"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

Happy Mardi Gras from the Chaplain of Bourbon Street

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Mardi Gras is one mighty explosion of sin, stage-managed by the devil. I believe that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, if they could be resurrected and visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, would by unanimous vote request that they be sent back to hell. I think that Mardi Gras is a time when even the devil is ashamed of his own followers.”

So proclaimed the Rev. Bob Harrington in his 1969 autobiography The Chaplain of Bourbon Street. Born in 1927 and born again in 1958 (both in the town of Sweet Water, Alabama), Harrington first encountered “the dives and strip joints of the [French] Quarter” while a Navy seaman during World War II. He returned in 1960 as a student at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, along with his first wife Joyce and their two daughters. He “was particularly thrilled by the lives of four great evangelists, Jesus, Roger Williams, who founded the first Baptist church on American soil, and those two great modern-day preachers, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.” It didn’t take long for Harrington “to open a ‘Salvation Shop' in the heart of the French Quarter—the area that Billy Graham, during a visit there, had called ‘the middle of hell’.” Moreover, according to Harrington, “I wanted the sinners to see me coming from blocks away. I wasn’t going to pussyfoot around. To call attention to myself, I adopted the custom of wearing a red tie, red pocket handkerchief and red socks. And I carried with me everywhere a Bible bound in red leather. Those are my trademarks to this day.”

And the rest, as they say, is an In His Steps-esque tip-sheet for soul saving, but with a canned bluster (“No one had invited me—a sin-busting, devil-chasing young preacher—into the hellhole that was the French Quarter of New Orleans”) that came honest to an admirer of Billy Sunday, and with a voyeuristic gaze (“As far as I know, I’m the only man permitted free access to the backstage dressing rooms of the strippers”) that can only be (un)appreciated if you happen upon a copy of The Chaplain of Bourbon Street in your local Christian used bookstore. At the very least, check out his website: www.thechaplain.com

Here's a debate between Harrington and Madalyn Murray O’Hair (founder of American Atheists) on the Phil Donahue Show in 1970.

For our vinyl collectors...

And from the bombastic to the benign, here’s a two-sided card that my daughter caught at a recent Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge.

Front:

Back: