“Between the Word and the Water”
Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The following was delivered as the morning keynote at the Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts and Culture Festival, November 15, 2025, at Holy Cross Church in Lafayette. Note that the short story included in the text was originally published at Heart of Flesh Literary Journal.
Here in Louisiana we exist between the Word and the water. This is a geographical fact as well as a spiritual one. I remember my pre-calculus teacher in high school used to say that culture follows squiggles. That is, if you want culture, look on the map for water, for the squiggly edges of places, and that’s where you’ll find it. And certainly our water has contributed immensely to the culture that has grown up in Louisiana, a culture which continues to flourish despite the water’s periodic attempts to draw things back to itself. We’ll hear from Karen Ullo this evening about her book To Crown with Liberty, and if you want an illustration of the cultural richness that springs up along rivers and bayous and creeks, look no further than the pages of that novel.
But squiggles are also to be found in language. This strange capacity of humans to deal with the world through letters, to shape our voices in such a way as to mirror the fact of our curious suspension between the animal and the angelic, issues forth in these squiggly things called words that curl and luxuriate on the page, that rise and fall and flow over the air according to the contours of our tongues and teeth, our passions and appetites, our will and intellect and memory. Here again Louisiana has known tremendous blessings. The languages that have shaped us, from Latin to French to Spanish to English, have not vanished one into another, at least not completely, and not without attempts to the contrary. At St. Patrick’s in New Orleans, God speaks English but still remembers his Latin, as Archbishop Hannan once put it. Likewise in Acadiana, if the local French has suffered its setbacks, its musicality remains, not only as quaint coloration, but as means of expressing those things which lie nearest the heart of life.
In South Louisiana we are providentially drawn near to the heart of things, to that which endures. We know that we and all of this–these homes, these churches, these places that we love–will one day pass away. We are given demonstrations of the tenuous character of earthly life practically every hurricane season. And this can be a blessing when we remember, as the Gospels and indeed all of Scripture announce to us, that human life is going somewhere. The great exodus from the prince of this world is underway, and the pilgrim church is journeying toward Christ whose second coming forms the final horizon of all human events. At the heart of Louisiana culture is the conviction that we are journeying toward Christ, toward the day of the Lord’s eternal supper, toward Heaven.
Far from pulling us out of the world, though, from convincing us to withdraw from engagement with the things of creation, this conviction about the end of our journey calls us to draw all the nearer to that which the Word has fashioned, this world into which the Word has entered. Thus the richness of earthly things is redoubled in the doings of Louisiana’s people. We cook rich food. We make music meant not simply for passive hearing or intellectual analysis, but music for dancing, music for singing together. If not overabundantly wealthy, we are nonetheless lavish with our time and our energy as only those who are must truly wealthy can be. There is something in our culture of a Mary, breaking the alabaster jar, anointing Christ with that precious aromatic nard. We reveal what we value in how we spend ourselves, and we spend ourselves lavishly here on each other and on Christ and his Church, seeking in our way to fulfill the Great Commandment.
This largesse is to be seen, likewise, in the way that Louisianans, and perhaps especially Cajuns, encounter the world in a highly mediated way. That is, people down here tend to know what things are and how they work. I submit that this is no small matter, that it can make a great deal of difference to be able to distinguish the mallard and the gadwall, the live oak and the water oak, the black vulture and the turkey vulture and the hawk, that there is good reason to know the twitter of the robin from the cardinal’s whistle. These are the voicings of the Word in his creative activity, and to know them is to know the Word the better.
St. Augustine emphasizes this point in his De Doctrina Christiana. He writes there about the way that a knowledge of the things of the world is critical to delving into the figurative meanings of Scripture itself,
Just as a knowledge of the habits of the snake clarifies the many analogies involving this animal regularly given in scripture, so too an ignorance of the numerous animals mentioned no less frequently in analogies is a great hindrance to understanding. The same is true of stones, herbs, and anything that has roots. Even a knowledge of the carbuncle, a stone which shines in the dark, explains many obscure passages in scripture where it is used as an analogy; and ignorance of the beryl and the adamant often closes the door to understanding.
