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, 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? Why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why why why why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? 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? 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? Why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why why why why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? 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? 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.