November 5, 2019 • 39 mins
On not talking about it. On jocks. On talking about it. On religion. On feeling feelings.
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Some restrictions apply. Why does it have to get dark?
Why won't the day always day? Let's say goodbye to
(01:32):
the night time, good bye. Let's send the dark time away. Someday, Oh,
someday I'll know what to say. Someday, Oh, someday I'll
(01:53):
not have to say? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why wonder why why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why
why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
(02:28):
Do you ask a lot of why questions? I know
I always did when I was a little I still do.
Mm hmm. Bad stuff happens, and for a lot of us,
our first response is why why is this happening to me?
(02:51):
Fred Rogers sang songs like this one to show kids
it's okay to ask the question, But in his own
life and in his show, he turned why into how
how to respond? How to make someone else's life better.
How to be good in a world filled with bad.
(03:14):
I'm Carvil Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast
about Fred Rogers from I Heart Media and Fatherly in
partnership with Transmitter Media. Last episode, we talked about the
famous scene in Mr Rogers Neighborhood in which Fred washes
Francois Clement's feet. It was politically charged, a white man
(03:38):
sharing a swimming pool with a black man, but the
scene was also a blatant recreation of a Bible story
from the Gospel of John. In the story, Jesus washes
the feet of his followers, the people who are supposedly
less powerful, less important than himself. The moral is that
(04:00):
great leaders are first and foremost great servants, that we
can and maybe should, serve one another. But for all
the biblically evocative nature of the footpath scene, which most
striking is what Fred Rogers doesn't say God Fred was
(04:22):
an ordained Presbyterian minister, though you wouldn't even know it
from watching his program, This scene with Officer Clement is
about as close as he ever came to telling a
Bible story in the neighborhood. Here's a question, when I
say the word religion, What is your response comfort or
(04:45):
does your guard go up? For me? I don't have
much of a reaction to it at all. It was
not forced on me in any uncomfortable way. The Bible
camps and churches I went to were, in my mind,
sometimes boring, sometimes interesting, but large lee inconsequential. Although I
was deathly afraid of Satan and the Book of Revelations
(05:08):
and the Second Coming. And when I thought about these
things as a kid, my mouth would go dry, and
my stomach would feel like it was filled with hot lead,
and I would lay awake in bed just terrified. So
maybe it was a big deal. What about you? Where
does your response to religion live in your heart, in
(05:32):
your brain, in the pit of your stomach? What do
you think religion is for? Oh boy, that's that's a
bit of a loaded question, especially in in the world
we live in today. Lisa Dormeyer was an intern on Mr.
Rogers neighborhood. She later attended seminary and was a chaplain
(05:53):
of the children's hospital. Today, she helps run a senior
care facility just outside of Pittsburgh, not far from where
Fred Rogers grew up. Here in western Pennsylvania. We have
a lot of Scottish and German influence, and that's my ancestry,
which is not very affectionate or even affirming. This was
the same background Fred Rogers came from. People men especially
(06:16):
were stern, stolid, maybe even a little cold, and these sturdy,
old Scottish immigrants were Presbyterians. It's a Protestant Christian tradition
that is older than the founding of this country. In fact,
there were so many Presbyterians involved in writing the Declaration
of Independence and early governance that a lot of our
(06:36):
United States government structures are similar to the Presbyterian tradition
of election and general assembly bodies that come together as
as a voice. We don't have bishops, we don't have
a pope um our elected leadership changes on a regular
basis um, so that's kind of our structure. Theologically, were Calvinists,
(06:58):
and so we believe that you're unable to save ourselves.
We are fully reliant on the grace of God to
save us. And that to me has always been that's
the gift of being a Presbyterian, is that belief that
in our brokenness God enters the world to love and
claim us as we are. We're broken already and God
(07:20):
loves us just the way we are. My mother and
dad were both on boards of our church. I remember
early on being very, very taken with the kinds of
things that the ministers were talking about. Fred sat for
(07:43):
a four and a half hour retrospective interview, and rather
than talk explicitly about his beliefs, he talked about the
ways in which, growing up he saw faith tangibly at
work in the world, like his industrialist father's philanthropy and
his mother's service work. I think she had something like
(08:03):
twenty five thousand volunteer hours at the hospital. She loved
being a narciss aid, and during the Second World War
she was in charge of making surgical dressings for the troops.
And I remember as a little boy going down and
(08:25):
seeing the people folding these gauze squares, you know, and
then they would ship them off. I mean, what better
metaphor for binding up the brokenness of the world than
literally making gauze bandages. M Fred Rogers grew up in
(08:49):
the Trobe, Pennsylvania, a small but active industrial town just
outside of Pittsburgh, and it's heyday there were trolley cars billowing,
smokestacks it's where the banana split was invented. But Fred
grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. The
Tropes population was mostly blue collar people working in factories,
and pretty much everyone was struggling to make ends meet,
(09:11):
pretty much everyone except the Rogers family. They came from
old banking and industry money. Both of his parents were
extraordinarily giving, helped all hundreds and hundreds of people and
families in Latrobe. They gave away a lot of their
money to to other people who needed it. Maxwell King
(09:32):
is Fred's biographer. The message he got from watching his
parents was caring and being neighborly, and being concerned and
being considerate. They had a lot of privilege, and I
think that that may be one of the reasons that
Fred felt like an outlier. He was very shy as
a little boy. He was introverted, He was lonely. The
(09:55):
family had a limousine drive him to elementary school every day.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine? You might just
get teased a little bit about that. Some kids weren't
allowed to come over to Fred's house because their parents
worried their clothes weren't nice enough. Fred was lonely, a quiet,
chubby kid who suffered from childhood asthma. He was self
(10:17):
conscious and he was insecure. Kids at school called him
fat Freddy. One day, his chauffeur didn't show up to
drive him home from school, kids chased him down the street,
you know, shouting out, we're gonna get you, Fat Freddy.