To know the names of things is also to begin to enter upon their workings, their causes, and this allows for our own greater activity in the world. To know the names of machines, for instance, and the parts of machines, allows us to use them more effectively, and to fix them when they break down. At least, it gives us the vocabulary to ask for the help we need in fixing them. Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming makes this abundantly clear, as Allison Huger, having lost her memory, finds herself needing, at times, for the words of things to be revealed to her so that she can carry out her work of adapting to life in the home she has inherited.
As it turns out, some of the best writers are at their own best when they are describing how things work. To those with ears to hear, there are few greater delights than in listening as Ishmael describes how to strip the blubber from a sperm whale and render it into oil in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Here you have a mere slice, a Bible leaf, as it were:
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.
Likewise, there is a keen pleasure in the way Cormac McCarthy describes the process for replacing the wheel of a shopping cart in The Road.
They collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools and emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel. He pulled the bolt and bored out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he’d cut to length with a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright and wheeled it around the floor. It ran fairly true. The boy sat watching everything.
To tell things truly, we need the words–the windlasses, the hawsers, the tackle, the collets. And this naming of things, akin to Adam’s naming of the animals, allows us to enter into them the more deeply, to feel the satisfaction of the spiralized orange rind and to savor the sweetness of the fruit of creation. And the responsibility to do these things well, and to name them rightly, is the more important as we recall that we are being watched, by our children and by all those who depend on our witness.
And, knowing how things work, we can put ourselves at the service of others. We can form a Cajun Navy. We can cook a gumbo for the poor. We can develop all of the tools and instruments needed to catch, clean, and cook the many creatures that go into our signature dishes. (Dr. Jennifer Morel has pointed out in an article for Joie de Vivre, for instance, how Acadiana has one of the highest number of patents per capita in the United States.) Knowing how things work can help us to clothe the naked and give solace to the lonely and, perhaps above all, instruct the ignorant by bringing them into contact with the causes of things and so with the cause of all things, finding the ancient in what we renew, meeting beauty at every turn.
Leaving aside for now the Indian Oceans and post-apocalyptic Appalachians of Melville and McCarthy, though, we can find a similar linguistic delight, and a similar readiness to labor alongside the Father in his creative activity, in the work of our own Tim Gautreaux, whose vision of life always centers on Tiger Island, as Morgan City once was called, and who attunes us to the beauty of the world through similarly precise and satisfying descriptions. In his stories, you can learn a pretty impressive amount about how to spray a house for insects, how to use an acetylene torch to dismantle a three-quarter ton pickup, how to dance, how to fight, how to shoot a match aflame, or how to wage war against the mafia. Gautreaux is a master of humor, and it’s the masters of humor who have mastered something of words, who can recognize and point to the play of the Word along the seams of being.
Incidentally, the Gautreauxvian humor seems to be part of the fabric of his marriage. In the dedication to his collection Same Place, Same Things, Gautreaux thanks his wife, Winborne, adding that though it might be worth thanking the National Endowment for the Arts, they never baked him biscuits. For her part, Winborne, when I met her at our festival last May, expressed her amazement that Tim had ever taken an interest in her, given that he only ever seems interested in things that are rusty, that he can take apart and scrub up and put back together again.
Perhaps nowhere in his body of work is Gautreaux’s attunement to the workings of things more evident than in his first novel, The Next Step in the Dance. Paul Thibodeaux’s mastery of machines, not only his knowledge of them but his intuition of their workings, is legendary, drawing acclaim expressed so colorfully that I can’t here repeat it. At the outset of the story, though, Paul is not using his powers to their full extent. He leaves his grass uncut and wastes time in the dive bars and drive-ins till his wife, Colette, decides she’s had enough and heads for California. This is sufficient to begin Paul’s process of maturation. He recognizes that he must change his life, and following Colette to California, he surprises her and, perhaps, even himself, by finding his skills in high demand. His practical bayou know-how turns out to meet with a great many needs of those in Los Angeles, from textile companies to Disneyland. Nonetheless, it will take a long road home, involving life-threatening accidents, violent storms, an unexpected birth, and loss after brutal loss, for Paul and Colette to find their way back to each other and to a vision of something like marriage as God intends it.
