November 5, 2019 • 35 mins
On not talking about it. On jocks. On talking about it. On religion. On feeling feelings.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Why does it have to get dark? Why won't the
day always stay? Let's say good bye to the night time,
good bye, Let's send the dark time away. Some day, oh,
(00:27):
some day I'll know what to say. Some day, oh,
some day I'll not have to say? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Wonder?
(00:49):
Why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why why why
why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Do you
(01:11):
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?
(01:34):
Fred Rogers sang songs like this one to show kids
it's okay to ask the question, But in his own
life and in a 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?
(01:57):
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
(02:21):
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 this story, Jesus washes
the feet of his followers, the people who are supposedly
less powerful, less important than himself. The moral is that
(02:42):
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
(03:05):
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
(03:28):
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 largely inconsequential. Although I was
deathly afraid of Satan, and the Book of Revelations and
(03:51):
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 that 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
(04:15):
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
(04:35):
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,
(04:59):
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 United States government structures are similar to the
(05:21):
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,
we're Calvinists, and so we believe that we are unable
(05:43):
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 loves us just the way we are.
(06:06):
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 a four and a half hour retrospective interview,
(06:30):
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 twenty five thousand volunteer hours at the hospital.
(06:51):
She loved being a narciss aid, and during the Second
World War she was in charge of banking surgical dressings
for the troops. And I remember as a little boy
going down and seeing the people folding these gauze squares,
(07:12):
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 La Trobe, Pennsylvania, a small but active industrial
(07:35):
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.
Pretty much everyone except the Rogers family. They came from
(07:59):
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
is Fred's biographer. The message he got from watching his
parents was caring and being neighborly and being concerned and
(08:24):
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
family had a limousine drive him to elementary school every day.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine you might just
(08:46):
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 conscious,
and he was insecure. Kids at school called him Fat Freddy.
(09:06):
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 grandparents about it,
and they said to him, oh, Fred, if you just
(09:28):
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 sat in
his room and said to himself, I do care. The
(09:50):
stoic white people who settled in northern Appolachia, they probably
wouldn't have survived without advice, like, just pretend you don't care.
But the problem him, 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.
(10:11):
He had to find ways to work 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 Elaine, certainly the
(10:35):
mischief maker, the fund maker, exdals, the adolescent, all love
flying around this place. I've been looking for you all anyway.
It's a lot easier even as an adult for me
to have Daniel say I'm really scared. Do you think
(10:59):
maybe you could keep me a huck? You know? But
that would be hard for me to say, I'm really scared,
do you think you can give me? 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. Even fred did. I was very, very shy
(11:21):
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 on campus by the name of Jim
(11:41):
Stumball who was on 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. We started to talk and
(12:06):
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. So when he got out
of the hospital, and went back to the school. He
(12:27):
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 I started writing for the newspaper,
(12:48):
got to be president of the student council. What a
difference one person can make in the life of another.
H It's almost as if he said, I like you
just the way you are. Did you ever have an
(13:11):
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. We are broken and
(13:35):
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 a religious show, but Lisa
(13:57):
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 you listened, when you read,
(14:19):
there was an incredible depth and call to action in
his interactions on the show. In Mr Rogers, fish Died.
(14:40):
Take a look at the aquarium. 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 stones at the bottom and stayed there.
Fred scoops it out and stares hard into the camera
as we better bury it. M He solemnly wraps the
(15:01):
fish in a yellow cloth and the place back here
in the yard. 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.
(15:31):
And finally, 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 Mitzi.
Mm hmm. When she got to be old and she died.
(15:57):
I was very sad when she died, because she and
I were good pals. Mm hmmm. And when she died,
I cried. My grandmother heard me crying, I remember, and
(16:18):
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
(16:45):
didn't want to bury her because I thought I'd just
pretend that she was still alive. But 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
(17:07):
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 Mizzi and a song. Why Why? Why? Why?
(17:34):
Wonder why? He shows that it's okay and important to
ask a big, unanswerable question and to keep asking it. Why.
We'll be right back Why why Fred Rogers? Uh. We
(18:14):
live in his neighborhood. In my office was right across
the street, from w q e D, the public television
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
(18:38):
you have a picture of Fred Rogers in your office?
Is I do I do? Why? Um? Well? He is
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
(19:00):
of years, while we're with each other, to make of
this world the world of which we speak and dream.
Fred's own spiritual activity was rooted deeply in his Presbyterian faith,
but he understood that not everyone finds God or religion
to be a source of solace or sustenance. Even if
(19:20):
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
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
(19:45):
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 that we want your theology or your pronouncements about
how this is all part 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
(20:07):
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 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
(20:30):
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
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,
(20:52):
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,
that's a really beautiful message. And we don't need to
uh to muck it up, or to confuse it, or
to uh uh divide ourselves one from another by overlaying
(21:14):
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
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
(21:35):
describing clergy work, UM people speak of of being a preacher,
a pastor, or a priest. And so preaching is what
you do on a pulpit or teaching or in a
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
(21:56):
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
pains of growing up. Fred's program was his pulpit, not
metaphorically literally. A few years after he started making children's
(22:19):
TV programming, Fred started attending classes at what is now
known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on his lunch breaks. Eight
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
(22:40):
through the mass media. But the thing is, if you're
ministering through mass media, especially public media, then you're not
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
(23:01):
include every kind of person that might be in the world,
and that requires a very skillful pastor. You know, I
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
(23:22):
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,
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
(23:45):
that's what he referred to Carril as holy ground, the
space between Fred in the studio and all the millions
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
(24:09):
almost inexplicable communion. Something happened across that space that he
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
(24:31):
it Fred time it was on the program. Things would
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
(24:53):
and touch our hearts as well. This was no TV gimmick.
