Place and Presence
The fleur-de-lis on the Saints football helmet. King cake after Mass on Hospitality Sunday. The itty-bitty Tabasco bottle in the painting of The Last Supper at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Parks. Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s legendary letter to Insta-Gator Ranch explaining the status of alligator meat as “seafood.” You don’t see this kind of stuff in the Diocese of Cleveland.
Catholicism just looks different down here in South Louisiana. A 10:00 AM Jazz Mass at St. Augustine Catholic Church in New Orleans tells you that it sounds different. The mouth-watering aroma of the Knights of Columbus’ fish fry every Friday in Lent tells you that it smells different. The beads of sweat rolling down your forehead in a church without power in the aftermath of a hurricane tell you that it feels different. And every meemaw in Kenner baking cookies for the St. Joseph Altar can tell you that it tastes different, too. South Louisiana is indeed a strange and sacred place in the cosmos.
Something can be said about how God has willed that places, like people, have character. Where we are tells us something about who we are. Being attentive to this reality enables each of us to live, as our own Walker Percy puts it, “as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.” Place has intimate connection. Place has history. Place has identity. Place forbids anonymity, whether you like it or not. And this is true even for the places we find ourselves stuck in.
This is the mystery that gives meaning to my drawing. It’s coarse. It’s colorful. It can come only from Norco. Actually, it can come only from being stuck in Norco during a global health crisis.
Towards the end of 2019 when I began my graduate studies at Notre Dame Seminary, I took a part-time position working in the office of my home parish, Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Norco. While I consider this place to be the cradle of my creative vocation, I’m not here to convince you that that quirky ole Norco should be heralded as an artist’s go-to oasis of imagination. Go study in Florence if you want that kind of stuff. After all, the gas flare of Shell’s Norco Manufacturing Complex does not exactly blaze with a Promethean poiesis. The neighborhood streets reek of an industrial stench that clings onto you along with the humidity of the surrounding swamps. And for some reason, plenty of the residents leave their Halloween decorations up year-round (at least, you hope that the plastic skeleton sprawling on that front porch is just a decoration). If anything, this place is the setting of a Southern Gothic short story just waiting to be written.
But this place is not without its beauty. I really believe that. The Lord leans forward in his creation and speaks to us in this stinky swamp just as he speaks in Jerusalem and Rome. No place is exempt from being hallowed ground.
The COVID pandemic lockdown made Easter 2020 simply bizarre. Like most Catholics, Sacred Heart’s parishioners were left with livestreamed liturgies, stuck at home and somehow feeling homeless. One week later on Divine Mercy Sunday, I got a call from our parish secretary:
“We’re going to do a drive-by Eucharistic procession and bring the Blessed Sacrament through every neighborhood in the parish. Can you come? And do you think your dad would be okay if we used his pickup truck?”
Only at Sacred Heart. Actually, only at Sacred Heart during a pandemic. What came next was a procession made possible by pawpaws and their pickup trucks, with the papal flag and American flag waving in the front and some parishioners steadying our pastor as he rode in the bed and elevated the monstrance before each home. I sat in the passenger’s seat of the truck and posted frequent updates about our whereabouts on the parish Facebook page: Christ is on Apple Street! Christ is on his way to Montz! And with every stop, out came our parishioners as eager and clumsy as Lazarus bursting from his tomb. They were beaming, getting as close as they could with all the social-distancing, falling to their knees and looking so strange and starving. We kept riding, and I kept thinking of all those hungry disciples Christ fed with the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. There is something holy about staying put, about working with what you got. That’s when miracles happen.
Soon I grabbed my colored pencils to compose this simple image: one man rejoicing in the presence of the Lord, the Lord who through his humanity has reached down into the very flesh of his people to laugh with us, sweat with us, cry with us, be with us. I call this picture “Good Morning, Jesus” because our pastor never stopped humming that song, and he kept humming it during this pickup truck procession. If you want to see this drawing in-person, go pay a visit to the Sacred Heart Church office. It’s a great place, I promise you.
In his Passion and death, Jesus brought heaven all the way down here to earth. In his Ascension, he took with him not just his divinity but his humanity as well. That means we’re meant to have eternal life with him, for there is a greater country, a greater land, a greater place. The task for us now is to live heavenly here in the places he puts us so we can live heavenly with him in his Kingdom.
“Good Morning, Jesus!” by Rachel Moore
This essay was featured in the Summer 2023 issue of the Joie de Vivre print journal. To order this issue and subscribe to future issues, click the “Subscribe” tab above.
Rachel Moore studied English at The Catholic University of America and pastoral leadership at Notre Dame Seminary. She is an artist of The St. Louis IX Art Society.
