A Prayer for Owen Meany

“What are you going to say about him—at his funeral?” I finally asked Pastor Merrill.

In the darkness, his expression was hidden from me; but Mr. Merrill sat so stiffly at his old desk that the unnatural rigidity of his posture gave me the impression he had no confidence in his ability to do his job. “I WANT YOU TO SAY A PRAYER FOR ME,” Owen Meany had said to him. Why had that prayer been so difficult for the Rev. Mr. Merrill? “IT’S YOUR BUSINESS, ISN’T IT?” Owen had asked. Why had Mr. Merrill appeared almost stricken to agree? For wasn’t it, indeed, his BUSINESS, not only to pray for Owen Meany, then and now and forever, but here in Hurd’s Church—at Owen’s funeral—to bear witness to how Owen had lived his life, as if he were on divine assignment, as if he were following God’s holy orders; and whether or not the Rev. Lewis Merrill believed in everything that Owen had believed, wasn’t it also the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s BUSINESS to give testimony to how faithful a servant of God Owen Meany had been?

I sat in the dark of the vestry office, thinking that religion was only a career for Pastor Merrill. He taught the same old stories, with the same old cast of characters; he preached the same old virtues and values; and he theologized on the same old “miracles”—yet he appeared not to believe in any of it. His mind was closed to the possibility of a new story; there was no room in his heart for a new character of God’s holy choosing, or for a new “miracle.” Owen Meany had believed that his death was necessary if others were to be saved from a stupidity and hatred that was destroying him. In that belief, surely he was not so unfamiliar a hero.

In the darkness of the vestry office, I suddenly felt that Owen Meany was very near.

The Rev. Lewis Merrill turned on the lamp; he looked as if I’d awakened him, and that he’d been dreaming—he looked as if he’d suffered a nightmare. When he tried to speak, his stutter gripped his throat so tightly that he needed to raise both his hands to his mouth—almost to pull the words out. But no words came. He looked as if he might be choking. Then his mouth opened—still he found no words. His hands grasped the top of his desk; his hands wandered to the handles of his old desk drawers.

When the Rev. Mr. Merrill spoke, he spoke not with his own voice—he spoke in the exact falsetto, the “permanent scream,” of Owen Meany. It was Mr. Merrill’s mouth that formed the words, but it was Owen Meany’s voice that spoke to me: “LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE.” Then the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s right hand flew down to the third desk drawer on the right-hand side; he pulled the drawer out so far that it came free of the desk—and the baseball rolled across the cool, stone floor of the vestry office. When I looked into Pastor Merrill’s face, I had no doubt about which baseball it was.

“Father?” I said.

“Forgive me, my s-s-s-son!” said the Rev. Lewis Merrill.

That was the first time that Owen Meany let me hear from him—after he was gone. The second time was this August, when—as if to remind me that he would never allow anything bad to happen to me—he kept me from falling down the cellar stairs in the secret passageway. And I know: I will hear from him—from time to time—again. It is typical of Owen, who was always guilty of overkill; he should understand that I don’t need to hear from him to know if he is there. Like his rough, gray replacement of Mary Magdalene, the statue that Owen said was like the God he knew was there—even in the dark, even though invisible—I have no doubt that Owen is there.

Owen promised me that God would tell me who my father was. I always suspected that Owen would tell me—he was always so much more interested in the story than I was. It’s no surprise to me that when God decided it was time to tell me who my father was, God chose to speak to me in Owen’s voice.

“LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE,” God said.

And there was the ball that Owen Meany hit; and there was my wretched father, asking me to forgive him.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes—toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings. The wholly anticlimactic, unsatisfying, and disagreeable news that the Rev. Lewis Merrill was my father—not to mention the death of Owen Meany—is just one example of the condition of universal disappointment.

In my sorry father’s case, my disappointment with him was heightened by his refusal to admit that Owen Meany had managed—from beyond the grave—to reveal the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s identity to me. This was another miracle that my father lacked the faith to believe in. It had been an emotional moment; I was—by my own admission—becoming an expert in imitating Owen’s voice. Furthermore, Mr. Merrill himself had always desired to tell me who he was; he’d simply lacked the courage; perhaps he’d found the courage by using a voice not his own. He’d always wanted to show me the baseball, too, he admitted—“to confess.”

The Rev. Lewis Merrill was so intellectually detached from his faith, he had so long removed himself from the necessary amount of winging it that is required of belief, that he could not accept a small but firm miracle when it happened not only in his presence but was even spoken by his own lips and enacted with his own hand—which had, with a force not his own, ripped the third drawer on the right-hand side completely out of his desk. Here was an ordained minister of the Congregation

al Church, a pastor and a spokesman for the faithful, telling me that the miracle of Owen Meany’s voice speaking out in the vestry office—not to mention the forceful revelation of my mother’s “murder weapon,” the “instrument of death”—was not so much a demonstration of the power of God as it was an indication of the power of the subconscious; namely, the Rev. Mr. Merrill thought that both of us had been “subconsciously motivated”—in my case, to use Owen Meany’s voice, or to make Mr. Merrill use it; and in Mr. Merrill’s case, to confess to me that he was my father.

“Are you a minister or a psychiatrist?” I asked him. He was so confused. I might as well have been speaking to Dr. Dolder!