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
(25:16):
at a deeper level than most people. Uh. Fred could
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
(25:37):
an open heart to people. You know, this is particularly
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.
(26:00):
And uh, he likes to point out that 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 from. 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
(26:22):
violence against people and a lot of hatred. 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
(26:44):
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 we're really bad murders, assassinations, violence, uh, genocide.
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
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
(27:47):
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 of the answer. And also
he believed that ultimately God prevails and that God is good.
(28:08):
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, of course,
(28:32):
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
(28:56):
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 required that
he looked 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.
(29:18):
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
(29:44):
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 co opted for political or
social will gain. And sometimes you questioned how his own
Presbyterian church was responding to the larger culture. There was
(30:07):
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 in the world, and and their
(30:29):
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 world changing theology and philosophy.
(30:53):
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 was some discomfort there. Ask
(31:14):
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 on gay people, or single mothers or
(31:35):
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. Seeing the harm that people in
the world have done in the name of faith, how
(31:58):
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 were expected
to remain beneath the surface, but his own experience helped
him see that the things we feel as human beings
(32:21):
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, makes him exceptional. I
think that God sends saints to walk among us who
(32:45):
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 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
(33:09):
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 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
(33:30):
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 what faith we do or
don't subscribe to. Fred Rogers believed that we could make
(33:50):
a better world here in this lifetime by accepting people,
by helping people, even in their goodness. It's a challenge.
I'm not suggesting that I or Fred Rodgers have the
ability all the time, any one of us to live
in this, but to aspire to it, to be imperatively
(34:11):
implored to strive towards that. That's that's the life schal
I think that Mr Rodgers was sharing with us next time,
and you could hear the beat, beat beat of the
heart monitor and the dripping of all the i vs,
(34:31):
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 Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team
(34:54):
at I Heart Media. Special thanks this week to the
sixth Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and the Reverend Vincent Holbe,
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 Interviews. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan, music
(35:15):
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 Carver Wallace. Thank you for listening.
Why does it have to get dark? Why won't the
day always stay? Let's say good bye to the night time,
good bye, Let's send the dark time away. Some day, oh,
(00:27):
some day I'll know what to say. Some day, oh,
some day I'll not have to say? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Wonder?
(00:49):
Why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why why why
why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Do you
(01:11):
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?
(01:34):
Fred Rogers sang songs like this one to show kids
it's okay to ask the question, But in his own
life and in a 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?
(01:57):
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
(02:21):
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 this story, Jesus washes
the feet of his followers, the people who are supposedly
less powerful, less important than himself. The moral is that
(02:42):
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
(03:05):
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
(03:28):
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 largely inconsequential. Although I was
deathly afraid of Satan, and the Book of Revelations and
(03:51):
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 that 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
(04:15):
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
(04:35):
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,
(04:59):
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 United States government structures are similar to the
(05:21):
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,
we're Calvinists, and so we believe that we are unable
(05:43):
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 loves us just the way we are.
(06:06):
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 a four and a half hour retrospective interview,
(06:30):
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 twenty five thousand volunteer hours at the hospital.
(06:51):
She loved being a narciss aid, and during the Second
World War she was in charge of banking surgical dressings
for the troops. And I remember as a little boy
going down and seeing the people folding these gauze squares,
(07:12):
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 La Trobe, Pennsylvania, a small but active industrial
(07:35):
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.
Pretty much everyone except the Rogers family. They came from
(07:59):
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
is Fred's biographer. The message he got from watching his
parents was caring and being neighborly and being concerned and
(08:24):
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
family had a limousine drive him to elementary school every day.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine you might just
(08:46):
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 conscious,
and he was insecure. Kids at school called him Fat Freddy.
(09:06):
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 grandparents about it,
and they said to him, oh, Fred, if you just
(09:28):
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 sat in
his room and said to himself, I do care. The
(09:50):
stoic white people who settled in northern Appolachia, they probably
wouldn't have survived without advice, like, just pretend you don't care.
But the problem him, 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.
(10:11):
He had to find ways to work 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 Elaine, certainly the
(10:35):
mischief maker, the fund maker, exdals, the adolescent, all love
flying around this place. I've been looking for you all anyway.
It's a lot easier even as an adult for me
to have Daniel say I'm really scared. Do you think
(10:59):
maybe you could keep me a huck? You know? But
that would be hard for me to say, I'm really scared,
do you think you can give me? 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. Even fred did. I was very, very shy
(11:21):
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 on campus by the name of Jim
(11:41):
Stumball who was on 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. We started to talk and
(12:06):
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. So when he got out
of the hospital, and went back to the school. He
(12:27):
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 I started writing for the newspaper,
(12:48):
got to be president of the student council. What a
difference one person can make in the life of another.