Gautreaux’s fiction has the power to give us the courage of our parishes, to echo what Katy Carl, invoking Patrick Kavanagh, said in her own keynote at our spring festival. Gautreaux reminds us that the stories which make up the fabric of life in Louisiana are not only well worth telling but that, in their particularity, they bear a medicine much needed by our age.
The difficulty of the road that Paul and Colette Thibodeaux face is reflective of the fact that learning how things work and finding the words for those things, while difficult, is not so difficult yet as finding the words to describe how we ourselves work, for becoming honest with ourselves about who we are and how we relate to the one who has made us. To describe a thing with parts is difficult enough, but to get at the unity of what is is another matter, and in some sense the matter for which we are made, allowing ourselves by grace to be made whole, not drawn apart in the disparate passions and pleasures to which we might be attracted, but made one through the unifying power of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ who draws all things to himself. We seek to articulate the way he is working in our lives, and so we have recourse to him who articulates, to the Word who is not diminished in going forth from the Father but rather raises us up to divinity. Our own power of telling stories, and our culture of story-telling here in South Louisiana, is a means of allowing ourselves to be spoken into the story of all stories, to let our words be harmonized with the Word for the sake of eternal life.
Part of having the courage of our parishes is trusting that the many small stories that form and intersect with our lives are part of the fabric of the divine storyteller’s work. The heaven we seek is not something far off, St. Augustine reminds us. As he writes in his Confessions concerning the path to conversion, “It was a journey not to be undertaken by ship or carriage or on foot, nor need it take me even that short distance I had walked from the house to the place where we were sitting; for to travel–and more, to reach journey’s end–was nothing else but to want to go there, but to want it valiantly and with all my heart, not to whirl and toss this way and that with a will half crippled by the struggle, as part of it rose up to walk while part sank down.” The end for which we are made is Christ who dwells in the very depth of our own being. Plunging into that depth, descending on the pathways of Christ who stoops like a catskill eagle–to borrow from Melville, though perhaps we might more suitably invoke the osprey–into the depth of his own outpouring, opens our eyes to the divine narratives woven into our days.
And so Tim Gautreaux’s advice, where storytelling is concerned, is not to cast about for some far off tale, not to venture after the exotic, the exquisite, the esoteric, but rather to listen carefully to those closest us, to attend to the stories the boring old people tell and tell again and to begin to hear the real story beneath the telling.
This means, too, that the culture we cherish calls for constant cultivation. The story of the Catholic faith unfolding here is not one which sustains itself without our attention, our care, our providence in preparing the way of the Lord who is himself the way. If we forget ourselves, if the lives of the saints, as happens in Nancy Lehman’s amazing novel of that name, become mere artifacts rather than living witnesses to the faith, then our culture will calcify, and the story will drift away into idiocy.
I’m going to read a story which seeks, in the manner of Gautreaux, to place our small stories in conversation with the story of salvation. Both of my grandmothers died a few years ago, and so the stories they told and the stories I’ve heard about them have been especially present to me these recent days. Some of their stories were told to me in detail. Others came down as mere one-line anecdotes. Taking those anecdotes and transforming them into fiction has been for me a way of remembering them and of remembering, in turn, that God is not God of the dead but of the living.
This particular story takes place between words and water. And it’s based on the time my Meemaw was suspended from school for hanging off the bridge over Bayou St. John near Cabrini High School.
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The Bridge
Only Carmen knew that Janelle sometimes hung by her knees from the bridge over Bayou St. John. Cars used it in those days, but it was mainly a pedestrian bridge. It was the same color grey as a sycamore’s trunk, and it sat low to the water, which in that part of the bayou, where it curved, was almost always still, and Janelle liked to hang from it and look down into the water, seeing first her own reflection and then, as she gazed, seeing also the reflection of the bridge in the sky and the longest limbs of the oak trees stretching from the banks and the long hydrilla fronds standing languid and serene below the water’s surface and the whole reflected world.
