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Speaker 1: Some restrictions apply. Why does it have to get dark?
Speaker 1: Why won't the day always day? Let's say goodbye to
Speaker 1: the night time, good bye. Let's send the dark time away. Someday, Oh,
Speaker 1: someday I'll know what to say. Someday, Oh, someday I'll
Speaker 1: not have to say? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Speaker 1: Why wonder why why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why
Speaker 1: why why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Speaker 1: Do you ask a lot of why questions? I know
Speaker 1: I always did when I was a little I still do.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Bad stuff happens, and for a lot of us,
Speaker 1: our first response is why why is this happening to me?
Speaker 1: Fred Rogers sang songs like this one to show kids
Speaker 1: it's okay to ask the question, But in his own
Speaker 1: life and in his show, he turned why into how
Speaker 1: how to respond? How to make someone else's life better.
Speaker 1: How to be good in a world filled with bad.
Speaker 1: I'm Carvil Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast
Speaker 1: about Fred Rogers from I Heart Media and Fatherly in
Speaker 1: partnership with Transmitter Media. Last episode, we talked about the
Speaker 1: famous scene in Mr Rogers Neighborhood in which Fred washes
Speaker 1: Francois Clement's feet. It was politically charged, a white man
Speaker 1: sharing a swimming pool with a black man, but the
Speaker 1: scene was also a blatant recreation of a Bible story
Speaker 1: from the Gospel of John. In the story, Jesus washes
Speaker 1: the feet of his followers, the people who are supposedly
Speaker 1: less powerful, less important than himself. The moral is that
Speaker 1: great leaders are first and foremost great servants, that we
Speaker 1: can and maybe should, serve one another. But for all
Speaker 1: the biblically evocative nature of the footpath scene, which most
Speaker 1: striking is what Fred Rogers doesn't say God Fred was
Speaker 1: an ordained Presbyterian minister, though you wouldn't even know it
Speaker 1: from watching his program, This scene with Officer Clement is
Speaker 1: about as close as he ever came to telling a
Speaker 1: Bible story in the neighborhood. Here's a question, when I
Speaker 1: say the word religion, What is your response comfort or
Speaker 1: does your guard go up? For me? I don't have
Speaker 1: much of a reaction to it at all. It was
Speaker 1: not forced on me in any uncomfortable way. The Bible
Speaker 1: camps and churches I went to were, in my mind,
Speaker 1: sometimes boring, sometimes interesting, but large lee inconsequential. Although I
Speaker 1: was deathly afraid of Satan and the Book of Revelations
Speaker 1: and the Second Coming. And when I thought about these
Speaker 1: things as a kid, my mouth would go dry, and
Speaker 1: my stomach would feel like it was filled with hot lead,
Speaker 1: and I would lay awake in bed just terrified. So
Speaker 1: maybe it was a big deal. What about you? Where
Speaker 1: does your response to religion live in your heart, in
Speaker 1: your brain, in the pit of your stomach? What do
Speaker 1: you think religion is for? Oh boy, that's that's a
Speaker 1: bit of a loaded question, especially in in the world
Speaker 1: we live in today. Lisa Dormeyer was an intern on Mr.
Speaker 1: Rogers neighborhood. She later attended seminary and was a chaplain
Speaker 1: of the children's hospital. Today, she helps run a senior
Speaker 1: care facility just outside of Pittsburgh, not far from where
Speaker 1: Fred Rogers grew up. Here in western Pennsylvania. We have
Speaker 1: a lot of Scottish and German influence, and that's my ancestry,
Speaker 1: which is not very affectionate or even affirming. This was
Speaker 1: the same background Fred Rogers came from. People men especially
Speaker 1: were stern, stolid, maybe even a little cold, and these sturdy,
Speaker 1: old Scottish immigrants were Presbyterians. It's a Protestant Christian tradition
Speaker 1: that is older than the founding of this country. In fact,
Speaker 1: there were so many Presbyterians involved in writing the Declaration
Speaker 1: of Independence and early governance that a lot of our
Speaker 1: United States government structures are similar to the Presbyterian tradition
Speaker 1: of election and general assembly bodies that come together as
Speaker 1: as a voice. We don't have bishops, we don't have
Speaker 1: a pope um our elected leadership changes on a regular
Speaker 1: basis um, so that's kind of our structure. Theologically, were Calvinists,
Speaker 1: and so we believe that you're unable to save ourselves.
