All 4 of us (the Angel, both boys, and myself) spent Sunday afternoon in a local high school auditorium watching their spring musical, The Hunchback of Norte Dame. I’ve seen them perform Mary Poppins and Anastasia the 2 previous years, and you would think I’d start to expect a certain level of excellence. Yet, every year, I am left awed. We go to see a student actor who we just love to pieces, and I am always surprised by his talent, too.

I was unfamiliar with The Hunchback of Norte Dame (as I was with Mary Poppins & Anastasia). If it was a book, I didn’t read it, I never saw the Disney cartoon, so I walked in blissfully blank. It’s pretty dark, to tell you the truth. There is religion, sex, assault, death, gypsies, and, obviously, a hunchback. (I won’t spoil anything about it, just in case you haven’t seen it – you probably should.)

The last song ended with these lyrics: “Someday. Life will be kinder. Love will be blinder. Some new afternoon. Godspeed this bright millennium. Hope lives on. Wish upon the moon. Let it come one day.” You can already guess it’s not the feel good hit of the summer. Then, “And we wish we could leave you a moral. Like a trinket you hold in your palm. But here is a riddle to guess if you can. Sing the bells of Notre Dame. What makes a monster. And what makes a man.”

Everyone in the story is a label; Father, brother, gypsy, hunchback, soldier, stone, martyr, villain, and on and on. And all of them prove greater than the box in which they are relegated. They all transcend, for better or worse, becoming more and more human (for all that means.) I even thought the musical did the same, giving us the respect to not leave it too tidy and glossy, to leave us wide open, questioning, wondering, confused, broken and angry with a world that is hardly ever tidy and glossy. We’re all kind of broken and confused with our own world, looking for happy endings and finding few.

What makes a monster, and what makes a man? The question reminds me of a song that asks, Is evil something we are, or something we do? We’re all monsters, all men, or at least all have the capacity to be everything. We’re all villains, sometimes. Maybe the real danger is in our blindness to that fact.

But we’re also all heroes, too. Both/And. Quasimodo had choices, all throughout. Stay inside, watching a world on fire, watching Esmeralda burn, or leave, engage, act. Of course, he makes that choice. He braves a cruel, cold society for just one reason: love. It’s probably the same reason that impels any of us to act in a positive direction. We can choose our own selves, comfort, power, or we can choose to try our very best to bring healing to others, to a creation crying out in pain.

(I’m about to write something that is going to sound – and totally is – embarrassingly cheesy, but one of the blessings of being as old as I am is that I don’t care at all;) We are the hunchbacks of our worlds. We want to cower from a harsh, often nasty environment that sees us as hopeless outcasts. This environment protects itself, at any and all costs. It stifles beauty it doesn’t understand. But the divine can’t be extinguished, beauty perseveres, it’s just so hard to see sometimes. Some new afternoon, love will be blinder, life will be kinder, right? I left that show with tears in my eyes, but a big strong overflow of hope in my heart.

Great art does that, over and over- stretches the limits of the possible. Yes, sure, now can feel dark and overwhelmed, but the dark isn’t forever. If this can happen… If a person can create this loveliness in a high school in central Pennsylvania, with a huge group of teenagers that have been gifted hand over fist with this sort of passion and heart… If Quasimodo can affect the culture of his world, with his own gifts, despite his flaws, then anything can happen. Anything. So, we hunchbacks sing the bells of Norte Dame. Let it be one day. Let it be today.