May 03, 2024 |
WLSU, New Orleans
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
WLSU, New Orleans
Seven years later I returned to New Orleans. This time I was officiating the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, the father of the bride found out I’d never had raw oysters. He told me tonight I’d be eating ten of them. So, I did. After the rehearsal dinner, I accompanied the wedding party down filthy funky Bourbon St. It was a Friday night, and I was in my clericals. Revelers and strippers threw beads at me and cheered the priest simply for being in their midst. What is this place and what am I doing here? As the gathering was winding down, I stopped by a nearby cigar shop and a group of guys from New Jersey celebrating their buddy’s birthday told me I was their priest now and I was coming with them. I became their sober religious mascot for the rest of the evening. I still talk with some of them on Facebook. That wedding was one of my all-time favorites. The couple were natives to New Orleans, and their love and affection for each other, for their families, for their friends, for their city just poured out of them.
The third time I went to New Orleans I had a steak so good I didn’t eat red meat again for a month. That is not hyperbole. It was the literal best meal I have ever had, and like visiting the grave of Jesus, I don’t like saying much about it because I don’t want to sully something so meaningful with my pitiful words.
New Orleans. It is both otherworldly and perfectly grounded. Magical and real. Gorgeous and grimy. Warm and scary. Joyous and dangerous. Poverty and wealth and theft and murder and marriage and joy and death and life and, dear God above, food and music and food and music!
For all I’ve said here, I don’t feel like I have a right to talk about New Orleans. It doesn’t belong to me. The people I’ve since met who are from there, maybe it doesn’t even belong to them so much as they belong to it. In some ways, my experience of New Orleans was not unlike my trip to the Holy Land of Palestine and Israel. Before I went, I had no experience and knew exactly what I thought. After going, I knew so much less and loved so much more. These places and these people – they don’t need my opinions and they don’t need me. There is so much life to be lived if I can love without judgment, if I can just go and see.
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