Carmen and Janelle grew up next door to each other on Bienville, though they didn’t meet, really, until they started together at the Cabrini girls’ school in first grade. Janelle sat across from Carmen at lunch on the first day of school. They shared a bunch of red grapes and a shrimp salad sandwich Janelle’s mother had brought home from the seafood market on Carrollton where she worked. And after that they were more or less together, all the way to school and through the day and back, though at home they might as well still not have known each other. Their parents weren’t on speaking terms. This was strange for New Orleans, and Janelle didn’t understand it except that she’d heard her mother crying once, saying Carmen’s mother’s name behind a locked bedroom door, saying “With Lizette? With Lizette?” And after that Janelle’s father was gone, and the house itself seemed to relax, but her mother didn’t speak to Carmen’s mother or to her father, who seemed very sad even when he smiled at Carmen as she came home.
One day Carmen wasn’t talking. Janelle was used to not talking. Her mother went through long periods of not talking, alternating with long periods of talking, not directed to her as to a child but rather as to an audience who might in the seats of some theater to be benefit from a discourse on the vicissitudes of life and their ineluctability. So she was used to not talking as a general rule and noticed Carmen’s silence and accepted it and wondered at it. It lasted over the bridge to school and through the day and back to the foot of the bridge before Janelle had had enough. She stopped walking. Carmen plodded on, head down and tipping side to side in the loose-jointed way of little children.
“Hey,” Janelle said.
Carmen kept walking.
“Hey,” she said again, this time with a shade of the rage she’d heard sometimes in her mother’s soliloquies.
Carmen turned.
“Come here,” she said. “I wanna show you something.”
Carmen came back, and Janelle took her lunch box and set it beside her own at the side of the bridge and took her hand and led her down into the grass that was a coarse crisp grey then at the end of October and then led her out, edging along the bridge’s substructure, with both hands sliding along the dusty edge of the road, to the joint of the first piling. There had been no rain and there was no current but a cool breeze riffled the surface in places and the light was golden and touched the water and the grass and the bridge with gold and the bells of Holy Rosary rang 3:30 as Janelle sat on the substructure and let herself down, unfolding backwards, till her hair in its thick rough curls cascaded toward the water and her hands reached for the surface nearly touching their own reflections. And she found Carmen’s eyes in the water as it stilled. Carmen was standing, holding to the bridge with one hand and leaning out to look at her friend’s reflection and her own. Then Janelle looked up at her, and they both smiled, and Carmen lowered herself, smoothing her skirt to pin it behind her knees, and hung beside Janelle. The two watched the gold of the day deepen and begin to die. And if Carmen still was silent now her silence could be shared.
So Carmen was the only one who knew, or that at least was what Janelle thought, and that the two of them might now share the secret arterial joy of the sky that gathered a foot away on the water’s face and the silent world that floated and finned and languorously grew beneath it.
That was Friday.
On Monday, the 2nd of November, Sr. Miriam Clare led her second graders back from Mass. Once they were seated, Sister stood before them, hands clasped at her belly in a gesture not of prayer but of serene command.
“Girls,” she said, “my good girls. It is a day to recall that not all souls will know the blessedness for which they are made. Christ the vine bids us be all grafted into him. But finding the sap too bitter in the early draughts, some draw away and wither. How hard the way, and how much the harder when in childhood we’ve not begun to learn it, to make its steps and strictures our own. Christ is the bridge, children. Christ is the bridge. Stay with him. Keep your feet to him. And do not tempt the deep below.”
At those final sentences Janelle lifted her eyes to Sister’s and waited. Her gaze was not returned, though she imagined this was by design, that every blink and slip of eye was calculated to leave her alone in her supposing. She felt, too, the urge to look at Carmen and resisted even after Sister turned to the board and began to write. But she could feel Carmen looking at her and she put her head down until the click and rasp of the chalk came to an end.
At lunch the girls sat across from each other, as they always did, at the end of their usual table. And Carmen said, as she flipped the latch on her lunchbox, “Do you think she saw?”
“Who?” Janelle said.
“Us. Sister. On the bridge.”
“Oh,” Janelle said, biting a fig. “No.”
“But she said stay on the bridge.”
“She’s just being preachy. She didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“But why would she talk about the bridge the very next day?”
By then Janelle, not knowing why, was feeling mean about it, so she said, “You know I think your mama’s gone pretty far off the bridge a time or two.”
