A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead …’” Pastor Merrill assured us. “‘For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead,’” my father said.

  My grandmother would not let go of my amputated finger, and even Simon’s face was wet with tears; and still Mr. Merrill would not rest—he sent us swiftly to Second Corinthians.

  “‘So we do not lose heart,’” he told us. “‘Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal,’” Pastor Merrill said. “‘So we are always of good courage’!” my father exhorted us. “‘We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight,’” he said. “‘We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.’”

  Then he swept us into another psalm, and then he commanded the congregation to stand, which we did, while he read us the Gospel according to John: “‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,’” Pastor Merrill said, and we mourners lowered our heads like sheep. And when we were seated, Mr. Merrill said: “O God—how we miss Owen Meany!” Then he read to us—that passage about the miracle in the Gospel according to Mark:

  And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd about them, and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed, and ran up to him and greeted him. And he asked them, “What are you discussing with them?” And one of the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit; and wherever it seizes him it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, “How long has he had this?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.” And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

  When he finished reading this passage, Pastor Merrill lifted his face to us and cried out, “‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ Owen Meany helped my ‘unbelief,’” my father said. “Compared to Owen Meany, I am an amateur—in my faith,” Mr. Merrill said. “Owen was not just a hero to the United States Army—he was my hero,” my father said. “He was our hero—over and over again, he was our hero; he was always our hero. And we will always miss him,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said.

  “As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes—that He exists—or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God—I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.

  “For example, I would like to ask God to give us back Owen Meany,” Mr. Merrill said; when he spread his arms wide, the fingers of his right hand were dancing again in the beam of light. “O God—give him back, give him back to us!” Pastor Merrill asked. It was so quiet in Hurd’s Church, while we waited to see what God would do. I heard a tear fall—it was one of my grandmother’s tears, and I heard it patter upon the cover of the Pilgrim Hymnal, which she held in her lap. “Please give us back Owen Meany,” Mr. Merrill said. When nothing happened, my father said: “O God—I shall keep asking You!” Then he once more turned to The Book of Common Prayer; it was unusual for a Congregationalist—especially, in a nondenominational church—to be using the prayer book so scrupulously, but I was sure that my father respected that Owen had been an Episcopalian.

  Lewis Merrill took the prayer book with him when he left the pulpit; he approached the flag-draped casket and stood so close to Owen’s medal that the shaft of sunlight that shone through the hole the baseball had made flickered on the prayer book, which Mr. Merrill raised. Then he said, “Let us pray,” and he faced Owen’s body.

  “‘Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Owen Meany,’” my father said. “‘Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light,’” he prayed—the light from the hole in the stained-glass window still playing tricks with the medal and The Book of Common Prayer.

  “Amen,” the Rev. Mr. Merrill said.

  Then he nodded to Colonel Eiger and the young, frightened-looking first lieutenant; they matched their steps to the casket, they removed the American flag and snapped it taut—the medal bouncing like a coin, but it was pinned fast to the flag and couldn’t fall. Then the colonel and the first lieutenant walked haltingly toward each other, folding the flag—triangulating it, very exactly, so that the medal ended up on top of the package, which Colonel Eiger handed completely into the care of the frightened first lieutenant. Then Colonel Eiger saluted the folded flag, and the medal. The young man about-faced so sharply that my grandmother was startled; I felt her flinch against me. Then the first lieutenant mumbled something indistinct to Mr. and Mrs. Meany, who appeared surprised that he was speaking to them. He was saying something about the medal—“For heroism that involves the voluntary risk of life.” After that, the first lieutenant cleared his throat and the congregation could hear him more distinctly. He spoke directly to Mrs. Meany; he handed her the flag, with the medal on top, and he said—too loudly: “Missus Meany, it is my privilege to present you with our country’s flag in grateful appreciation for the service rendered to this nation by your son.”

  At first, she didn’t want to take the flag; she didn’t appear to understand that she was supposed to take it—Mr. Meany had to take it from her, or she might have let it fall. The whole time, they had sat like stones.

  Then the organ startled my grandmother, who flinched again, and the Rev. Lewis Merrill led us through the recessional hymn—the same hymn he had chosen for the recessional at my mother’s funeral.

  Crown him with man-y crowns, The Lamb up-on his throne;

  Hark! how the heavenly an-them drowns All mu-sic but its own;

  A-wake, my soul, and sing Of him who died for thee,

  And hail him as thy match-less king Through all e-ter-nity.