And he was very traumatized by the experience, and he
and he got home and he told his parents and
(10:40):
grandparents about it, and they said to him, oh, Fred,
if you just pretend you don't care, just pretend it
doesn't matter to you that you don't care, then they'll
leave you alone. And Fred went up to his room,
this is a little boy of about ten or eleven
and sadness room, and said to himself, I do care.
(11:07):
The stoic white people who settled in northern Appalachia, they
probably wouldn't have survived without advice like just to pretend
you don't care. But the problem for young Fred was
that even though he was from these people, he was
not quite of them. He was, for some reason, made
of something different. He had to find ways to work
(11:30):
through his sensitivity and loneliness. So he created puppets to
play with in his room. And he used them to
work through all the feelings he wasn't supposed to have,
and in a sense he did pretend not to have
those feelings. He gave them to his puppets. I think
every one of them has a facet of me, Lady
(11:51):
Laine certainly, the mischief maker, the fund maker, Exdals, the
adolescent all love flying around this place of and look,
I'm for you all anyway. It's a lot easier, even
as an adult, for me to have Daniel say I'm
(12:12):
really scared. Do you think maybe you could give me
a hug? You know, but that would be hard for
me to say, I'm really scared. Do you think you
can give me a huff? When we're teens and our
social lives become so much more important, we need more
than make believe in puppets to make life feel manageable,
(12:33):
even Fred did. I was very, very shy when I
was in grade school, and when I got to high school,
I was scared to death to go. But just so
happened that in our class there was this big man
(12:56):
on campus by the name of Jim Stumbaugh who was
every team and he got hurt at a football practice,
and I was told to take his homework to him
to the hospital. Over time, a relationship began to develop
between shy, quiet Freddie and Jim, the big man on campus.
(13:19):
We started to talk and I could see what substance
there was in this jock, you know. And evidently he
could see what substance there was in this shy kid.
(13:39):
So when he got out of the hospital and went
back to the school, he said to people, you know
that that Roger's kids. Okay. That made all the difference
in the world for me, just somebody saying to the
others that Roger's kids, okay. It was after that that
(14:02):
I started writing for the newspaper, got to be president
of student council. You know what a difference one person
can make in the life of another. It's almost as
if he said, I like you just the way you are.
(14:27):
Did you ever have an experience like this where the
kindness of just one person changed the course of your life.
Being accepted and welcomed by this jock healed something inside
Fred Rogers, and Fred would eventually use his television program
to demonstrate what he understood to be a religious idea.
(14:50):
We are broken and we're not really capable of fixing ourselves.
But there is this God of love that transcends the
brokenness and enters into our lives and our world to
love us as we are, and often that love shows
up through other people. Again. Mr Rogers Neighborhood was not
(15:12):
a religious show, but Lisa dor Meyer says it was
a vehicle for the love of a god that Fred
Rogers deeply believed in. I think a lot of people
just didn't take the time to listen to what he
was really saying. They thought that he was very simplistic
and really didn't have depth to that message. But when
(15:34):
you listened, when you read, there was an incredible depth
and call to action in his interactions on the show.
In Mr Rogers Fish Died, take a look at the aquarium.
(15:58):
Do you see a dead fish? You might remember he
had a whole tank of them, and one of the tiny,
guppy sized ones sank to the stone at the bottom
and stayed there. Fred scoops it out and stares hard
into the cameras we better bury it. He solemnly wraps
the fish in a yellow cloth. Back here in the
(16:22):
the whole sequence of discovering the dead fish, trying to
revive the fish, and then Burying the Fish runs longer
than five minutes, during which Fred doesn't speak more than
ten sentences. I counted the rest is silence. And finally,
(16:49):
after all this ceremony, Mr Rogers just tells us a story.
When I was very young, I had a dog that
I loved very much. Her name was Mitsy mm hmm.
And she got to be old and she died, and
(17:14):
I was very sad when she died because she and
I were good pals. Mm hmm. And when she died,
I cried. My grandmother heard me crying, I remember, and
(17:35):
she came and she just put her arm around me
because she knew I was sad. She knew how much
I loved that dog. And my dad said we'd we'd
have to bury Metsy, and I didn't want to. I
(18:02):
didn't want to bury her because I thought i'd just
pretend that she was still alive. My dad said that
her body was dead and we'd have to bury her,
so we did. By this time, Fred Rogers had used
(18:24):
this program to talk quite frankly to four or five
and six year olds about assassination and racism and war,
and now he was doing a whole episode about death,
about mortality, and never once does he say a thing
about God, just Mitzi and a song. Why Why? Why? Why?
(18:51):
Wonder why? He shows that it's okay and important to
ask a big unanswered question and to keep asking it. Why.
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com and start feeling better today. Fred Rogers, Uh, we
live in his neighborhood. In my office was right across
the street from w q e D, the public television
(21:10):
radio station from which Mr Rogers was broadcast. My name
is Aaron Bisno, Rabbi at Rhodef Shalem Congregation, which is
the largest Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh. And you have a
you have a picture of Fred Rogers in your office?
Is I do I do why um Well, he is
(21:34):
the full picture from the magazine quotas what if Heaven
is the relationships we make here, and that rather than
waiting for a world that we might one day inherit
or merit, we have an opportunity in a few number
of years, while we're with each other, to make of
this world the world of which we speak and dream.