She didn’t even know exactly what she was saying but she knew its enormity as she said it and saw it too in Carmen’s eyes, which stared over the pink shoulder of her apple until it came down and rested on the table and Carmen said, her voice steady even though her hand was trembling, “Well at least my mama’s still at home.” And she stood and gathered her apple and her lunchbox and turned away, leaving Janelle to a brown pear.
So there was silence again, silence now spined and bitter and bellowing. When the bell rang at the end of the day, Janelle remained seated as the other girls rose, watching Carmen out of sight from the corner of her eye. Then she, too, rose, and came behind, slowly, slowly. Glancing up from time to time, she made, downcast, for home. She was over the bridge before she realized Carmen was there, standing in the grass, down by the water, watching her. Both were still a moment.
“What do you want?” Janelle said.
“I bet you won’t try it again,” Carmen said.
“Try what?”
Carmen pointed to the bridge. “You know Sister was talking about us. Admit it.”
“You’re crazy,” Janelle said.
“Go on and do it,” Carmen said.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“You’re a liar and a coward then.”
For answer Janelle climbed out and let herself hang. At first she watched Carmen, who was not looking at her but seemed rather to be staring off across the water to the far end of the bridge. Then she let her sight drift to the water below. Now she was seeing the water itself, now the sky that lay along it, now a bluegill gliding by with fins the blue of stove flame, now herself as if about to fall through the sky to the water beyond. And then, like a great fish swimming up to swallow her, rose the veiled face of Sr. Miriam Clare. Janelle looked up. The eyes that met hers were stern and bright and sorrowful.
“Oh, Janelle. Oh, Janelle.”
Janelle looked to the bank, but Carmen was gone. She clambered up and edged along the bridge, wondering if she ought to run. But Sister was there to meet her at the water’s edge and snatched her to herself and held her at arm’s length, kneeling before her on the grass.
The two walked in silence to Janelle’s house, and inside, declining a cup of coffee, Sister told Janelle’s mother what had happened and that she felt, given the seriousness of the matter, that there was no choice but to suspend Janelle for two days. Janelle’s mother was gracious and superb, and when she had bid Sister farewell and shut the door she went a long while in silence. Then she began to laugh. And she laughed for a long time and began to speak of the foolishness of it all and the endurance of fools and the miserable foolery of women with women in the woeful world and Janelle listened for a long time until, certain of her own foolishness and the foolishness of it all, she felt her heart subside into silence and the wish that a friend were there to share it.
The next day her mother went to work at the seafood market, and Janelle sat alone at the window watching her go and watching Carmen on her way to school and watching Carmen’s father walk sadly down to his car and hunch over the wheel and drive away. A deep listlessness settled on her, a sadness that nursed itself so that she grew jealous as she thought of Carmen’s mother sitting alone as well next door. Then a shiny blue Continental pulled up to Carmen’s house and Janelle was sick and somehow a little glad to see her father get out and stroll with his hands in his pockets and his same old close-lipped smile up the walk to Carmen’s door. So she was alone again in her loneliness and was glad for an hour until her father went away again, strolling at his ease, his head looking up and down the street, his lips pursed in a silent whistle.
Around noon she ate an apple. She tried to fix a sandwich but instead took the two slices of bread and walked down to the bayou. She sat on the bank as the Angelus died in the tower across the water and balled up bits of the bread between her finger and thumb and threw them on the surface and watched the bluegill swirl and peck. A mallard pair paddled near, dabbling up the bread, and a turtle, peering from mid water, rowed to join them. The bread ran out, and the water grew still, and Janelle looked across the water a while and turned for home.
At half past three she was at the window in the living room again. She hadn’t turned a light on all day. Carmen came up the street and turned in at Janelle’s walk. She stood at the door, then looked over at the window, her eyes falling exactly on Janelle’s though Janelle was sure she couldn’t see her. The mail slot clattered and Carmen dropped from the front step and darted across the grass for home.
The note on the mat said, You missed a quiz today. Sister looked sad. Sorry I called you a liar. And a coward. Carmen.
Her mother came home smelling of shrimp, and they had étouffée for dinner. Janelle did not say she’d seen her father. Her mother put extra butter on Janelle’s rounds of French bread.
