A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  I don’t remember much about meeting Dan’s family: at the wedding, they chose not to mingle. My grandmother was outraged that there were people who actually dared to condescend to her—to treat her like some provincial fussbudget. I recall that Dan’s mother had an acid tongue, and that, when introduced to me, she said, “So this is the child.” And then there followed a period of time in which she scrutinized my face—for any telltale indication of the race of my missing male ancestor, I would guess. But that’s all I remember. Dan refused to have anything further to do with them. I cannot think that they played any role at all in the four-year “engagement.”

  And what with all the comparing and contrasting of a theological nature, there was no end of religious approval for matching Dan and my mother; there was, in fact, double approval—the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians appeared to be competing for the privilege of having Dan and my mother come worship with them. In my opinion, it should have been no contest; granted, I was happy to have the opportunity to lift Owen up in the air at Sunday school, but that was the beginning and the end to any advantage the Episcopalians had over the Congregationalists.

  There were not only those differences I’ve already mentioned—of an atmospheric and architectural nature, together with those ecclesiastical differences that made the Episcopal service much more Catholic than the Congregational service—CATHOLIC, WITH A BIG C, as Owen would say. But there were also vast differences between the Rev. Lewis Merrill, whom I liked, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin—the rector of the Episcopal Church—who was a bumpkin of boredom.

  To compare these two ministers as dismissively as I did, I confess I was drawing on no small amount of snobbery inherited from Grandmother Wheelwright. The Congregationalists had pastors—the Rev. Lewis Merrill was our pastor. If you grow up with that comforting word, it’s hard to accept rectors—the Episcopal Church had rectors; the Rev. Dudley Wiggin was the rector of Christ Church, Gravesend. I shared my grandmother’s distaste for the word rector—it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously.

  But it would have been hard to take the Rev. Dudley Wiggin seriously if he’d been a pastor. Whereas the Rev. Mr. Merrill had heeded his calling as a young man—he had always been in, and of, the church—the Rev. Mr. Wiggin was a former airline pilot; some difficulty with his eyesight had forced his early retirement from the skies, and he had descended to our wary town with a newfound fervor—the zeal of the convert giving him the healthy but frantic appearance of one of those “elder” citizens who persist in entering vigorous sporting competitions in the over-fifty category. Whereas Pastor Merrill spoke an educated language—he’d been an English major at Princeton; he’d heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological—Rector Wiggin spoke in ex-pilot homilies; he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt.

  What made Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was full of doubt; he expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubling plot, but a plot that can be understood: God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us—at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.

  Although he knew all the best—or, at least, the least boring—stories in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite. By comparison, whatever the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had seen to make him believe in God, he had seen absolutely—possibly by flying an airplane too close to the sun. The rector was not gifted with language, and he was blind to doubt or worry in any form; perhaps the problem with his “eyesight” that had forced his early retirement from the airlines was really a euphemism for the blinding power of his total religious conversion—because Mr. Wiggin was fearless to an extent that would have made him an unsafe pilot, and to an extent that made him a madman as a preacher.

  Even his Bible selections were outlandish; a satirist could not have selected them better. The Rev. Mr. Wiggin was especially fond of the word “firmament”; there was always a firmament in his Bible selections. And he loved all allusions to faith as a battle to be savagely fought and won; faith was a war waged against faith’s adversaries. “Take the whole armor of God!” he would rave. We were instructed to wear “the breastplate of righteousness”; our faith was a “shield”—against “all the flaming darts of the evil one.” The rector said he wore a “helmet of salvation.” That’s from Ephesians; Mr. Wiggin was a big fan of Ephesians. He also whooped it up about Isaiah—especially the part when “the Lord is sitting upon a throne”; the rector was big on the Lord upon a throne. The Lord is surrounded by seraphim. One of the seraphim flies to Isaiah, who is complaining that he’s “a man of unclean lips.” Not for long; not according to Isaiah. The seraphim touches Isaiah’s mouth with “a burning coal” and Isaiah is as good as new.

  That was what we heard from the Rev. Dudley Wiggin: all the unlikeliest miracles.

  “I DON’T LIKE THE SERAPHIM,” Owen complained. “WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEING SCARY?”

  But although Owen agreed with me that the rector was a moron who messed up the Bible for tentative believers by assaulting us with the worst of God the Almighty and God the Terrible—and although Owen acknowledged that the Rev. Mr. Wiggin’s sermons were about as entertaining and convincing as a pilot’s voice in the intercom, explaining technical difficulties while the plane plummets toward the earth and the stewardesses are screaming—Owen actually preferred Wiggin to what little he knew of Pastor Merrill. Owen didn’t know much about Mr. Merrill, I should add; Owen was never a Congregationalist. But Merrill was such a popular preacher that parishioners from the other Gravesend churches would frequently skip a service of their own to attend his sermons. Owen did so, on occasion, but Owen was always critical. Even when Gravesend Academy bestowed the intellectual honor upon Pastor Merrill—of inviting him to be a frequent guest preacher in the academy’s nondenominational church—Owen was critical.