(21:55):
Fred's own spiritual activity was rooted deeply in Presbyterian faith,
but he understood that not everyone finds God or religion
to be a source of solace or sustenance. Even if
people believe in some kind of greater power, that faith
doesn't necessarily give them answers about what to do about
loneliness and fear hurt. Believing in God doesn't necessarily mean
(22:20):
feeling all of God's love, So the the Christian theologian C. S. Lewis,
in a very small monograph he wrote in the year
following his wife's death, called a Grief Observed, he is
a line where he says, do not speak to me
of the comforts of religion, or I shall know that
you do not understand. We're hurting, right, And it's not
(22:43):
that we want your theology or your pronouncements about how
this is all power of God's plan, or you're in
God's hand, but rather I need a hug, or I
need to be able to cry right now, or I
need to just be silent with you and not have
you demand anything of me. It's so interesting because Fred
wasn't an ordained minister who in a sense saw his
show as a kind of ministry, I would believe, and
(23:07):
the television was his pulpit. Yes, you know, it's like,
given all that, it strikes me as particularly meaningful that
he uh did not very very rarely is as far
as I know, said the word God um in his work.
He's not there to edify you about religion. He's there
to do this other thing, which is this kind of
comfort and support, and he doesn't need to mention God
(23:28):
in order to do that. Uh. And in fact, maybefore
a lot of people mentioned God would would interfere with
his ability to do that. And so I think that
that's right. And Fred Rogers lets everybody know that, Hey,
I like you just the way you are. You're good enough,
you're wonderful, right, You're exactly who you're supposed to be.
There's no one in the world just like you and
the world will be a poorer place in your absence. Um.
(23:52):
That's a really beautiful message. And we don't need to
uh to muck it up for to confuse it, or
to uh uh divide ourselves one from another by overlaying
it with words like like god fed Rogers saw the
opportunity to use television as a means of reaching a
pulpit from which to reach, not preach, quite more to
(24:13):
pastor right more, to be there as as one who
comforts reassures. What's that distinction between preach and pastor, as
you just made it well. So often in in um
describing clergy work, UM people speak of of being a preacher,
a pastor, or a priest, and so preaching is what
you do in a pulpit or teaching or in a
(24:34):
classroom kind of thing, right, and pastoring is holding someone's
hand and being with them. Fred Rogers chose to understand
the medium and what incredible insight to do so to
comfort and to reassure, and to serve as a guide
and a friend who's gonna walk with you through this divorce,
through this death, through this experience you're having, through the
(24:55):
pains of growing up Fred's program was his pulpit, not
metaphorically literally. A few years after he started making children's
TV programming, Fred started attending classes at what is now
known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on his lunch breaks. Eight
(25:15):
years later, he was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church.
He received an extremely unique assignment from the body that
oversees ministry. Fred was tasked quote to minister to families
through the mass media. But the thing is, if you're
ministering through mass media, especially public media, then you're not
(25:37):
just ministering to your congregation. You're not just reaching Presbyterians
or Christians or even believers. Anyone can be on the
other side of that TV screen. Your congregation has to
include every kind of person that might be in the world,
and that requires a very skillful pastor. You know. I
(26:00):
my ex wife gave me a ride to the airport
for this trip, and we were talking about this on
the way and she said, she said, what I remember
about Fred Rodgers is that's where I learned to use chopsticks.
And I said, oh really, She said yeah, and she
described it and she said, you know, it was really slow,
and we just sat there together and he taught me
how to use chopsticks. And I thought that was such
an interesting phrasing that she said we just sat there together,
(26:21):
because she was clearly watching TV, and yet even through
this medium of separation, she felt that Fred Rogers was
sitting with her showing her how to use chopsticks. And
that's what he referred to Carril as holy ground, the
space between Fred in the studio and all the millions
(26:42):
of people children, youth and adults watching the neighborhood on television.
George Worth is a Presbyterian minister and was a close
friend of Fred's for twenty years. He told me that
Fred's communication with kids through the television was sacred, an
almost inexplicable communion. Something happened across that space that he
(27:03):
believed was deeply spiritual and mystical um and so he
he really thought about himself sitting there with just one person,
even though there were millions of people watching. He thought
about being with one person at a time. They called
it Fred time it was on the program. Things would
(27:23):
slow down as the program would begin. He'd take his
sneakers off, he'd put on his sweater. He slowed the
pace down and that gave him the opportunity not only
to see other people, but to be able to express
his love and care for other people and reach out
and touch our hearts as well. This was no TV gimmick.
(27:46):
It was some sort of technique of attention kindness that
Fred developed that he was able to communicate through the
cameras and air waves and TV sets, But he communicated
that attention and kindness in person too. What was true
about fed Rogers is he was he was tuned in
at a deeper level than most people. Uh. Fred could
(28:08):
see with his eyes. He was very observant of what
was happening around him, especially of the people with whom
he was talking at whatever they were doing. But he
also could see with his heart. Um. He had um
an open heart to people. You know, this is particularly
(28:29):
timely for me because I have a sixteen year old
son and he and I are embroiled in a long term,
friendly but philosophical argument about religion, and my son has
now reached the point where he's he's really he really
enjoys the what he thinks is the intellectual rigor of
atheism and uh right. He likes to point out that
(28:52):
that the people of religion have been responsible for so
many terrible things, and that there's so much hypocrisy, and
and I absolutely understand where it's coming. Um, And it
is true that you can look at a lot of
Christians and Christianity and see a lot of problems and
a lot of violence against people and a lot of hatred.
(29:12):
Even though I'm forty four, that still feels like a
little child who's just learning that people can be bad.
And I feel shocked by that. And I think one
of the natural human responses is to go into fear, defensiveness, protection.
And I wonder what made Fred Rogers so good at
(29:32):
merging Christianity with love and and the expansion of rights
and with care for each human being. And how how
did you see Fred dealing with things that were things
in the world that were really bad murders, assassinations, violence, uh, genocide?
