Louisiana in the Distance

Josh Britton (’08)

If I feel a sense of responsibility for any place in the world, it’s south Louisiana. I spent the first twenty-two years of my life there and I have been shaped by that place in more ways than I can count. Much of that shaping came from a dense network of family and friends. I went to college at LSU in Baton Rouge, just a short distance from the small town where I grew up amidst my extended family. Until I came to Maryland last August as a Trinity Forum Academy Fellow, the longest I had ever been away from home was two months.

It is perhaps unsurprising that much of my thinking and reading during my time at the Academy has concerned the notion of place—specifically, how relationships develop within the contours of shared places and how those places affect who we are and how we live. I began thinking seriously about place after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit my state in the fall of 2005, as I was starting my senior year of college. The damage was a local and inescapable concern for residents of south Louisiana. After the storms, we couldn’t just change the channel or click a new link to escape the story. Even if the rest of the world moved on, we still had a devastated region and a dysfunctional major city to tend to. 

Growing up, I thought New Orleans was just a smelly, crime-ridden, bizarre place. And while it is all of those things, after Katrina it also appeared beautiful and vulnerable. Louisiana’s problems have been well documented, but the storms helped me appreciate how blessed I have been by my home state. Here was a place that had not only given rise to jazz and jambalaya in the French Quarter but had sustained the Otts, the Joneses, and the Brittons in Livingston Parish—generations of my ancestors who had planted themselves in one place and worked hard to make it better. Aware of all this, I decided to leave.

I wasn’t tired of Louisiana, but I needed an opportunity to think critically about my future plans. The Academy was a chance to experience a new place and to gain perspective on my life, so almost two years to the day after Katrina, I arrived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for nine months of reflection and study. I left the community I had known my whole life for a new kind of community—one consisting of eleven strangers with whom I would share a place that was new to all of us.

Moving to a new place meant learning to adjust to its responsibilities: in this case, it meant attending matins, reading for class, working in the lodge, and learning to love the people around me. As I settled into the patterns of life here, I was tempted to see them as tedious and repetitive. But patterns and daily responsibilities are inescapable, and I’m learning to see them as opportunities for sustained faithfulness to this community. It is the small acts of daily life—every meal cooked, every prayer prayed, every toilet scrubbed—that work like so many little bricks to build something bigger: a community, a place, a home. This is as true for me here as it was for the generations before me in Louisiana.

The apostle Paul wrote that our citizenship is in heaven. We are indeed wayfarers and strangers. Yet we sojourners make our homes somewhere on earth, even in our transient society. And I have been given a special gift: I am truly “from” somewhere. I wonder if that means I have a unique responsibility to Louisiana. Fixing a broken state government, transforming the economy, and restoring New Orleans are huge tasks that will require the sustained faithfulness of generations of people. But as a Christian, how can I despair of hard, incremental work? Can I not trust that even in Louisiana, in spite of the state’s struggles, God is working out his mysterious redemptive plan?

I long to be back in the place I’ve always called home, but I suspect my journey is just beginning. In the years ahead, I may pursue jobs and a graduate degree in places outside of Louisiana. I wonder whether I’ll feel at home in those places. The truth is, I may not feel at home even if I return to Louisiana, but I can’t imagine a better place to plant myself. There is a lifetime of good work to be done there, and I love the state and its people. While it is not my eternal home, it is a place suffused with brokenness and hope, a place yearning for redemption and fulfillment—much like this native son who hears the faint call of jazz music everywhere he goes.

1 Responses • Alumni, Wed 23 Apr 2008