  “BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER,” he complained. “IF HE’S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE’S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS.”

  But who, besides Owen Meany and Rector Wiggin, had so little doubt? Owen was a natural in the belief business, but my appreciation of Mr. Merrill and my contempt for Mr. Wiggin were based on common sense. I took a particularly Yankee view of them; the Wheelwright in me was all in favor of Lewis Merrill, all opposed to Dudley Wiggin. We Wheelwrights do not scoff at the appearance of things. Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter. That clean, well-lit place of worship, which was the Congregational Church—its pristine white clapboards, its tall, clear windows that welcomed the view of branches against the sky—that was a first impression that lasted for me; it was a model of purity and no-nonsense, against which the Episcopal gloom of stone and tapestry and stained glass could pose no serious competition. And Pastor Merrill was also good-looking—in an intense, pale, slightly undernourished way. He had a boyish face—a sudden, winning, embarrassed smile that contradicted a fairly constant look of worry that more usually gave him the expression of an anxious child. An errant lock of hair flopped on his forehead when he looked down upon his sermon, or bent over his Bible—his hair problem was the unruly result of a pronounced widow’s peak, which further contributed to his boyishness. And he was always misplacing his glasses, which he didn’t seem to need—that is, he could read without them, he could look out upon his congregation without them (at least not appearing to be blind); then, all of a sudden, he would commence a frantic search for them. It was endearing; so was his slight stutter, because it made us nervous for him—afraid for him, should he have his eloquence snatched from him and be struck down with a crippling speech impediment. H
e was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he exhibited what hard work it was—to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter.

  And then, to add to Mr. Merrill’s appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes—a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord’s work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire.

  She suffered visibly. Her blondness turned to dry straw; her cheeks and nose turned a raw salmon color, her eyes watered—she caught every flu, every common cold there was; no epidemic missed her. Aghast at the loss of her California color, she tried makeup; but this turned her skin to clay. Even in summer, she couldn’t tan; she turned so dead white in the winter, there was nothing for her to do in the sun but burn. She was sick all the time, and this cost her her energy; she grew listless; she developed a matronly spread, and the vague, unfocused look of someone over forty who might be sixty—or would be, tomorrow.

  All this happened to Mrs. Merrill while her children were still small; they were sickly, too. Although they were successful scholars, they were so often ill and missed so many school days that they had to repeat whole grades. Two of them were older than I was, but not a lot older; one of them was even demoted to my grade—I don’t remember which one; I don’t even remember which sex. That was another problem that the Merrill children suffered: they were utterly forgettable. If you didn’t see the Merrill children for weeks at a time, when you saw them again, they appeared to have been replaced by different children.

  The Rev. Lewis Merrill had the appearance of a plain man who, with education and intensity, had risen above his ordinariness; and his rise manifested itself in his gift of speech. But his family labored under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable.

  It was said that Mrs. Merrill had a drinking problem—or, at least, that her modest intake of alcohol was in terrible conflict with her long list of prescription drugs. One of the children once swallowed all the drugs in the house and had to have its stomach pumped. And following a kind of pep talk that Mr. Merrill gave to the youngest Sunday school class, one of his own children pulled the minister’s hair and spit in his face. When the Merrill children were growing up, one of them vandalized a cemetery.

  Here was our pastor, clearly bright, clearly grappling with all the most thoughtful elements of religious faith, and doubt; yet, clearly, God had cursed his family.

  There was simply no comparable sympathy for the Rev. Dudley Wiggin—Captain Wiggin, some of his harsher critics called him. He was a hale and hearty type, he had a grin like a gash in his face; his smile was the smirk of a restless survivor. He looked like a former downed pilot, a veteran of crash landings, or shoot-outs in the sky—Dan Needham told me that Captain Wiggin had been a bomber pilot in the war, and Dan would know: he was a sergeant himself, in Italy and in Brazil, where he was a cryptographic technician. And even Dan was appalled at the crassness with which Dudley Wiggin directed the Christmas Pageant—and Dan was more tolerant of amateur theatrical performances than the average Gravesend citizen. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was—if properly understood—threatening.

  And his wife, clearly, had not suffered. A former stewardess, Barbara Wiggin was a brash, backslapping redhead; Mr. Wiggin called her “Barb,” which was how she introduced herself in various charity-inspired phone calls.

  “Hi! It’s Barb Wiggin! Is your mommy or your daddy home?”

  She was very much a barb, if not a nail, in Owen’s side, because she enjoyed picking him up by his pants—she would grab him by his belt, her fist in his belly, and lift him to her stewardess’s face: a frankly handsome, healthy, efficient face. “Oh, you’re a cute-y!” she’d tell Owen. “Don’t you ever dare grow!”