(29:55):
How did he face those things both in his personal
life spiritually and also just in his public work. Yeah,
I had a problem with a person in the church
that I was serving who really was not only disagreeable,
but was was eager to see me move on to
(30:15):
another place. He just didn't like me. And I was
telling Fred about it over lunch one day, and he
looked at me and he said, George, I wonder what
happened to that man when he was a child that
has caused him to be so angry and so um
(30:35):
determined to hurt you. I wonder what ho what pain
that man suffered when he was a child that blew
me away? Um. That's one part of the answer. And
also he believed that ultimately God prevails and that God
(30:55):
is good. God can cause no harm. God loves with
an redeeming love all of God's children on earth, and
God is sad and feels the pain when bad things happen.
The question why does God allow bad things to happen,
(31:19):
of course, is the theological question that all of us ask.
There's no answer to that. Ultimately, we just don't know.
But what we do know is when the bad things happen,
God comes alongside us. God is present to us not
only through our prayers to reading the Bible, but through
other people. And Fred believed in doing God's work in
(31:44):
the world, being with people through the difficulty, no matter
who those people were or what they believed. Fred's ministry,
the enormity and diversity of his TV congregation require that
He look for and communicate the things that people hold
in common with one another, rather than the things that
differentiate or divide them via sect, or denomination or creed.
(32:06):
He was a very receptive person to other faith traditions
and very sensitive to people who came from no faith
tradition at all. He was um, i would say, broad
gaged in that respect, a Christian and eventually became, as
you know, a Presbyterian minister. But Fred went to school
on other religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the other religions and
(32:32):
found the good in all of those faith traditions and
the people who adhered to them. And while Fred studied
other faiths, Lisa dor Meyer says that Fred also knew
that institutional religion could be coopted for political or social gain,
and sometimes he questioned how his own Presbyterian church was
(32:53):
responding to the larger culture. There was tension there the
Presbyterian Church back in the time that he was in seminary,
and are amazing alums that came through in the late
fifties the early sixties. Those were folks who went to
Alabama to take part in the freedom marches, and they
drove the food trucks and were so concerned about justice
(33:16):
in the world, and and their preaching was prophetic about
changing the world. And then we kind of shifted in
the eighties and into the nineties into a more evangelical bend,
and it was much more i would say, self reflective
on personal relationship with Jesus rather than kind of this
(33:37):
world changing theology and philosophy. And I think that that
shift was difficult, not just for Fred, but a lot
of others from his generation. For many years, the Presbyterian
Church was not affirming of all people, and Fred was
very affirming of all people, and so I think there
(33:58):
was some discomfort there. Ask yourself again, what you feel
when you hear the word religion. Today, it's nearly impossible
to hear that word and not think of certain churches
coming out in support of hurtful, harmful, even violent people
and causes, the pain inflicted in the name of religion
(34:21):
on gay people, or single mothers or divorced couples, or
the untold numbers of children who suffered sexual abuse literally
at the hands of a Christian church. What happens when
you're so convinced of the rightness of your cause that
human beings are less important than values, or commitments or commandments.
(34:41):
Seeing the harm that people in the world have done
in the name of faith, how can you ever be
certain about the moral goodness of the things that you've
been taught about your tradition. Fred grew up with his
appellation Presbyterianism, where feelings where expected to remain beneath the surface,
(35:03):
but his own experience helped him see that the things
we feel as human beings are our shared common ground.
Our feelings are where we can meet and understand one another.
And Fred didn't waiver from that. His constant goal was
to manifest love in the world, and that, Lisa says,
(35:27):
makes him exceptional. I think that God sends saints to
walk among us who are deeply spiritual people that somehow
are able to I think a lot of us have
been given gifts by God, and we we don't find
within ourselves the ability to use them. And I think
(35:48):
that he, for reasons that I can't explain, was able
to fully embrace the gifts God gave him. Is this
just out of reach for people like you and me?
Fred didn't think so, and that's why he made his
program as a beacon as a map as a guide
(36:08):
for how to treat one another with care and kindness.
Really take the time to see each other, to listen,
to understand and to see ourselves in one another, and
to accept the ways in which we're different, but to
extend kindness and understanding and caring to everyone, regardless of
(36:33):
what faith we do or don't subscribe to. Fred Rogers
believed that we could make a better world here in
this lifetime by accepting people, by helping people even in
their brokenness. And it's a challenge. I'm not suggesting that
I or Fred Rodgers have the ability all the time
(36:53):
any want of us to live in this but to
aspire to it, to be imperatively implore, or to strive
towards that. That's that's the life schal I think that
Mr Rogers was sharing with us next time, and you
could hear the beat beep beep of the heart monitor
(37:17):
and the dripping of all the I vs, and in
the background you hear there are many ways to say
I love you. Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media.
The team is Dan O'donnald, Jordan Bailey, and Mattie Foley.
Our editor is Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter
Media is Gretta Cone. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon
(37:40):
Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I
Heart Media. Special thanks this week to the sixth Presbyterian
Church in Pittsburgh and the Reverend Vincent Colb, Reverend John McCall,
and the Reverend Bill Guy Fred Rogers. Interview tape courtesy
of the Television Academy Foundation and Interviews. The full interview
is available at Television Academy dot com slash inter Views.
(38:00):
Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan, music by Blue
Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown. If you like what
you're hearing, rate the show, review the show and tell
a friend I'm Carbo Wallace, thank you for listening. Teething
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Some restrictions apply. Why does it have to get dark?
Why won't the day always day? Let's say goodbye to
(01:32):
the night time, good bye. Let's send the dark time away. Someday, Oh,
someday I'll know what to say. Someday, Oh, someday I'll
(01:53):
not have to say? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why wonder why why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why
why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
(02:28):
Do you ask a lot of why questions? I know
I always did when I was a little I still do.
Mm hmm. Bad stuff happens, and for a lot of us,
our first response is why why is this happening to me?
