Depending on when you were born or how much you enjoy watching old sitcoms, the theme song to The Addams Family, including those infamous double snaps, is immediately recognizable. This past weekend, the students in our theater program performed The Addams Family for our spring musical. The musical told a story about how Wednesday Addams, the oldest daughter, was nervous to tell Morticia, her mother, that she was engaged to Lucas, a “normal” guy, rather than someone like them. Wednesday begs her parents to act “normal” when her fiance and his parents visit. Anyone who knows the Addams family knows that they find joy in morbid or scary experiences which they understand makes them different than other “normal” people. For Wednesday’s sake, they do their best to act normal, but they do it in their own way. While the show provided for a lot of good laughs and entertainment, I thought it was interesting how for all the ways the Addams family was regarded as abnormal, their underlying values really weren’t that far off from what we would consider normal.
While the Addams family had a way of life that looked very different from everyone around them, I and the rest of the audience could relate to their values. They had a tight-knit nuclear family while also caring for Uncle Fester, Grandma, and Lurch in their home. The Addams family showed great love for one another, embodied in the way Gomez, the father, and Morticia embraced one another and would spontaneously begin dancing with one another. Lastly, the Addams family greatly valued telling the truth to one another as the foundation of a trusting relationship. This was embodied by the way Gomez and Morticia interacted with one another and their kids. They talked in the musical about how telling the truth was the expectation in their family.
The musical concludes with the two families understanding one another better and the wedding between Wednesday and her fiance permitted to continue. The fiance’s normal family also began to see the virtues of the Addams family and learned that the values of the family weren’t so outdated or irrelevant after all. Because the Addams family stuck to their values, their abnormal practices didn’t overshadow their strong beliefs.
Our values as a Jesuit school might be considered abnormal in some places. We encourage our students and staff members to be Open to Growth, Loving, Intellectually Competent, Religious, Committed to Justice, and Work Experienced. We challenge ourselves and our students to live and think differently, in a good way. In students' time at CRJ, they reflect and consider the ways that they believe in our core values and how they are challenged by these values. Living our values in a world that may view them as antiquated, irrelevant, or soft could be considered abnormal to some. We see it differently though. With these values, we believe our lives can be more fulfilled and aligned with God's dreams for our lives and our world. Given the many issues we see in our world, maybe living a little more “abnormally” would yield more positive and “normal” outcomes for us all?
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