"But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. "When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth--so effortlessly--we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in--and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands." I added the last paragraph, only two sentences long, a day later. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You." I didn't arrive at the first sentence ("I am doomed to"