All Souls Day (2025)
It was 2020 and I made the decision to close the Jordan Ministry Center on St. Patrick’s Day. Although schools had already been closed and the Diocese of Tucson had canceled public Masses and gatherings of more than a handful of people, Arizona was still days away from any sort of formal stay-at-home order. But that afternoon as our board of directors gathered for a quarterly meeting (with some members taking part via Zoom), I noticed those present practicing a joking, nervous form of social distancing. I understood that closing our doors was the obvious, responsible thing to do.
In that time of quarantine and COVID-19, I find myself working from home. I didn’t necessarily mind the limited social contact and times of solitude, but I did miss the active parts of my ministry and the people we served.
One of the unexpected benefits of this time was the opportunity to discover new music and to re-discover some old favorites. It was early in the pandemic when I first listened “Hadestown.” And, I have to say, I immediately fell in love with it and I listened to it on a loop.
When it really hit me was one day when I was working on something else and “Hadestown” was on in the background, when these words from Mister Hermes made me stop and really listen:
“See, Orpheus was a poor boy
But he had a gift to give:
He could make you see how the world could be
In spite of the way that it is”
And in the musical—and the different versions of the myths—this was absolutely true. Orpheus could tame wild beasts and furious gods, his songs could make trees and rocks dance, and the beauty of his music was stronger than death.
What a lot of people might miss is that in the first centuries after Jesus, the early Christians saw Orpheus as an allegory for Christ. They believed that even in the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, God had somehow set the scene for the coming of Jesus. Just as the Jewish people had the prophets, other peoples had philosophers and playwrights whose writings also offered glimpses of truth about God and how God was at work in the world.
It’s easy to appreciate how they could see Orpheus taming the animals as a symbol of Jesus the Good Shepherd calling and comforting straying sheep (as we see in frescoes in the Roman catacombs), or Orpheus’ divine poetry and songs as a reminder of Jesus, the Logos—the Word—revealing the truth of God (as we read in Clement of Alexandria, for example), and Orpheus’ journey into realm of the dead as a image of the Paschal Mystery, when the Lover goes into domain of death itself to bring back the Beloved (“He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep,” the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday reminds us).
But, for me, that day, the word that caught my attention and imagination was that word: “could…”
He could make you see how the world could be.
It was Lent and I found myself thinking about the approach of Easter, asking if this isn’t exactly how we understand the mission of Jesus: Isn’t that what we really find again and again in the life and mission of Jesus: a lesson in how the world could be?
It’s the same mystery of what is possible in God’s love and mercy that we celebrate on this All Souls Day, as we remember that the stories we have loved and lost still aren’t finished… in God’s goodness, their stories continue and we trust that there will be ultimate happiness for them when their journeys have come to an end.
At the same time, we when we think about everything happening today—emotionally, spiritually, even politically—it’s been easy to get caught in the trap of only seeing the world as it is.
Everything becomes about the here-and-now. And the here-and-now is frightening and things are hard for far too many people… We’re left with infinitely more questions than answers. And, on a day like today, we pause to grieve and to remember those who have gone before us.
Although we might want simpler times, many things won’t or can’t go back to the way they were before, but it was the same for our spiritual ancestors in the days and weeks after that first Easter as they tried to make sense of their grief and everything that they had seen and heard. There was no going back to what had been and it was up to them to begin to make what Jesus taught and showed could be and to begin to reshape the world based on that could. Questions of the present might have been left unanswered, but the resurrection was about the hope and promise the future held.
At the end of “Hadestown,” Hermes laments that Orpheus has failed in his quest to win back Eurydice. He sings:
“It’s a sad song
It’s a sad tale
It’s a tragedy
It’s a sad song
But we sing it anyway
‘Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time…
But we keep singin’ even so”
We keep telling these ancient stories of faith—we keep singing—because our world is not yet what Jesus has promised it could be. Work remains to be done, and we continue to be faced with essential questions. We continue to pray and entrust those we have lost to God’s mercy.
And here, we reach the essential difference between our two Orpheuses. For the Orpheus of myth, there can be only one ending to his story, however much hope we might bring when we re-tell. But as we tell the story of Jesus—that New Orpheus—we trust that it is in the re-telling that we help make that vision of how the world could be a reality.
Listen kindly to our prayers, O Lord,
and, as our faith in your Son,
raised from the dead, is deepened,
so may our hope of resurrection for your departed servants
also find new strength.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
-Collect I for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed
Homily prepared for Divine Savior Holy Angels High School, Milwaukee, WI