  While we sang, the honor guard lifted Owen’s small, gray casket and proceeded up the aisle with him; thus his body was borne from the church, about the time we were singing the third verse of the hymn—it was the verse that had meant the most to Owen Meany.

  CROWN HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O’ER THE GRAVE,

  AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE;

  HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND ROSE ON HIGH,

  WHO DIED, E-TER
-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE.

  There’s not much to add about the committal. The weather was hot and sticky, and from the cemetery, at the end of Linden Street, we could once again hear the kids playing baseball on the high-school athletic fields—the sounds of their fun, and their arguing, and that good old American crack of the bat drifted to us while we stood at Owen Meany’s grave and listened to the Rev. Lewis Merrill say the usual.

  “‘In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Owen…’” my father said. If I listened with special care, it was because I knew I was listening to Pastor Merrill for the last time; what more could he ever have to say to me? Now that he had found his lost faith, what need did he have of a lost son? And what need did I have of him? I stood at Owen’s grave, holding Dan Needham’s hand, with my grandmother leaning against the two of us.

  “‘… earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’” Pastor Merrill was saying, and I was thinking that my father was quite a fake; after all, he had met the miracle of Owen Meany, face to face, and still hadn’t believed in him—and now he believed everything, not because of Owen Meany but because I had tricked him. I had fooled him with a dressmaker’s dummy; Owen Meany had been the real miracle, but my father’s faith was restored by an encounter with a dummy, which the poor fool had believed was my mother—reaching out to him from beyond her grave.

  “GOD WORKS IN STRANGE WAYS!” Owen might have said.

  “‘… the Lord lift up his countenance upon him, and give him peace,’” Lewis Merrill said—while clods of earth fell upon the small, gray casket. Then the stern, sawed-off soldier, whom Colonel Eiger had referred to as a master sergeant, played taps for Owen Meany.

  I was leaving the cemetery when she came up to me. She might have been a farmer’s wife, or a woman who worked outdoors; she was my age, but she looked so much older—I didn’t recognize her. She had three children with her; she carried one of them—a pouting boy who was too heavy to be carried easily, or far. She had two daughters, one of whom hung on her hip and tugged at her and continued to wipe her runny nose on the woman’s faded-black dress. The second daughter—the eldest child, who was possibly seven or eight—lagged behind and eyed me with a gawky shyness that was painful to endure. She was a pretty girl, with straw-colored hair, but she could not keep her hands away from a raspberry-colored birthmark on her forehead, which was about the size of a passport photo and which she tried to hide with her hair. I stared into the woman’s weary, red-eyed face; she was struggling not to burst into tears.

  “Do you remember how we used to lift him up?” she asked me. Then I knew her: she was Mary Beth Baird, our old Sunday school colleague and the girl Owen had selected for the role of the Virgin Mary. “MARY BETH BAIRD HAS NEVER BEEN MARY,” Owen had said. “THAT WAY, MARY WOULD BE MARY.”

  I’d heard she’d gotten pregnant and had dropped out of high school; she’d married the boy, who was from a big family of dairy farmers—and now she lived on a dairy farm in Stratham. I hadn’t seen her since her staggering performance in the Nativity of 1953—when, in addition to her efforts as the Virgin Mother to Owen’s Christ Child, she had contributed those striking cow costumes, the ones with floppy antlers that made the cows resemble damaged reindeer. I suppose that she had not been an expert on dairy cows—or on cows of any kind—back then.

  “He was so easy to lift up!” Mary Beth Baird said to me. “He was so light—he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?” she asked me. That was when I discovered that I couldn’t speak. I had lost my voice. It occurs to me now that it wasn’t my voice that I wanted to hear. If I couldn’t hear Owen’s voice, I didn’t want to hear anyone’s. It was only Owen’s voice that I wanted to hear; and when Mary Beth Baird spoke to me, that was when I knew that Owen Meany was gone.

  There’s not much to add about coming to Canada. As Owen and I had discovered: at the New Hampshire–Quebec border, there’s little to see—just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost, the so-called customs house, which I remembered as just a cabin, was not exactly as I’d remembered it; and I thought there’d been a gate that was raised—like a gate guarding a railroad crossing—but that was different, too. I was sure I remembered sitting on the tailgate of the tomato-red pickup, watching the fir trees on both sides of the border—but then I wondered if everything I’d done with Owen Meany was not as exact in my memory as I imagined. Perhaps Owen had even changed my memory.