(02:51):
Fred Rogers sang songs like this one to show kids
it's okay to ask the question, But in his own
life and in his show, he turned why into how
how to respond? How to make someone else's life better.
How to be good in a world filled with bad.
(03:14):
I'm Carvil Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast
about Fred Rogers from I Heart Media and Fatherly in
partnership with Transmitter Media. Last episode, we talked about the
famous scene in Mr Rogers Neighborhood in which Fred washes
Francois Clement's feet. It was politically charged, a white man
(03:38):
sharing a swimming pool with a black man, but the
scene was also a blatant recreation of a Bible story
from the Gospel of John. In the story, Jesus washes
the feet of his followers, the people who are supposedly
less powerful, less important than himself. The moral is that
(04:00):
great leaders are first and foremost great servants, that we
can and maybe should, serve one another. But for all
the biblically evocative nature of the footpath scene, which most
striking is what Fred Rogers doesn't say God Fred was
(04:22):
an ordained Presbyterian minister, though you wouldn't even know it
from watching his program, This scene with Officer Clement is
about as close as he ever came to telling a
Bible story in the neighborhood. Here's a question, when I
say the word religion, What is your response comfort or
(04:45):
does your guard go up? For me? I don't have
much of a reaction to it at all. It was
not forced on me in any uncomfortable way. The Bible
camps and churches I went to were, in my mind,
sometimes boring, sometimes interesting, but large lee inconsequential. Although I
was deathly afraid of Satan and the Book of Revelations
(05:08):
and the Second Coming. And when I thought about these
things as a kid, my mouth would go dry, and
my stomach would feel like it was filled with hot lead,
and I would lay awake in bed just terrified. So
maybe it was a big deal. What about you? Where
does your response to religion live in your heart, in
(05:32):
your brain, in the pit of your stomach? What do
you think religion is for? Oh boy, that's that's a
bit of a loaded question, especially in in the world
we live in today. Lisa Dormeyer was an intern on Mr.
Rogers neighborhood. She later attended seminary and was a chaplain
(05:53):
of the children's hospital. Today, she helps run a senior
care facility just outside of Pittsburgh, not far from where
Fred Rogers grew up. Here in western Pennsylvania. We have
a lot of Scottish and German influence, and that's my ancestry,
which is not very affectionate or even affirming. This was
the same background Fred Rogers came from. People men especially
(06:16):
were stern, stolid, maybe even a little cold, and these sturdy,
old Scottish immigrants were Presbyterians. It's a Protestant Christian tradition
that is older than the founding of this country. In fact,
there were so many Presbyterians involved in writing the Declaration
of Independence and early governance that a lot of our
(06:36):
United States government structures are similar to the Presbyterian tradition
of election and general assembly bodies that come together as
as a voice. We don't have bishops, we don't have
a pope um our elected leadership changes on a regular
basis um, so that's kind of our structure. Theologically, were Calvinists,
(06:58):
and so we believe that you're unable to save ourselves.
We are fully reliant on the grace of God to
save us. And that to me has always been that's
the gift of being a Presbyterian, is that belief that
in our brokenness God enters the world to love and
claim us as we are. We're broken already and God
(07:20):
loves us just the way we are. My mother and
dad were both on boards of our church. I remember
early on being very, very taken with the kinds of
things that the ministers were talking about. Fred sat for
(07:43):
a four and a half hour retrospective interview, and rather
than talk explicitly about his beliefs, he talked about the
ways in which, growing up he saw faith tangibly at
work in the world, like his industrialist father's philanthropy and
his mother's service work. I think she had something like
(08:03):
twenty five thousand volunteer hours at the hospital. She loved
being a narciss aid, and during the Second World War
she was in charge of making surgical dressings for the troops.
And I remember as a little boy going down and
(08:25):
seeing the people folding these gauze squares, you know, and
then they would ship them off. I mean, what better
metaphor for binding up the brokenness of the world than
literally making gauze bandages. M Fred Rogers grew up in
(08:49):
the Trobe, Pennsylvania, a small but active industrial town just
outside of Pittsburgh, and it's heyday there were trolley cars billowing,
smokestacks it's where the banana split was invented. But Fred
grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. The
Tropes population was mostly blue collar people working in factories,
and pretty much everyone was struggling to make ends meet,
(09:11):
pretty much everyone except the Rogers family. They came from
old banking and industry money. Both of his parents were
extraordinarily giving, helped all hundreds and hundreds of people and
families in Latrobe. They gave away a lot of their
money to to other people who needed it. Maxwell King
(09:32):
is Fred's biographer. The message he got from watching his
parents was caring and being neighborly, and being concerned and
being considerate. They had a lot of privilege, and I
think that that may be one of the reasons that
Fred felt like an outlier. He was very shy as
a little boy. He was introverted, He was lonely. The
(09:55):
family had a limousine drive him to elementary school every day.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine? You might just
get teased a little bit about that. Some kids weren't
allowed to come over to Fred's house because their parents
worried their clothes weren't nice enough. Fred was lonely, a quiet,
chubby kid who suffered from childhood asthma. He was self
(10:17):
conscious and he was insecure. Kids at school called him
fat Freddy. One day, his chauffeur didn't show up to
drive him home from school, kids chased him down the street,
you know, shouting out, we're gonna get you, Fat Freddy.
And he was very traumatized by the experience, and he
and he got home and he told his parents and
(10:40):
grandparents about it, and they said to him, oh, Fred,
if you just pretend you don't care, just pretend it
doesn't matter to you that you don't care, then they'll
leave you alone. And Fred went up to his room,
this is a little boy of about ten or eleven
and sadness room, and said to himself, I do care.