H It's almost as if he said, I like you
just the way you are. Did you ever have an
(13:11):
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. We are broken and
(13:35):
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 a religious show, but Lisa
(13:57):
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 you listened, when you read,
(14:19):
there was an incredible depth and call to action in
his interactions on the show. In Mr Rogers, fish Died.
(14:40):
Take a look at the aquarium. 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 stones at the bottom and stayed there.
Fred scoops it out and stares hard into the camera
as we better bury it. M He solemnly wraps the
(15:01):
fish in a yellow cloth and the place back here
in the yard. 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.
(15:31):
And finally, 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 Mitzi.
Mm hmm. When she got to be old and she died.
(15:57):
I was very sad when she died, because she and
I were good pals. Mm hmmm. And when she died,
I cried. My grandmother heard me crying, I remember, and
(16:18):
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
(16:45):
didn't want to bury her because I thought I'd just
pretend that she was still alive. But 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
(17:07):
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 Mizzi and a song. Why Why? Why? Why?
(17:34):
Wonder why? He shows that it's okay and important to
ask a big, unanswerable question and to keep asking it. Why.
We'll be right back Why why Fred Rogers? Uh. We
(18:14):
live in his neighborhood. In my office was right across
the street, from w q e D, the public television
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
(18:38):
you have a picture of Fred Rogers in your office?
Is I do I do? Why? Um? Well? He is
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
(19:00):
of years, while we're with each other, to make of
this world the world of which we speak and dream.
Fred's own spiritual activity was rooted deeply in his Presbyterian faith,
but he understood that not everyone finds God or religion
to be a source of solace or sustenance. Even if
(19:20):
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
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
(19:45):
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 that we want your theology or your pronouncements about
how this is all part 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
(20:07):
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 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
(20:30):
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
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,
(20:52):
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,
that's a really beautiful message. And we don't need to
uh to muck it up, or to confuse it, or
to uh uh divide ourselves one from another by overlaying
(21:14):
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
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
(21:35):
describing clergy work, UM people speak of of being a preacher,
a pastor, or a priest. And so preaching is what
you do on a pulpit or teaching or in a
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
(21:56):
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
pains of growing up. Fred's program was his pulpit, not
metaphorically literally. A few years after he started making children's
(22:19):
TV programming, Fred started attending classes at what is now
known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on his lunch breaks. Eight
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
(22:40):
through the mass media. But the thing is, if you're
ministering through mass media, especially public media, then you're not
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
(23:01):
include every kind of person that might be in the world,
and that requires a very skillful pastor. You know, I
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
(23:22):
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,
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
(23:45):
that's what he referred to Carril as holy ground, the
space between Fred in the studio and all the millions
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
(24:09):
almost inexplicable communion. Something happened across that space that he
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
(24:31):
it Fred time it was on the program. Things would
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
(24:53):
and touch our hearts as well. This was no TV gimmick.
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
(25:16):
at a deeper level than most people. Uh. Fred could
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
(25:37):
an open heart to people. You know, this is particularly
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.
(26:00):
And uh, he likes to point out that 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 from. 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
(26:22):
violence against people and a lot of hatred. 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
(26:44):
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 we're really bad murders, assassinations, violence, uh, genocide.
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
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
(27:47):
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 of the answer. And also
he believed that ultimately God prevails and that God is good.
(28:08):
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, of course,
(28:32):
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
(28:56):
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 required that
he looked 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.
(29:18):
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
(29:44):
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 co opted for political or
social will gain. And sometimes you questioned how his own
Presbyterian church was responding to the larger culture. There was
(30:07):
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 in the world, and and their
(30:29):
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 world changing theology and philosophy.
(30:53):
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 was some discomfort there. Ask
(31:14):
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 on gay people, or single mothers or
(31:35):
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. Seeing the harm that people in
the world have done in the name of faith, how
(31:58):
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 were expected
to remain beneath the surface, but his own experience helped
him see that the things we feel as human beings
(32:21):
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, makes him exceptional. I
think that God sends saints to walk among us who
(32:45):
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 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
(33:09):
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 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
(33:30):
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 what faith we do or
don't subscribe to. Fred Rogers believed that we could make
(33:50):
a better world here in this lifetime by accepting people,
by helping people, even in their goodness. It's a challenge.
I'm not suggesting that I or Fred Rodgers have the
ability all the time, any one of us to live
in this, but to aspire to it, to be imperatively
(34:11):
implored to strive towards that. That's that's the life schal
I think that Mr Rodgers was sharing with us next time,
and you could hear the beat, beat beat of the
heart monitor and the dripping of all the i vs,
(34:31):
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 Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team
(34:54):
at I Heart Media. Special thanks this week to the
sixth Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and the Reverend Vincent Holbe,
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 Interviews. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan, music
(35:15):
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 Carver Wallace. Thank you for listening.
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