Lester Louis LeBlanc was a child of the Great Depression, the oldest of nine children, an Army veteran of World War II, a Creole cook, and my father. He died in 1992, though the void that left in my life makes it feel longer.
Dad appears in my dreams every few months. I do not try to make it happen, because it would feel less magical. We are usually in some danger or lesser crisis together, but I do not panic because Dad is with me again, and Dad’s presence means security. Even if the danger of such a dream feels especially fraught, I am happy when I wake, because I’ve spent time with Dad again.
These dreams revisit almost primal memories, and neither of us tries to turn it into necromancy. Dad had, after all, once ordered me to stop watching a TV horror series, Night Gallery, because he saw how its dilettantish toying with the occult was harming me. That is one of my fondest memories of my father, because he showed such wisdom, and he never hesitated to act on it when my well-being was at stake.
One of my other favorite memories of my father involves a Christmas carol. Every year, when churches roll through their rotations of beloved hymns, I wait for “Angels We Have Heard on High.” My reason for loving this hymn may sound more like a Flannery O’Connor short story than something on The Hallmark Channel, and that’s another reason I love it.
One of the traditions among Dad and his siblings was gathering on Christmas Eve to exchange gifts, eat home-cooked Creole food, and, mostly for the men, drink themselves into a stupor. Dad checked all those boxes on December 24, 1968. I am not certain of the year, but my being 9 at the time feels about right. My mother and brother sang in the choir, and they had to leave the family party early. I stayed behind and rode with Dad, who somehow delivered us to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, without incident.
I gladly stayed at Dad’s side when we arrived in the nave. I remember only one of the hymns we sang that night. “Angels We Have Heard on High” is burned into my memory for one reason: Dad sang its chorus with great gusto through all four stanzas. Dad never claimed to be much of a singer, and his drunken state likely amplified his off-pitch singing.
Even if people around us were glaring then, I did not notice them. I was soaking up this shared time with Dad, and I found his singing oddly endearing. He was showing more raw emotion than I was accustomed to seeing from him. In later years, I realized that this hymn’s 19th-century tune, based on an older French carol, must have spoken to my father’s French soul.
His father, Louis, was descended from Acadians, who were driven out of Canada and migrated to southern Louisiana. His great-grandmother had a Parisian and English heritage. Dad grew up Catholic, and his mother was an observant, long-suffering believer who insisted that her children pray the rosary with her. She also was a cook for multiple boarding houses, who taught her children to cook like her. Dad’s mother fell dead from a heart attack while my mother was pregnant with me, and his father died only months later.
We were weekly churchgoers in my childhood, but none of us understood the gospel. I knew Jesus was the central character of the four gospels, and I often stared at depictions of the cross in my children’s Bible, but my idea of salvation was 100-proof works righteousness. Even at 9, I knew I had misbehaved enough to land in trouble. I had shown disrespect for my parents. I was a budding and covetous little materialist who thought that having a sunken swimming pool, a color TV set, and a two-story home were essential to the good life. I expected the point of life was to be sure my good deeds outweighed the bad when I faced God as judge. I am hard-pressed to remember any good deeds from those years, and I am not sure when I expected these bursts of piety to begin.
A few years after the Christmas Eve service I shared with Dad, my older and only brother, Randy, was caught up in the Jesus Movement. Dad thought my brother had become a fanatic, and our parish priest generally shared that impression. Dad began reading the Bible, perhaps in vain hope of finding this imperative by Jesus: “Follow me, but don’t be extreme about it.”
Within a few years and through various factors, including a visit to Baton Rouge by evangelist Billy Graham, Dad realized that my brother had encountered Christ in a way Dad had not. Dad gave himself to the Jesus my brother had helped him see. We all finally understood the personal dimension of Jesus’ death on the cross, and how it atoned for our individual sins, not simply all of humanity’s sins, like a giant ball of yarn. We all understood, for the first time, what it meant to call Jesus our Savior, and we began to learn what it means to call him Lord. We entered into living, dynamic relationships with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Dad had spent decades at bars trying to drown his painful memories: of hunting for the family supper as a boy, of leaving home to serve in the Civilian Conservation Corps, of living with relatives in Birmingham and sending his salary home, of being on a transport ship that was torpedoed on Christmas Eve. Dad gave up drinking—no human intervention required.
My father, who sometimes had been bested by an easily ignited anger, began transforming into a tenderhearted man whose instinct was to extend his hand in compassion. This man who felt painfully shy for most of his life began speaking about his life with God in an evangelical movement within the Episcopal Church known as Faith Alive. He began helping other people come to terms with alcoholism, often by driving them to AA meetings.
After seeing him live this way for another 20 years, I began to realize that Dad’s loud singing of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” was far more than my private experience with him. I’ve come to believe it was a glimpse into the soul of a Catholic boy who had felt so much pain by the time he was 20, and who never stopped believing in God. I was a cradle Episcopalian only because Dad was Catholic and Mom was a lapsed Baptist, and the Episcopal Church became the bridge between those cultural heritages. Dad pushed for finding that church, and attending it faithfully.
Years before our adventure at the Christmas Eve Eucharist, Dad had taught me the Lord’s Prayer, line by line, kneeling at his bedside. He encouraged my boyhood interest in serving as an acolyte. I think, in retrospect, that he had long wanted to make God the central focus of his daily life, but he didn’t know how to step into that deeper experience.
I have come to think that my shared experience with Dad not as the beginning of God’s work in his life, but as a glimpse of the yearning soul God saw in Dad across many years. It was a glimpse, too, of the man he would become through the mysterious and amusing wild card of my brother turning into a hippie who loved Jesus. Today, each time I hear “Angels We Have Heard on High,” I like to think of Dad singing it before God in Heaven, clean and sober, and pitch perfect.