  Owen hated her; he always begged Dan to cast her as a prostitute or a child-molester, but The Gravesend Players did not offer many roles of that kind, and Dan admitted to thinking of no other good use for her. Her own children were huge, oafish athletes, irritatingly “well rounded.” All the Wiggins played in touch-football games, which they organized, every Sunday afternoon, on the parish-house lawn. Yet—incredibly!—we moved to the Episcopal Church. It was not for the touch football, which Dan and my mother and I despised. I could only guess that Dan and my mother had discussed having children of their own, and Dan had wanted his children to be baptized as Episcopalians—although, as I’ve said, the whole church business didn’t appear to matter very much to him. Perhaps my mother took Dan’s Episcopalianism more seriously than Dan took it. All that my mother said to me was that it was better if we were all in one church, and that Dan cared more about his church than she cared about hers—and wasn’t it fun for me to be where Owen was? Yes, it was.

  Thank Heavens for Hurd’s Church; that was the unfortunate name of the nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy—it was named after the academy’s founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev. Emery Hurd himself. Without the neutral territory of Hurd’s Church, my mother might have started an interdenominational war—because where would she have been married? Grandmother wanted the Rev. Lewis Merrill to perform the ceremony, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had every reason to expect that he would get to officiate.

  Fortunately, there was some middle ground. As a faculty member at Gravesend Academy, Dan Needham had a right to use Hurd’s Church—especially for the all-important wedding and the quick-to-follow funeral—and Hurd’s Church was a masterpiece of inoffensiveness. No one could remember the denomination of the school minister, a sepulchral old gentleman who favored bow ties and had the habit of pinning his vestment to the floor with an errant stab of his cane; he suffered from gout. His role in Hurd’s Church was usually that of a bland master of ceremonies, for he rarely delivered a sermon himself; he introduced one guest preacher after another, each one more flamboyant or controversial than himself. The Rev. “Pinky” Scammon also taught Religion at Gravesend Academy, where his courses were known to begin and end with apologies for Kierkegaard; but old Pinky Scammon cleverly delegated much of the teaching of his Religion classes to guest preachers, too. He would invariably entice Sunday’s minister to stay through the day Monday, and teach his Monday class; the rest of the week, Mr. Scammon devoted to discussing with his students what the interesting guest had said.

  The gray granite edifice of Hurd’s Church, which was so plain it might have been a Registry of Deeds or a Town Library or a Public Water Works, seemed to have composed itself around old Mr. Scammon’s gouty limp and his sepulchral features. Hurd’s was dark and shabby, but it was comfy—the pews were wide and worn so smooth that they invited instant dozing; the light, which was absorbed by so much stone, was gray but soft; the acoustics, which may have been Hurd’s only miracle, were unmuddied and deep. Every preacher sounded better than he was there; every hymn was distinct; each prayer was resonant; the organ had a cathedral tone. If you shut your eyes—and you were inclined to shut your eyes in Hurd’s Church—you could imagine you were in Europe.

  Generations of Gravesend Academy boys had carved up the racks for the hymnals with the names of their girlfriends and the scores of football games; generations of academy maintenance men had sanded away the more flagrant obscenities, although an occasional “dork-brain” or “cunt-face” was freshly etched in the wooden slats that secured the tattered copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal. Given the darkness of the place, Hurd’s was better suited for a funeral than for a wedding; but my mother had both her wedding and her funeral there.

  The wedding service at Hurd’s was shared by Pastor Merrill and Rector W
iggin, who managed to avoid any awkwardness—or any open demonstration of the competition between them. Old Pinky Scammon nodded peaceably to what both ministers had to say. Those elements of the celebration that allow the impromptu were the responsibility of Mr. Merrill, who was brief and charming—his nervousness was manifest, as usual, only by his slight stutter. Pastor Merrill also got to deliver the “Dearly beloved” part. “‘We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony,’” he began, and I noticed that Hurd’s was packed—there was standing-room only. The academy faculty had turned out in droves, and there were the usual droves of women of my grandmother’s generation who turned out whenever there was a public opportunity to observe my grandmother, who was—to women her age—the closest that the Gravesend community came to royalty; and there was something special about her having a “fallen” daughter who was choosing this moment to haul herself back into the ranks of the respectable. That Tabby Wheelwright has some nerve to wear white, I’m sure some of these old crones from my grandmother’s bridge club were thinking. But this sense of the richness of gossip that permeated Gravesend society is, on my part, largely hindsight. At the time, I chiefly thought it was a splendid turnout.

  The Ministry of the Word was muttered by Captain Wiggin, who had no understanding of punctuation; he either trampled over it entirely, or he paused and held his breath so long that you were sure someone was pointing a gun at his head. “‘O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace,’” he gasped.