes. Likewise, he speaks as “THE VOICE” – his is not one opinion among many so much as the abstract truth. “Verily, verily, I say unto you.” John Irving has created a prophet in the mantle of a lowly son of a granite worker from Gravesend, New Hampshire. Thus did Owen Meany remodel Christmas,” Irving writes when Ownen Meany finagles his way into being both the Christ-child and the “ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” in the yearly Christmas Carol production,  “he had established himself as a prophet.”

In an interview with Irving supplied in the appendix to the book, the author mentioned that he considered putting all of Owen Meany’s words in red but opted to simply type them in CAPITALS. HE wanted them to stand out. To be both irritating and divine.

Like Jesus, Owen Meany sees his own death and prepares for it. The reader cannot read those sections of the novel where Owen predicts his own demise without remembering the words of Jesus to his disciples,

“He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Wheelright and his cousin Hester play a similar role, trying to convince Owen Meany that his “dreams” and his vision of sacrificial death are hallucinatory. It would be impossible to miss the many and varied ways in which Owen Meany is used as a symbol of Christ. He is “lifted up” by his peers. He is banished and rejected by his superiors. He is a gadfly and a pestilence to those he speaks out against. He is a “cleanser of the temple” and a voice against those who care more for money and power than they do for people. And in the end, Owen Meany gives his life to save the children of “the enemy.”

Owen Meany is conscious of his role. He believes that he will die but that he will also live forever (and in the story that Johnny Wheelright and John Irving spin, he will). ''Jesus has always struck me as a perfect victim and a perfect hero,'' said John Irving once, explaining the genesis of his A Prayer for Owen Meany. In the interview following the book, Irving explains that he is not himself a devout person or believer. He says that what he set out to do when writing this novel, is to write about an experience that, if it were to have happened to him, would have convinced him to be one. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a story that would make him a believer if he were to have experienced it. ''What degree of religious belief I can manage owes as much to personal experience as it does to all those years of conscious and subconscious training within church,'' Mr. Irving said in the interview. The same is true of John Wheelright in the novel. ''When I am moved to see beyond my usual doubt,” Irving says in his interview,

“When I am moved to something that approaches real faith, it seems to me, I am basing those instincts for belief on personal experience as much I am on any formal religious training.''

Like John Wheelright, he is brought to faith only by experience – by direct contact with a trut believer - and not by the preaching of sermons about the experiences of others. I am reminded of the experience that the Quaker, Margarette Fell had when listening to the preaching of George Fox (founder of the Society of Friends):

"And so he went on, and said, "That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God," &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, "The scriptures were the prophets' words, and Christ's and the apostles' words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord": and said, "Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, 'Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?" &c. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, "We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves."

John Wheelright doubts Owen Meany. But eventually comes to faith because of Owen Meany. Why? Because Owen Meany’s life only makes sense when Owen Meany dies. Owen Meany’s death makes it impossible to doubt Owen Meany’s life – Owen Meany’s message. Indeed, as Irving writes in his opening line,

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

Irving seems to be arguing with John Wheelright, that we believe, not so much because of texts, but because we know someone who believed and their lives of belief convince us. John Wheelright tells us in the opening paragraph, that his faith is not rooted in textual sources. “I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament,” he says, “and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church.”

He comes to believe because of his love for Owen Meany and because Owen Meany’s convictions came true.

“What a coincidence “ I said when the Flying Yankee had gone. . . . But Owen smiled at me … Of course I know now that Owen did not believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that coincidence was a stupid shallow refuge sought by stupid shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design, more powerful and unstoppable than the Flying Yankee.”

In Conclusion, we discover that the prayer for Owen Meany is not a prayer to help Owen Meany. Owen needs no help He is God’s incarnate son in the novel. The Prayer for Owen Meany is a prayer that he be returned to us. “O God-please give him back! I shall keep asking You” the last sentence of the novel reads. Irving intentionally echoes that last words of the New Testament,

“He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Perhaps what he is calling for is for people who, like Owen Meany, or like Jesus, make it possible for us to believe in miracles.

“Miracles don’t cause belief,” pastor Merrill tells Johnny, “Real miracles don’t make faith out of thin air. You have to already have faith to believe in real miracles.” This is why we need people like Owen Meany in our lives. People who make it possible to believe. This is why we miss those people so dearly when we lose them. “The only thing wrong with me is what is missing,” says Johnny Wheelwright, “Owen Meany is what’s missing.”

Question for Comment: Who is the person in your life who has made it possible for you to believe? In miracles? In Destiny? In Providence? In some intelligent and loving being guiding us all through life? Or have you simply not met that person yet?

Comments

[mommalibrarian]

Asking who makes it possible for us to believe is the wrong question in my opinion. I return to your quote from the Quaker, Margarette Fell. Fox expressed the opinion that you had to 'say' the words not hear them said or have some one tell you they were said. You had to 'have' or 'be' the light. This is not the same as believing because you see someone else has the light. Good for them. But if you do not have it yourself you are a thief taking the word from others. "we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves."

I suppose an optimist would suggest you spend time and effort finding the light in yourself. "Christ's light ... God's presence within a person, ... a direct and personal experience of God". I can study the subject but I am much too cynical to believe.