(11:07):
The stoic white people who settled in northern Appalachia, they
probably wouldn't have survived without advice like just to pretend
you don't care. But the problem for young Fred was
that even though he was from these people, he was
not quite of them. He was, for some reason, made
of something different. He had to find ways to work
(11:30):
through his sensitivity and loneliness. So he created puppets to
play with in his room. And he used them to
work through all the feelings he wasn't supposed to have,
and in a sense he did pretend not to have
those feelings. He gave them to his puppets. I think
every one of them has a facet of me, Lady
(11:51):
Laine certainly, the mischief maker, the fund maker, Exdals, the
adolescent all love flying around this place of and look,
I'm for you all anyway. It's a lot easier, even
as an adult, for me to have Daniel say I'm
(12:12):
really scared. Do you think maybe you could give me
a hug? You know, but that would be hard for
me to say, I'm really scared. Do you think you
can give me a huff? When we're teens and our
social lives become so much more important, we need more
than make believe in puppets to make life feel manageable,
(12:33):
even Fred did. I was very, very shy when I
was in grade school, and when I got to high school,
I was scared to death to go. But just so
happened that in our class there was this big man
(12:56):
on campus by the name of Jim Stumbaugh who was
every team and he got hurt at a football practice,
and I was told to take his homework to him
to the hospital. Over time, a relationship began to develop
between shy, quiet Freddie and Jim, the big man on campus.
(13:19):
We started to talk and I could see what substance
there was in this jock, you know. And evidently he
could see what substance there was in this shy kid.
(13:39):
So when he got out of the hospital and went
back to the school, he said to people, you know
that that Roger's kids. Okay. That made all the difference
in the world for me, just somebody saying to the
others that Roger's kids, okay. It was after that that
(14:02):
I started writing for the newspaper, got to be president
of student council. You know what a difference one person
can make in the life of another. It's almost as
if he said, I like you just the way you are.
(14:27):
Did you ever have an experience like this where the
kindness of just one person changed the course of your life.
Being accepted and welcomed by this jock healed something inside
Fred Rogers, and Fred would eventually use his television program
to demonstrate what he understood to be a religious idea.
(14:50):
We are broken and we're not really capable of fixing ourselves.
But there is this God of love that transcends the
brokenness and enters into our lives and our world to
love us as we are, and often that love shows
up through other people. Again. Mr Rogers Neighborhood was not
(15:12):
a religious show, but Lisa dor Meyer says it was
a vehicle for the love of a god that Fred
Rogers deeply believed in. I think a lot of people
just didn't take the time to listen to what he
was really saying. They thought that he was very simplistic
and really didn't have depth to that message. But when
(15:34):
you listened, when you read, there was an incredible depth
and call to action in his interactions on the show.
In Mr Rogers Fish Died, take a look at the aquarium.
(15:58):
Do you see a dead fish? You might remember he
had a whole tank of them, and one of the tiny,
guppy sized ones sank to the stone at the bottom
and stayed there. Fred scoops it out and stares hard
into the cameras we better bury it. He solemnly wraps
the fish in a yellow cloth. Back here in the
(16:22):
the whole sequence of discovering the dead fish, trying to
revive the fish, and then Burying the Fish runs longer
than five minutes, during which Fred doesn't speak more than
ten sentences. I counted the rest is silence. And finally,
(16:49):
after all this ceremony, Mr Rogers just tells us a story.
When I was very young, I had a dog that
I loved very much. Her name was Mitsy mm hmm.
And she got to be old and she died, and
(17:14):
I was very sad when she died because she and
I were good pals. Mm hmm. And when she died,
I cried. My grandmother heard me crying, I remember, and
(17:35):
she came and she just put her arm around me
because she knew I was sad. She knew how much
I loved that dog. And my dad said we'd we'd
have to bury Metsy, and I didn't want to. I
(18:02):
didn't want to bury her because I thought i'd just
pretend that she was still alive. My dad said that
her body was dead and we'd have to bury her,
so we did. By this time, Fred Rogers had used
(18:24):
this program to talk quite frankly to four or five
and six year olds about assassination and racism and war,
and now he was doing a whole episode about death,
about mortality, and never once does he say a thing
about God, just Mitzi and a song. Why Why? Why? Why?
(18:51):
Wonder why? He shows that it's okay and important to
ask a big unanswered question and to keep asking it. Why.
We'll be right back. Teething can be a real nightmare
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com and start feeling better today. Fred Rogers, Uh, we
live in his neighborhood. In my office was right across
the street from w q e D, the public television
(21:10):
radio station from which Mr Rogers was broadcast. My name
is Aaron Bisno, Rabbi at Rhodef Shalem Congregation, which is
the largest Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh. And you have a
you have a picture of Fred Rogers in your office?
Is I do I do why um Well, he is
(21:34):
the full picture from the magazine quotas what if Heaven
is the relationships we make here, and that rather than
waiting for a world that we might one day inherit
or merit, we have an opportunity in a few number
of years, while we're with each other, to make of
this world the world of which we speak and dream.
(21:55):
Fred's own spiritual activity was rooted deeply in Presbyterian faith,
but he understood that not everyone finds God or religion
to be a source of solace or sustenance. Even if
people believe in some kind of greater power, that faith
doesn't necessarily give them answers about what to do about
loneliness and fear hurt. Believing in God doesn't necessarily mean
(22:20):
feeling all of God's love, So the the Christian theologian C. S. Lewis,
in a very small monograph he wrote in the year
following his wife's death, called a Grief Observed, he is
a line where he says, do not speak to me
of the comforts of religion, or I shall know that
you do not understand. We're hurting, right, And it's not
(22:43):
that we want your theology or your pronouncements about how
this is all power of God's plan, or you're in
God's hand, but rather I need a hug, or I
need to be able to cry right now, or I
need to just be silent with you and not have
you demand anything of me. It's so interesting because Fred
wasn't an ordained minister who in a sense saw his
show as a kind of ministry, I would believe, and
(23:07):
the television was his pulpit. Yes, you know, it's like,
given all that, it strikes me as particularly meaningful that
he uh did not very very rarely is as far
as I know, said the word God um in his work.
