It's in the Water

In Louisiana, spirituality remains intertwined in our landscape

by

In Delacroix, Louisiana, there’s a point at which you reach the “END OF THE WORLD,” as the cheerfully foreboding, if unclear, marina sign proclaims. There’s something to this matter-of-fact moniker, located at the dead end of LA-300, where the furthest floating slivers of South Louisiana soil give way to the Gulf. It implies a dropping off, not just into the Gulf, but from the edge of what is fixed and known. It reads like a morbid inside joke, the cynical self-awareness and good-natured humor of a place that has faced the “end times” time and time again. The phrase adds to the sense of otherworldliness with which we tend to view these outlying coastal communities; not just as static remnants of a way of life that’s all but disappeared in Louisiana, but as separate from the rest of the boot. As if the further below sea level the place, the more steeped it is in the past. Here, the supernatural manifests in the water itself.

It is no coincidence that in Golden Meadow, Louisiana—the last Bayou Lafourche town within the state’s levee protection system—the Catholic church is named for Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the Marian title who Louisiana Catholics often pray to for protection from hurricanes. Growing up, I can remember reciting her prayer during hurricane season when we attended Mass at our Metairie church, the congregation reading the final line in unison, “Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us.” As an adult, I’m admittedly a lapsed Catholic—like many in Louisiana—and yet, I am ever-drawn to the blurring of mysticism and religion that saturates our culture, the allure of this tension in the places where boundaries dissolve, and the myriad idiosyncratic ways our belief systems are tied to our very real, physical landscape.

This connection looks different today, of course; it’s no longer as culturally comprehensive or present within our everyday lives. The waterways now function as a means for industry or recreation, not as the primary method of travel; over time, we’ve seen settlements established exclusively in proximity to the rivers and bayous begin to move inward, especially in the wake of historic disasters such as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. As levees and floodwalls were constructed to protect burgeoning urban areas—and as the state’s economy shifted from being primarily maritime and fishing-based into one driven by oil and gas—access to and firsthand knowledge of the waterways and coast declined, changing our relationship to the landscape as a result.

“We live in a world of this incredible tapestry of waterways in Louisiana, most of which are out of sight, out of mind,” said Dr. Michael Pasquier, a professor of history and religious studies at LSU. “We as a society have done a really good job of making these waterways invisible to us. They don’t have an impact on us, until they do. And it’s these punctuation moments in people’s lives where we’re reminded of this water world in which we live.”

In an increasingly secular modern world, efforts like the Fête Dieu du Teche become a highly visual way to preserve Louisiana’s faith-infused culture, what one Acadiana priest deems “the last stronghold of Catholic culture in the United States.”

As our perception of this water world has gradually diminished, so have our religious traditions and rituals. Today, public ceremonies such as the biannual Blessing of the Fleet, which is held in once-majority fishing villages across the state, appear largely symbolic, valued more for its festivities than its benediction. In a 1991 article originally published in the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany journal, scholar Betsy Gordon observed how the aesthetics of boat decoration for the shrimp fleet blessing in Chauvin, Louisiana has overtaken its spiritual significance. She writes, “Although present-day participants still hold many of the religious beliefs of the originators, various changes have resulted in a parade of boats’ taking visual precedence over the blessing.” Outdoor baptisms—historically performed by African-American Baptist communities in the Delta region—are uncommon in Louisiana today. French Louisiana religious folk practices, such as the traiteur tradition or Vodou, are not nearly as pronounced as in previous generations; they’re either an exception to the rule, or they possess a mainstream, material quality that feels like a caricature of the real thing, leveraged for cultural tourism. This isn’t to imply that Louisiana is an individual actor, but rather part of a broader temporal shift in our society. In an increasingly secular modern world, efforts like the Fête Dieu du Teche become a highly visual way to preserve Louisiana’s faith-infused culture, what one Acadiana priest deems “the last stronghold of Catholic culture in the United States.”

[Read our review of Gregory Alexander's The Holy Mark here.]

