Fred Rogers
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I decided to try to keep these short and sweet for the season, to take a little bit of a break, but then I just didn’t send any for several weeks, so I guess that works, too.
“‘Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.’
“‘Oh, monsters are scared,’ said Lettie. ‘That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups…’ She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, ‘I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.’ She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. ‘Except for Granny, of course.’
“We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.” -The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
I highly recommend this article about Mr. Rogers, if you haven’t read it, but watching the movie works, too. It gets all the important things right, sounds like. (Trigger warning for some grief and loss — watch it when you’re ready for a good cry.) Also, I found the article through this podcast episode of The Next Right Thing by Emily Freeman, also recommended. (There’s a transcript there, if you’d rather read it.)
There is one thing about the article, though. Tom Junod writes that Fred Rogers failed in his mission, in his experiment, he lost in his efforts to make the world a kinder place. That he has no successors. I mean, look at us. Look at the world.
But. One thing about taking on the mantle of Fred Rogers, considering he was the one to ask, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?”, those carrying on that mantle aren’t necessarily going to be people we know about. They won’t necessarily be in the public eye. Little by little, in daily life, they’ll try to always be kind and civil, to see the good in everyone, to say, “he [or she] was a child once, too.”
And then to give those children cups of cold water in Jesus’ name.
“And that’s it, really—his message to doctors was his message to politicians, CEOs, celebrities, educators, writers, students, everyone. It was also the basis of his strange superpowers. He wanted us to remember what it was like to be a child so that he could talk to us; he wanted to talk to us so that we could remember what it was like to be a child. And he could talk to anyone, believing that if you remembered what it was like to be a child, you would remember that you were a child of God.
“The question, then, isn’t what Fred would do, what Fred would say, in the face of outrage and horror, because Fred was the most stubbornly consistent of men. He would say that Donald Trump was a child once too.”
It won’t make headlines. Maybe someday those carrying on his legacy will try to do something as audacious in their day as Fred Rogers trying to reform public television was in his, but mostly it’ll be moment by moment, person by person, and it won’t matter if they “fail” in their endeavors or not, because when you’re faithful in the small things, you do leave a legacy, even if it’s hard to see at first.
As Lisa-Jo Baker and Christie Purifoy so wonderfully point out, the way of the cross is the way of failure.
Coming back to this article, thinking again about Fred Rogers, and what he would do, it’s one more thing saving my life. Huh. I love that Fred Rogers so simply, undramatically, unassumingly demonstrates the way of failure, the way of losing your life so you will save it.
“There are a lot of people who still believe what they read about Fred on the internet—that he was a Navy SEAL who wore sweaters to cover the tattoos on his arms, each one celebrating a proud kill. I saw him standing in a locker room after his daily swim, naked as a jaybird, and can attest that his arms remained innocent of ink. But I guess that people have to call him a warrior simply to account for him, for the peculiar power of his pacifism, and in some ways they have him exactly right, as well as his wife, Joanne. Though they both called me “My dear,” they were warriors, the both of them, and Joanne remains so at 91, with her gap-toothed smile and her mobcap of curls and her twinkling eyes and her merry chuckle.”
“He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.”
As Madeleine L’Engle put it in Walking on Water, not referring specifically to Fred Rogers or his legacy, though it applies beautifully to both,
“Often we forget that [God] has a special gift for each one of us, because we tend to weigh and measure such gifts with the coin of the world’s market place. The widow’s mite was worth more than all the rich men’s gold because it represented the focus of her life. Her poverty was rich because all she had belonged to the living Lord. Some unheard-of Elizabethan woman who led a life of selfless love may well be brought before the throne of God ahead of Shakespeare, for such a person may be a greater force for good than someone on whom God’s blessings seem to have been dropped more generously. As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, ‘To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.’
“The widow’s mite and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion are both ‘living mysteries,’ both witness to lives which affirm the loving presence of God.”
Let’s do it. Let’s fight to be kind. Let’s go fail together. Who’s with me??