A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

I have a church-rummage faith—the kind that needs patching up every weekend.

the front page of The Globe and Mail gave us a full account of President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union Message. Will I ever learn? When I see such things, I know I should simply not read them; I should pick up The Book of Common Prayer, instead.

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.

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