The Fête Dieu du Teche is a Eucharastic Procession by boat on the Bayou Teche, held annually on August 15 both to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption and to commemorate the anniversary of the arrival of the Acadians in 1765, who were persecuted by the British for their French heritage and Catholic faith. “We need this to revive culture. Faith is supposed to permeate culture,” said Fr. Michael Champagne of the Community of Jesus Crucified in St. Martinville, who started the Fête in 2015. “It’s a way of life, it’s who we are. This manifests the divine within the public square.”

The procession reenacts the journey of the first Acadian settlers who brought the Catholic faith to Louisiana, Champagne said, and brings the Blessed Sacrament—Christ himself—outside of the church to honor the grace in the physicality of the pilgrimage. The lengthy procession—which usually includes around fifty boats—stops at each Bayou Teche settlement along the thirty-eight-mile stretch from Leonville to St. Martinville. The daylong event is undoubtedly a mighty sight to behold: dozens of boats making their way down the bayou’s muddy brown waters, the lead vessel bearing a six-foot-tall specially-made monstrance beneath a protective canopy—“so people can see Christ from a distance,”—followed by a statue of the Virgin Mary in the next. Incense from the thurible suffuses the summer humidity, and the sounds of participants reciting the Rosary or singing old hymns can be heard drifting down the bayou. Each time the clergy members and altar servers disembark with the Blessed Sacrament onto land where followers on foot await them, flower girls in white mantilla veils scatter red, pink, and white rose petals in their path. Onlookers, many of whom have traveled from elsewhere to be present, fall to their knees in adoration.

But to have a comprehensive understanding of how our culture functions in relation to the divine, we have to look a little deeper. Even as our faith traditions lose their cultural prominence in the literal sense, in other ways Pasquier believes our spirituality has become more expansive. “It’s in the water, [Louisianans’] beliefs about something other than the human, but it isn’t a kind of persistent state,” he said. Think of disasters, the way religion resurfaces as a long dormant solace, even for those who don’t consciously exhibit our faith through daily prayer. Or say there’s a fisherman who keeps a palmetto leaf from Palm Sunday in his boat; it operates like a symbol, a sign of one’s faith, but it isn’t necessarily activated; they may not be consciously thinking about the role God is playing in their life as they interact with the water, but the placement itself matters because it’s there.

Understanding these subtleties means loosening our definition of devotion, viewing it through a more fluid lens, as opposed to a rigid doctrine or formal structure. This expanding is central to how Pasquier approaches studying coastal communities and the intimate ways they interact with the water and the “everydayness of religion” as he terms it, or the ordinary ways in which people who work or live on the coast allow for their religious beliefs and practices to filter into their daily lives. “There’s the obvious things that appear to us and there are the obvious actors whose job it is to be religious,” he said. “And then there are just people.”

[Read our article on the intersection of Catholicism and Buddhism in Broussard, Louisiana here.]

Part of Pasquier’s work in exploring these connections between people, land, and water involves searching for indicators of religious physical markers in a place, such as the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in Shell Beach on the bank of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or The Lady of the Gulf Seamen’s Memorial, a sixteen-foot-tall statue of a mermaid in Port Fourchon to honor the lives lost at sea. He listens to the stories of the people who inhabit these places, and encapsulates them in collaborative multimedia projects such as Water Like Stone, a documentary he co-produced with Louisiana filmmaker Zack Godshall, and the audio series Coastal Voices, a podcast that recollects the oral histories of coastal residents’ experience living in an endangered environment. Within the scope of his work, Pasquier isn’t seeking an answer so much as he’s attempting to interpret how these connections between faith and landscape are embedded within us, and what our landscape’s inevitable shifting means for us as a people.

We don’t have to think of faith or benediction as a concept in binary terms—to practice or not to practice; its influence can be subtle and varied, altars all around us.

Like most things in Louisiana, spirituality is more nuanced, more subjective than what’s on the surface. We don’t have to think of faith or benediction as a concept in binary terms—to practice or not to practice; its influence can be subtle and varied, altars all around us. If God is in the festivals and the pomp and the circumstance, can’t he also be in the streams running behind our homes, in the Gulf and the stolid faith of those who have remained?