  Anyway, I crossed the border without incident. A Canadian customs officer asked me about the granite doorstop—JULY 1952. He seemed surprised when I told him it was a wedding present. The customs officer also asked me if I was a draft dodger; although I might have appeared—to him—too old to be dodging the draft, they had been drafting people over twenty-six for more than a year. I answered the question by showing the officer my missing finger.

  “I’m not worried about the war,” I told him, and he let me into Canada without any more questions.

  I might have ended up in Montreal; but too many people were pissy to me there, because I couldn’t speak French. And I arrived in Ottawa on a rainy day; I just kept driving until I got to Toronto. I’d never seen a lake as large as Lake Ontario; I knew I was going to miss the view of the Atlantic Ocean from the breakwater at Rye Harbor, so the idea of a lake that looked as big as the sea was appealing to me.

  Not much else has happened to me. I’m a churchgoer and a schoolteacher. Those two devotions need not necessarily yield an unexciting life, but my life has been determinedly unexciting; my life is a reading list. I’m not complaining; I’ve had enough excitement. Owen Meany was enough excitement for a lifetime.

  How it must have disappointed Owen … to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man. Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats? Only Mr. Merrill could have escaped my attention. As many times as I searched the audience at the performances of The Gravesend Players (and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was always there), I always missed him, I never remembered him as he was in those bleacher seats, I simply overlooked him. In any gathering, not only did Mr. Merrill not stand out—he didn’t even show up!

  How it has disappointed me … to discover that my father was just another Joseph. I never dared tell Owen, but once I dreamed that JFK was my father; after all, my mother was just as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe! How it has disappointed me … to discover that my father is just another man like me.

  As for my faith: I’ve become my father’s son—that is, I’ve become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be. Doubt one minute, faith the next—sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair. Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me. Whom do I know who’s alive whom I love? Good question—one that can bring you back to life. These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeling; I know I love them because I worry about them—Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some! What I feel for Hester isn’t exactly love; I admire her—she’s certainly been a more heroic survivor than I’ve been, and her kind of survival is admirable. And then there are those distant, family ties that pass for love—I’m talking about Noah and Simon, about Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred. I look forward to seeing them every Christmas.

  I don’t hate my father; I just don’t think about him very much—and I haven’t seen him since that day he committed Owen Meany’s body to the ground. I hear from Dan that he’s a whale of a preacher, and that there’s not a trace of the slight stutter that once marred his speech. At times I envy Lewis Merrill; I wish someone could trick me the way I tricked him into having such absolute and unshakable faith. For although I believe I know what the real miracles are, my belief in God disturbs and unsettles me much more than not believing ever did; unbelief seems vastly h
arder to me now than belief does—but belief poses so many unanswerable questions!

  How could Owen Meany have known what he “knew”? It’s no answer, of course, to believe in accidents, or in coincidences; but is God really a better answer? If God had a hand in what Owen “knew,” what a horrible question that poses! For how could God have let that happen to Owen Meany?

  Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!

  It was more than a year after I came to Canada, when the town churches of Gravesend—and Hurd’s Church, upon the urging of Lewis Merrill—organized a so-called Vietnam Moratorium. On a given day in October, all the church bells were rung at 6:00 A.M.—I’m sure that pissed some people off!—and services were held as early as 7:00. Following the services, a parade then commenced from the town bandstand, marching up Front Street to assemble on the lawn in front of the Main Academy Building on the Gravesend campus; there followed a peaceful demonstration, so-called, and a few of the standard antiwar speeches. Typically, the town newspaper, The Gravesend News-Letter, did not editorialize on the event, except to say that a march against mayhem on the nation’s highways would be a more significant use of such civilian zeal; as for the academy newspaper, The Grave reported that it was “about time” the school and the town combined forces to demonstrate against the evil war. The News-Letter estimated the crowd was less than four hundred people—“and almost as many dogs.” The Grave claimed that the crowd swelled to at least six hundred “well-behaved” people. Both papers reported the only counterdemonstration. As the parade swung up Front Street—just past the old Town Hall, where The Gravesend Players had for so long been entertaining both young and old—a former American Legion commander stepped off the sidewalk and waved a North Vietnamese flag in the face of a young tuba player in the Gravesend Academy marching band.