“It Isn’t Finished Yet”: Parenting, Postcolonializing, and Possibilities of Healing in Hadestown

The author argues that the Broadway musical Hadestown sheds light on liberation as a goal and process of spiritual care. Sharp reflects on parenting in conversation with her own experiences of encountering systemic deception with a chronically ill child in medical crisis. She reflects on postcolonializing pastoral care in conversation with Howard Thurman’s theory of liberation from deception, fear, and hatred. Sharp contemplates an iterative creative process in conversation with Hadestown songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Intertwining reflections on parenting, postcolonializing, and processes of creativity, Sharp casts liberative healing as an ongoing integrative spiral rather than a linear progression from ill to well and from trapped to freed. In sum, this paper connects Hadestown and healing, linking the personal with the professional, weaving parenting into a vocation of partnering in postcolonializing.