He's not there to edify you about religion. He's there
to do this other thing, which is this kind of
comfort and support, and he doesn't need to mention God
(23:28):
in order to do that. Uh. And in fact, maybefore
a lot of people mentioned God would would interfere with
his ability to do that. And so I think that
that's right. And Fred Rogers lets everybody know that, Hey,
I like you just the way you are. You're good enough,
you're wonderful, right, You're exactly who you're supposed to be.
There's no one in the world just like you and
the world will be a poorer place in your absence. Um.
(23:52):
That's a really beautiful message. And we don't need to
uh to muck it up for to confuse it, or
to uh uh divide ourselves one from another by overlaying
it with words like like god fed Rogers saw the
opportunity to use television as a means of reaching a
pulpit from which to reach, not preach, quite more to
(24:13):
pastor right more, to be there as as one who
comforts reassures. What's that distinction between preach and pastor, as
you just made it well. So often in in um
describing clergy work, UM people speak of of being a preacher,
a pastor, or a priest, and so preaching is what
you do in a pulpit or teaching or in a
(24:34):
classroom kind of thing, right, and pastoring is holding someone's
hand and being with them. Fred Rogers chose to understand
the medium and what incredible insight to do so to
comfort and to reassure, and to serve as a guide
and a friend who's gonna walk with you through this divorce,
through this death, through this experience you're having, through the
(24:55):
pains of growing up Fred's program was his pulpit, not
metaphorically literally. A few years after he started making children's
TV programming, Fred started attending classes at what is now
known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on his lunch breaks. Eight
(25:15):
years later, he was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church.
He received an extremely unique assignment from the body that
oversees ministry. Fred was tasked quote to minister to families
through the mass media. But the thing is, if you're
ministering through mass media, especially public media, then you're not
(25:37):
just ministering to your congregation. You're not just reaching Presbyterians
or Christians or even believers. Anyone can be on the
other side of that TV screen. Your congregation has to
include every kind of person that might be in the world,
and that requires a very skillful pastor. You know. I
(26:00):
my ex wife gave me a ride to the airport
for this trip, and we were talking about this on
the way and she said, she said, what I remember
about Fred Rodgers is that's where I learned to use chopsticks.
And I said, oh really, She said yeah, and she
described it and she said, you know, it was really slow,
and we just sat there together and he taught me
how to use chopsticks. And I thought that was such
an interesting phrasing that she said we just sat there together,
(26:21):
because she was clearly watching TV, and yet even through
this medium of separation, she felt that Fred Rogers was
sitting with her showing her how to use chopsticks. And
that's what he referred to Carril as holy ground, the
space between Fred in the studio and all the millions
(26:42):
of people children, youth and adults watching the neighborhood on television.
George Worth is a Presbyterian minister and was a close
friend of Fred's for twenty years. He told me that
Fred's communication with kids through the television was sacred, an
almost inexplicable communion. Something happened across that space that he
(27:03):
believed was deeply spiritual and mystical um and so he
he really thought about himself sitting there with just one person,
even though there were millions of people watching. He thought
about being with one person at a time. They called
it Fred time it was on the program. Things would
(27:23):
slow down as the program would begin. He'd take his
sneakers off, he'd put on his sweater. He slowed the
pace down and that gave him the opportunity not only
to see other people, but to be able to express
his love and care for other people and reach out
and touch our hearts as well. This was no TV gimmick.
(27:46):
It was some sort of technique of attention kindness that
Fred developed that he was able to communicate through the
cameras and air waves and TV sets, But he communicated
that attention and kindness in person too. What was true
about fed Rogers is he was he was tuned in
at a deeper level than most people. Uh. Fred could
(28:08):
see with his eyes. He was very observant of what
was happening around him, especially of the people with whom
he was talking at whatever they were doing. But he
also could see with his heart. Um. He had um
an open heart to people. You know, this is particularly
(28:29):
timely for me because I have a sixteen year old
son and he and I are embroiled in a long term,
friendly but philosophical argument about religion, and my son has
now reached the point where he's he's really he really
enjoys the what he thinks is the intellectual rigor of
atheism and uh right. He likes to point out that
(28:52):
that the people of religion have been responsible for so
many terrible things, and that there's so much hypocrisy, and
and I absolutely understand where it's coming. Um, And it
is true that you can look at a lot of
Christians and Christianity and see a lot of problems and
a lot of violence against people and a lot of hatred.
(29:12):
Even though I'm forty four, that still feels like a
little child who's just learning that people can be bad.
And I feel shocked by that. And I think one
of the natural human responses is to go into fear, defensiveness, protection.
And I wonder what made Fred Rogers so good at
(29:32):
merging Christianity with love and and the expansion of rights
and with care for each human being. And how how
did you see Fred dealing with things that were things
in the world that were really bad murders, assassinations, violence, uh, genocide?
(29:55):
How did he face those things both in his personal
life spiritually and also just in his public work. Yeah,
I had a problem with a person in the church
that I was serving who really was not only disagreeable,
but was was eager to see me move on to
(30:15):
another place. He just didn't like me. And I was
telling Fred about it over lunch one day, and he
looked at me and he said, George, I wonder what
happened to that man when he was a child that
has caused him to be so angry and so um
(30:35):
determined to hurt you. I wonder what ho what pain
that man suffered when he was a child that blew
me away? Um. That's one part of the answer. And
also he believed that ultimately God prevails and that God
(30:55):
is good. God can cause no harm. God loves with
an redeeming love all of God's children on earth, and
God is sad and feels the pain when bad things happen.
