a prayer for john irving

I recently finished reading A Prayer for Owen Meany on a friend's recommendation (thanks, Anna). Because of the holidays, I picked it up and put it down too many times to appreciate it as fully as I would have in a more focused context, but it was an interesting read. One of the overarching subjects of the book is faith, and I was intrigued by Irving's portrayal of belief as a product of coercion. Here are a few quotes from the book:

It seemed to me that Owen Meany had been used as cruelly by ignorance as he had been used by any design. I had seen what God used him for; now I saw how ignorance had used him, too.

This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

At times I envy Lewis Merrill; I wish someone could trick me the way I tricked him into having such absolute and unshakable faith. For although I believe I know what the real miracles are, my belief in God disturbs and unsettles me much more than not believing ever did; unbelief seems vastly harder to me now than belief does – but belief poses so many unanswerable questions!

Curious to research why Irving wrote this book and his religious convictions, I found this New York Times interview where he discusses a fascination in miracles as faith generators:

''I've always asked myself what would be the magnitude of the miracle that could convince me of religious faith,'' Mr. Irving said, identifying the kernel of philosophical curiosity that generated this latest book. He said that as a regular churchgoer during his youth, he himself had numerous religious doubts and ''an on-again, off-again faith'' [....] ''And yet,'' he said, ''so much accumulated churchgoing had an effect, even if, when I was a teen-ager, the pompousness of it, the self-righteousness of it irritated me. [....] For someone who was interested in telling stories, they [ministers] were among my first contacts with seizing someone's attention, telling a story and convincing you, not on intellectual grounds but persuading you, emotionally and psychologically, to believe something.''

This novel has made me consider the generation of my own faith--how someone like Irving might deem it "parental brainwashing" or "youthful indoctrination" which ignorantly loitered into adulthood. It grieves me that pondering the miracle of God's creation, incarnation and redemption is insufficient for Irving. Though many suppress the truth, God is still glorified through their work--whether they recognize it or not.