A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 543
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345417976
Publisher: Ballantine
THE FOUL BALL
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
a m a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life
in Christ, or with Christ--and certainly not for Christ, which I've heard
some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the
Old Testament, 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. I'm somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible
that appear in The Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often,
and my Bible only on holy days--the prayer book is so much more orderly.
I've always been a pretty regular churchgoer. I used to be a Congregationalist--I was baptized in
the Congregational Church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians
(I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, too), I became rather vague
in my religion: in my teens I attended a "nondenominational" church. Then
I became an Anglican; the Anglican Church of Canada has been my church--ever
since I left the United States, about twenty years ago. Being an Anglican
is a lot like being an Episcopalian--so much so that being an Anglican
occasionally impresses upon me the suspicion that I have simply become
an Episcopalian again. Anyway, I left the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians--and
my country once and for all.
When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire--alongside my mother--but the Anglican Church
will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity
of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs. My selections from the Order
for the Burial of the Dead are entirely conventional and can be found,
in the order that I shall have them entirely read--not sung--in The Book
of Common Prayer. Almost everyone I know will be familiar with the passages
from John, beginning with "...whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall
never die." And then there's ". . .in my Father's house are many mansions:
If it were not so, I would have told you." And I have always appreciated
the frankness expressed in that passage from Timothy, the one that goes
". . .we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry
nothing out." It will be a by-the-book Anglican service, the kind that
would make my former fellow Congregationalist fidget in their pews. I
am an Anglican now, and I shall die an Anglican. But I skip Sunday service
now and then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church-rummage
faith--the kind that needs patching up every weekend. What faith I have
I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen who made me a believer.
Excerpted from A Prayer for Owen Meany © Copyright 2008 by John Irving. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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