My favorite novel of all time is A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (maybe best known as the author of The Cider House Rules or The World According to Garp, which were both made into better movies than the atrocious Simon Birch, the Meany adaptation. In fact, I can’t close this parenthesis without mentioning that Birch was so atrocious that Irving refused to let the filmmakers use the name of his novel). The first words of the first chapter are:
“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 am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
Makes you want to keep reading, right? I recently started reading A Prayer for Owen Meany again, probably for the fifth or sixth time, and I got to thinking about the structure of this wonderful novel. Wonderful as it is, though, I fear that not that many of those reading these words may have read it. However, there is another story that follows a similar structure, with which you may be more familiar: M. Night Shyamalan‘s film Signs.
In Signs, Mel Gibson plays a (probably Episcopal) minister who has lost his faith after the tragic death of his wife. He lives with his idiosyncratic family on a farm. His brother is a failed baseball player, his son has terrible asthma, and his daughter leaves half-drunk glasses of water all over the house, claiming it “tastes funny.” When aliens with evil intentions invade earth and besiege Gibson’s family in their farmhouse, the foibles of his family (the baseball playing, the asthma, and the drinking water) turn out to be the exact set of circumstances that are required for the family to survive the attack. This leads Gibson to recover his faith.A Prayer for Owen Meany is like that. The seeming random and tragic events of two boys’ lives conspire to prepare them perfectly for their most pivotal moment, and this leads to the narrator’s belief in God.
What do you think of this? In these two stories, we get the classic “things work together for good” argument of Romans 8:28, even things that don’t appear, at the time, to be good. A boy’s asthma, and the death of another boy’s mother, are eventually shown to be for some “greater” good. It seems, though, that as pleasant as this seems, that in actual life (that is, life outside of movies and novels) we don’t get to see the allegedly greater good. Sometimes, it’s awfully hard to see any greater good at all.It seems, to me at least, that Christianity comes from a different place. The narrator of A Prayer for Owen Meany even alludes to it by specifying: “…he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” However, the narrator of Owen Meany becomes a believer because everything works out in the end. But “a Christian” is much more specific than “a believer in God.” Christians, fundamentally, believe in a God who saves. And this, finally, differentiates the God of Christianity from the God of Irving and Shyamalan. Their God saves, to be sure, but faith is only restored when the saving happens in a visible and obvious way. Their God saves temporally…ours saves eternally. It’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. How ’bout you?
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5 responses to “A Prayer for M. Night Shyamalan: God DOES Exist!”
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Nick, I just reread "Owen Meany" a few months ago. It's one of my all-time favorites, too. That opening sentence is possibly one of the best in all literature. (And yes, Simon Birch is wretched. What a disappointment…)
I remember thinking, as I read "Owen" this time around, how much I longed for the kind of sign that the narrator, John, receives in the book's climax. (Don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read! They should…) 'If only I were given THAT kind of sign, I would never, ever doubt again,' I thought. But I wonder if that's really true? Aren't there signs all around me? Miraculous gifts of beauty and joy and grace? And still, I wrestle with unbelief.
Anyway, it's a beautiful book and well worth the read, even if Irving doesn't get it quite right. I just love that he's openly and passionately struggling with the issue at all. ("Signs" ain't half bad, either.)
This is an interesting take on these works. I do think that sometimes in non-sentimentalized fiction a temporal "good" ending is often meant to be taken as analogous to God's ultimate "yes", rather than read literally as a claim that God makes things right in the here and now. Dickens' novels should be read with that in mind, I think. I would also suggest _Peace Like A River_ by Leif Enger as a novel that presents a God that can and does work miracles in the here and now, but that also presents suffering and sacrificial death and the permanent scars we all carry as the most profound level of our "aliens and strangers" life this side of true and lasting Glory.
You're right, Michael – It's not fair to Irving or Shyamalan to chastise them for not saying something like, "and nothing good came of it, but we all ended up in heaven." Just doesn't have the same ring, eh?
I'm afraid I cannot speak to the novel (this is the first time I've heard of it), but what fascinates me about 'signs' is the context – the crisis of faith caused by the trail of bereavement (a similar theme – how we deal with such loss – is touched on in last year's release, 'Surrogates'). I can certainly relate to this, having lost my own wife to cancer, but what I find key in Christianity is the very nature of redemption – that we can speak of 'all things' working towards a particular end because of the identifying of God in Christ with our broken world and lives. I have reached an age where my body has begun to fail me, `and death is pondered a great deal. Confidence, therefore, must be found beyond the present corruption and decay – such 'gifting' truly comes to us from beyond ourselves, from a Saviour who is truly at work to make our broken race something transformed by the wonder of His work and faithfulness.
Michael,
Took your suggestion and read Peace Like a River. Loved that book and I see your point.
Nick, I never read Owen Meany in my formative years but plan to do so! Thanks!