The question why does God allow bad things to happen,
(31:19):
of course, is the theological question that all of us ask.
There's no answer to that. Ultimately, we just don't know.
But what we do know is when the bad things happen,
God comes alongside us. God is present to us not
only through our prayers to reading the Bible, but through
other people. And Fred believed in doing God's work in
(31:44):
the world, being with people through the difficulty, no matter
who those people were or what they believed. Fred's ministry,
the enormity and diversity of his TV congregation require that
He look for and communicate the things that people hold
in common with one another, rather than the things that
differentiate or divide them via sect, or denomination or creed.
(32:06):
He was a very receptive person to other faith traditions
and very sensitive to people who came from no faith
tradition at all. He was um, i would say, broad
gaged in that respect, a Christian and eventually became, as
you know, a Presbyterian minister. But Fred went to school
on other religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the other religions and
(32:32):
found the good in all of those faith traditions and
the people who adhered to them. And while Fred studied
other faiths, Lisa dor Meyer says that Fred also knew
that institutional religion could be coopted for political or social gain,
and sometimes he questioned how his own Presbyterian church was
(32:53):
responding to the larger culture. There was tension there the
Presbyterian Church back in the time that he was in seminary,
and are amazing alums that came through in the late
fifties the early sixties. Those were folks who went to
Alabama to take part in the freedom marches, and they
drove the food trucks and were so concerned about justice
(33:16):
in the world, and and their preaching was prophetic about
changing the world. And then we kind of shifted in
the eighties and into the nineties into a more evangelical bend,
and it was much more i would say, self reflective
on personal relationship with Jesus rather than kind of this
(33:37):
world changing theology and philosophy. And I think that that
shift was difficult, not just for Fred, but a lot
of others from his generation. For many years, the Presbyterian
Church was not affirming of all people, and Fred was
very affirming of all people, and so I think there
(33:58):
was some discomfort there. Ask yourself again, what you feel
when you hear the word religion. Today, it's nearly impossible
to hear that word and not think of certain churches
coming out in support of hurtful, harmful, even violent people
and causes, the pain inflicted in the name of religion
(34:21):
on gay people, or single mothers or divorced couples, or
the untold numbers of children who suffered sexual abuse literally
at the hands of a Christian church. What happens when
you're so convinced of the rightness of your cause that
human beings are less important than values, or commitments or commandments.
(34:41):
Seeing the harm that people in the world have done
in the name of faith, how can you ever be
certain about the moral goodness of the things that you've
been taught about your tradition. Fred grew up with his
appellation Presbyterianism, where feelings where expected to remain beneath the surface,
(35:03):
but his own experience helped him see that the things
we feel as human beings are our shared common ground.
Our feelings are where we can meet and understand one another.
And Fred didn't waiver from that. His constant goal was
to manifest love in the world, and that, Lisa says,
(35:27):
makes him exceptional. I think that God sends saints to
walk among us who are deeply spiritual people that somehow
are able to I think a lot of us have
been given gifts by God, and we we don't find
within ourselves the ability to use them. And I think
(35:48):
that he, for reasons that I can't explain, was able
to fully embrace the gifts God gave him. Is this
just out of reach for people like you and me?
Fred didn't think so, and that's why he made his
program as a beacon as a map as a guide
(36:08):
for how to treat one another with care and kindness.
Really take the time to see each other, to listen,
to understand and to see ourselves in one another, and
to accept the ways in which we're different, but to
extend kindness and understanding and caring to everyone, regardless of
(36:33):
what faith we do or don't subscribe to. Fred Rogers
believed that we could make a better world here in
this lifetime by accepting people, by helping people even in
their brokenness. And it's a challenge. I'm not suggesting that
I or Fred Rodgers have the ability all the time
(36:53):
any want of us to live in this but to
aspire to it, to be imperatively implore, or to strive
towards that. That's that's the life schal I think that
Mr Rogers was sharing with us next time, and you
could hear the beat beep beep of the heart monitor
(37:17):
and the dripping of all the I vs, and in
the background you hear there are many ways to say
I love you. Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media.
The team is Dan O'donnald, Jordan Bailey, and Mattie Foley.
Our editor is Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter
Media is Gretta Cone. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon
(37:40):
Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I
Heart Media. Special thanks this week to the sixth Presbyterian
Church in Pittsburgh and the Reverend Vincent Colb, Reverend John McCall,
and the Reverend Bill Guy Fred Rogers. Interview tape courtesy
of the Television Academy Foundation and Interviews. The full interview
is available at Television Academy dot com slash inter Views.
(38:00):
Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan, music by Blue
Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown. If you like what
you're hearing, rate the show, review the show and tell
a friend I'm Carbo Wallace, thank you for listening. Teething
can be a real nightmare for your little ones. Highlands
(38:22):
Naturals Baby oral pain relief tablets can help ease the pain.
It's gentle, natural active ingredients like camemeo and Arnica suite
your baby's mouth, and gums made with ingredients derived from
plant minerals and other sources free of harsh chemicals. You
can count on Highlands for serious pain relief for your
teething baby. Highlands is a kinder way to care for teething.
Visit Highlands dot com slash kind that's h y l
(38:44):
a n ds dot com. Slash Kind claims based on
traditional homeopathrocractice. Not accept the medical evidence, not ft evaluated.
Do you suffer from zoom fatigue? Hotter dot ai is
here to help. Use auto dot ai to get automatic
meeting notes. You can even step away from the meeting
and catch up any time at started for free at
auter dot ai or download in the app stores that's
otter dot ai. If you work in i T, you'll
(39:07):
want to check out change Makers, a podcast profiling I
T industry leaders. We dive deep into i T profiles
and learn what it takes to drive large scale I
T transformations for successful businesses. Visit change Makers dot fresh
works dot com
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