Like so many things in the last twenty years: it got worse. The Rev. Mr. Merrill confessed that he had no faith at all; he had lost his faith, he told me, when my mother died. God had stopped speaking to him then; and the Rev. Mr. Merrill had stopped asking to be spoken to. My father had sat in the bleacher seats at that Little League game, and when he saw my mother strolling carelessly along the third-base line—when she had spotted him in the stands and waved to him, with her back to home plate—at that moment, my father told me, he had prayed to God that my mother would drop dead!

Infuriatingly, he assured me that he hadn’t really meant it—it had been only a “passing thought.” More often, he wished that they could be friends, and that the sight of her didn’t fill him with self-disgust for his long-ago transgression. When he saw her bare shoulders at the baseball game, he hated himself—he was ashamed that he was still attracted to her. Then she spotted him, and—shamelessly, without an ounce of guilt—she waved to him. She made him feel so guilty, he wished her dead. The first pitch to Owen Meany was way outside; he let it go. My mother had left my father’s church, but it never seemed to upset her when she encountered him—she was always friendly, she spoke to him, she waved. It pained him to remember every little thing about her—the pretty hollow of her bare armpit, which he could see so clearly as she waved to him. The second pitch almost hit Owen Meany in the head; he dove in the dirt to avoid it. Whatever my mother remembered, my father thought that nothing pained her. She just went on waving. Oh, just drop dead! he thought.

At that precise moment, that is what he’d prayed. Then Owen Meany hit the next pitch. This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends. How could the Rev. Lewis Merrill agree with me—that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were “monsters of superstition”—if he himself believed that God had listened to his prayer at that Little League game; and that God had not “listened” to him since? Because he’d wished my mother dead, my father said, God had punished him; God had taught Pastor Merrill not to trifle with prayer. And I suppose that was why it had been so difficult for Mr. Merrill to pray for Owen Meany—and why he had invited us all to offer up our silent prayers to Owen, instead of speaking out himself. And he called Mr. and Mrs. Meany “superstitious”! Look at the world: look at how many of our peerless leaders presume to tell us that they know what God wants! It’s not God who’s fucked up, it’s the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name!

Why the Rev. Lewis Merrill had so whimsically prayed that my mother would drop dead was such an old, tired story. My mother’s little romance, I was further disappointed to learn, had been more pathetic than romantic; Mother, after all, was simply a very young woman from a very hick town. When she’d started singing at The Orange Grove, she’d wanted the honest approval of her hometown pastor—she’d needed to be assured that she was engaged in a decent and honorable endeavor; she’d asked him to come see her and hear her sing. Clearly, it was the sight of her that had impressed him; in that setting—in that unfamiliarly scarlet dress—“The Lady in Red” did not strike the Rev. Mr. Merrill as the same choir girl he had tutored through her teens. I suppose it was a seduction accomplished with only slightly more than the usual sincerity—for my mother was sincerely innocent, and I will at least credit the Rev. Lewis Merrill with supposing that he was sincerely “in love”; after all, he’d had no great experience with love. Afterward, the reality that he had no intentions of leaving his wife and children—who were already (and always had been) unhappy!—must have shamed him.

I know that my mother took it fairly well; in my memory, she never winced to call me her “little fling.” In short, Tabitha Wheelwright got over Lewis Merrill rather quickly; and she bore up better than stoically to the task of bearing his illegitimate child. Mother’s intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don’t imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to—especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his “love” of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his “belief” was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn’t leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.

But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death. And when she met and became engaged to Dan Needham, how that must have threatened to put an end to his conjecturing; and when she married Dan, how that must have threatened to put an end to the self-inflicted pain of which he had grown so fond. That for all his sourness, her disposition remained sunny—that she even cheerfully sought the bleacher seats for him, and waved to him only a split second before she died—how insubstantial that must have made her in his eyes! The closest that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had come to God was in his remorse for his “sin” with my mother.

And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith—his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his mean-spirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother—that she’d had the good sense to shrug him off.

It’s no wonder it was such a tribulation for Mr. Merrill to know what he was going to say about Owen—at Owen’s funeral. How could a man like him know what to say about Owen Meany? He called Owen’s parents “monstrous,” while he outrageously presumed that God had actually “listened” to his ardent, narrow prayer that my mother drop dead; and he arrogantly presumed further that God was now silent, and wouldn’t listen to him—as if the Rev. Mr. Merrill, all by himself, possessed the power both to make God pay attention to him and to harden God’s heart against him. What a hypocrite he was—to agree with me that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were “monsters of superstition”!

In the vestry office, where we were supposed to be preparing ourselves for Owen Meany’s funeral, I said—very sarcastically—to my father: “How I wish I could help restore your faith.” Then I left him there—possibly imagining how such a restoration could ever be possible. I have never been angrier; that was when I felt “moved to do evil”—and when I remembered how Owen Meany had tried to prepare me for what a disappointment my father was going to be.

Toronto: September 27, 1987—overcast, with rain inevitable by the end of the day. Katherine says that the least Christian thing about me is my lack of forgiveness, which I know is true and is hand-in-hand with my constantly resurfacing desire for revenge. I sat in Grace Church on-the-Hill; I sat there all alone, in the dim light—as overcast as the outdoor weather. To make matters worse: the Toronto Blue Jays are involved in a pennant race; if the Blue Jays make it to the World Series, the talk of the town will be baseball.

There are times when I need to read the Thirty-seventh Ps

alm, over and over again.

Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: