A blast is heard from up the Bayou Teche, from the direction of Leonville, Cecilia, or Breaux Bridge. Then comes the ring of a far-off bell, barely heard through the cattails and wall of cicadas, crickets, and katydids. The tolling rolls down the waterway clear and rhythmic, like the echo of an evening train passing through a rural town.
It is August 15, and the Fête-Dieu du Teche has begun again. And just like the crushing weight of the Louisiana sun, countless Cajuns up and down the Teche will find themselves overcome. Hearts are about to break.
For many whose homes cling to banks of the bayou—rock-ribbed Louisiana Baptists, staunch anti-papists, nonbelievers, and the long-ago fallen away—the bell echoes in the backcountry like a rooster’s crow announcing the dawn of something forgotten or pushed away. Long-closed doors to the trace of a memory begin to open and set in motion first steps back to their centuries-old Nova Scotian roots.
And what a wonderful unfolding of grace this must be for Cajun-born Fr. Michael Champagne, the Religious Superior of the Community of Jesus Crucified, who, a decade ago, imagined how a Eucharistic procession down the heart of the bayou might move something deep in souls.
For readers unaware of the Fête-Dieu du Teche—Louisiana’s annual waterway procession on the Solemnity of the Assumption—the following is an image of its starting point: Canon fire pierces humid morning skies and sends a single boat, Vessel #1—the bell boat—down the serpentine waters that have flowed through these parts since before the birth of Christ. Thereafter, a phenomenon begins, where, over the past eleven years, Jesus Christ has floated back into the lives of fallen-away Catholics and Protestants, where an inner movement rises and begins to pull them back to the sacraments and faith of their martyred Acadian forebears.
The bell boat alerts families to something strange happening up the Teche. So they head to swinging porch doors that open into the ancient waterway; and before they are able to fuss about their privacy being trespassed upon, boat after boat begins to appear at a bend in the bayou.
Thereafter, a woody and warm scent overpowers the immovable loamy incense of the Teche; it is a pleasing smoke that moseys past the bank and floats like slow-motion sensory overload into backyards. Louisianans, some unmoored from the faith of their French-Canadian ancestors, feel the air becoming Catholic. Vessel #2 is the mist-covered thurible boat,purposed to burn and puff out incense that prepares the way for the Savior of the World in Vessel #3.
When Jesus, in the Eucharist, emerges in the haze, He is high-throned on an altar in a long-stemmed golden monstrance bordered by a few dozen sharp-edged rays. He is raised high but neatly protected beneath the shade of a canopy that all but grazes the tips of silvery-gray moss dripping from tree limbs like Louisiana tinsel. A young woman passenger glorifies Him by singing old Latin songs—“Panis Angelicus,” “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” the “Ave Verum Corpus,” or any number of other hymns in a voice that carries up and down the Teche through a headset and a small microphone. The love songs to the King of Kings cut straight through the wall of swamp insects, and the tolling of the bell is forgotten.
Onlookers see that Vessel #3 seems to be a sacred place, sardine-packed with cassocked and habited men and women in veils who, for the next eight or so hours, will kneel to adore Jesus in the bow. They will interchangeably glorify and consider His Majesty through silent contemplation or pray from breviaries, rosaries, or from the hymnals by their sides.
Over the years, this vision of the Eucharist boat and its quiet adorers has caused many thousands of men and women to fall to their knees. Because the sensus fidei rises quickly in them, their eyes often begin to burn and well, where tears fall and mix with moistened faces. Even Protestants have admitted to a spark in the soul and different kind of feeling in their gut. They know Vessel #3 is the reason for the Fête-Dieu du Teche—so some of these converts-to-be find themselves whispering words of adoration, and, for the first time, they drop the long-guarded belief that God could not become a wafer in a host; they begin to vulnerably embrace Him as the Slaughtered Lamb hidden in True Bread.
Old School Grit: Times...
Best Price: $3.42
Buy New $9.91
(as of 12:46 UTC - Details)
Thereafter, most stick around for another quarter of an hour to watch the long and lazy fleet of trailing vessels. Boat after boat floats by, filled with folks they recognize from the Piggly Wiggly or bank and post office lines. Old high school teammates and childhood friends or a neighbor or co-worker wave, where he or she has become a public witness to the Body, Soul, Blood, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. These trailing folks make periodic pit stops to dock their boat and make thirty-minute visits to old riverside churches or shaded grassy areas, where they merge with hundreds of other Catholics unable to find room on a boat but who wanted to join the pilgrimage nonetheless to pray a Rosary and Benediction.
It should be no surprise that Fr. Champagne chose to pierce hearts on the bayou. He grew up on the banks of the 125-mile-long Teche. As a school boy, he was told stories of the Acadian heroes who survived unimaginable hardship as they traveled south and down the Teche after refusing to kiss the British king’s ring. The priest had always seen the river as an escape route—the primary means of transportation for his ancestors’ 18th-century exodus from Nova Scotia.
So, all these years later, Fr. Champagne knew how the waterway procession might become the floating torchlight that would guide secular and fallen-away Cajuns to the upheaval, when old family members were murdered by British soldiers or endured torture, persecution, and imprisonment for refusing to leave the Catholic Faith.