The next day Janelle did not sit at the window but waited till the church bells tolled eight o’clock and went out to walk the neighborhood. She was afraid to let the day pass into sameness with the last and afraid even moreso to see her father again and almost thought she saw his car turning onto Bienville as she glanced back from the corner of Cortez. But she hurried on and came before long to City Park and lay for a time beneath the huge sprawling oak she called Moses and watched the Spanish moss curl and sway against the clean cold blue of the sky. She ran around Bayou Metairie and stopped to skip clam shells she dug from the bank and landed one in the hollow between a swimming duck’s white wings and stopped and watched it swim away with something like the feeling of prayer as it had come to her sometimes in the school chapel.
She had a nickel she’d been saving from the last time her father had come to see her, and she gave it to the man at the counter of the old casino building near the art museum, and he gave her back three pennies and a hotdog and she sat on an oak root listening to a man play the saxophone while she ate.
Inside the museum she stood before a St. Francis by El Greco, whose name she recognized almost before she read it on the nameplate since her mother kept a copy of his Vision of St. John in the living room. Once she’d asked her mother why the people looked like trees and her mother had said It’s a style, baby, it shows how people’s souls are always stretching up to heaven. So she knew the name, and the saint, like so many saints, frightened her. But across the gallery was a St. Sebastian by somebody she forgot as soon as she stepped back from the nameplate, and he was beautiful and he did not frighten her as she stood between the two men. St. Francis looked out from a gulf of darkness, and his eyes shone with tiny white flames like skulls, and St. Sebastian was pierced in the side and in the belly but the arrows’ bites were bloodless as if barred their lust and she wondered, looking from one to the other, how many souls there were with her in that long red gallery.
At three o’clock she left the museum, taking the steps slowly, already mourning the day. The bells called out down a line of naked crape myrtles that she followed to the bayou. She could see the bridge in the distance with a line of girls in their blue uniforms crossing for home, and she imagined for a moment that the bridge was the torso of a monumental figure, pierced, with all the water of sorrow flowing through it and away and the girls walking safely, mounting ever higher through the mannered elongation of the oaks into the skull’s eye of the sun and endless light. Then she hurried along the bank and came to the bridge, where Sr. Miriam Clare stood talking at the center with Carmen.
“Hello, Janelle,” said Sister. “We were just talking about you.”
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” said Carmen.
“We’ve missed you, dear girl,” said Sister. “But we’ll see you again in the morning. Carmen will help catch you up.”
“Thank you,” Janelle said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” Sister said. “Good evening, girls. God bless you.”
She turned and walked through the frame of the bridge, her veil rising slightly behind her on the breeze. The girls watched her go, then stepped to the edge of the bridge and looked over and found each other on the water’s face.
“Well,” Janelle said to the reflection, “do you wanna come to my house?”
The eyes in the water vanished and Janelle turned and found Carmen looking at her, smiling, nodding her head. And Janelle saw her friend and saw herself being seen and thought, almost, that she could see the rest of their world in Carmen’s eyes as well, the bridge and Sister and the school and the dome of the church. Then hand in hand they walked away, the breeze at their backs, sharing what had passed in silence.
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Again, this is a story set between words and water, a story of learning how to use our words, of beginning to be aware of their power to work upon the minds and hearts of those entrusted to us by providence; a story, too, of the water that attracts our gaze and gives it back to us, doubled, inverted, at once more luminous and more obscure, the water that is both primal chaos and cleansing power. Christ is the Word, calling us with him into the waters of death and resurrection, death to self and rebirth in Him, death to sin and rebirth in the freedom of the Son.
This is the freedom which motivates the culture of South Louisiana at its best, and the best is often to be found here in Acadiana, where attunement to the world is attunement to the Word, where words express the joy of living in conformity with Christ.
Many thanks to all of you for being here today. My hope is that you find refreshment in the prayer, stories, discussions, songs, and meals we will share today, and that we all become more aware of the working of the Word in our hearts, calling us through the saving flood of grace into eternal life.
Danny Fitzpatrick is the Editor of Joie de Vivre, and the author of First Make Mad, Yonder in the Sun, Restoring the Lord’s Day, Only the Lover Sings, and more.