Speaker 1: We are fully reliant on the grace of God to
Speaker 1: save us. And that to me has always been that's
Speaker 1: the gift of being a Presbyterian, is that belief that
Speaker 1: in our brokenness God enters the world to love and
Speaker 1: claim us as we are. We're broken already and God
Speaker 1: loves us just the way we are. My mother and
Speaker 1: dad were both on boards of our church. I remember
Speaker 1: early on being very, very taken with the kinds of
Speaker 1: things that the ministers were talking about. Fred sat for
Speaker 1: a four and a half hour retrospective interview, and rather
Speaker 1: than talk explicitly about his beliefs, he talked about the
Speaker 1: ways in which, growing up he saw faith tangibly at
Speaker 1: work in the world, like his industrialist father's philanthropy and
Speaker 1: his mother's service work. I think she had something like
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand volunteer hours at the hospital. She loved
Speaker 1: being a narciss aid, and during the Second World War
Speaker 1: she was in charge of making surgical dressings for the troops.
Speaker 1: And I remember as a little boy going down and
Speaker 1: seeing the people folding these gauze squares, you know, and
Speaker 1: then they would ship them off. I mean, what better
Speaker 1: metaphor for binding up the brokenness of the world than
Speaker 1: literally making gauze bandages. M Fred Rogers grew up in
Speaker 1: the Trobe, Pennsylvania, a small but active industrial town just
Speaker 1: outside of Pittsburgh, and it's heyday there were trolley cars billowing,
Speaker 1: smokestacks it's where the banana split was invented. But Fred
Speaker 1: grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. The
Speaker 1: Tropes population was mostly blue collar people working in factories,
Speaker 1: and pretty much everyone was struggling to make ends meet,
Speaker 1: pretty much everyone except the Rogers family. They came from
Speaker 1: old banking and industry money. Both of his parents were
Speaker 1: extraordinarily giving, helped all hundreds and hundreds of people and
Speaker 1: families in Latrobe. They gave away a lot of their
Speaker 1: money to to other people who needed it. Maxwell King
Speaker 1: is Fred's biographer. The message he got from watching his
Speaker 1: parents was caring and being neighborly, and being concerned and
Speaker 1: being considerate. They had a lot of privilege, and I
Speaker 1: think that that may be one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: Fred felt like an outlier. He was very shy as
Speaker 1: a little boy. He was introverted, He was lonely. The
Speaker 1: family had a limousine drive him to elementary school every day.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine that? Can you imagine? You might just
Speaker 1: get teased a little bit about that. Some kids weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to come over to Fred's house because their parents
Speaker 1: worried their clothes weren't nice enough. Fred was lonely, a quiet,
Speaker 1: chubby kid who suffered from childhood asthma. He was self
Speaker 1: conscious and he was insecure. Kids at school called him
Speaker 1: fat Freddy. One day, his chauffeur didn't show up to
Speaker 1: drive him home from school, kids chased him down the street,
Speaker 1: you know, shouting out, we're gonna get you, Fat Freddy.
Speaker 1: And he was very traumatized by the experience, and he
Speaker 1: and he got home and he told his parents and
Speaker 1: grandparents about it, and they said to him, oh, Fred,
Speaker 1: if you just pretend you don't care, just pretend it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter to you that you don't care, then they'll
Speaker 1: leave you alone. And Fred went up to his room,
Speaker 1: this is a little boy of about ten or eleven
Speaker 1: and sadness room, and said to himself, I do care.
Speaker 1: The stoic white people who settled in northern Appalachia, they
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't have survived without advice like just to pretend
Speaker 1: you don't care. But the problem for young Fred was
Speaker 1: that even though he was from these people, he was
Speaker 1: not quite of them. He was, for some reason, made
Speaker 1: of something different. He had to find ways to work
Speaker 1: through his sensitivity and loneliness. So he created puppets to
Speaker 1: play with in his room. And he used them to
Speaker 1: work through all the feelings he wasn't supposed to have,
Speaker 1: and in a sense he did pretend not to have
Speaker 1: those feelings. He gave them to his puppets. I think
Speaker 1: every one of them has a facet of me, Lady
Speaker 1: Laine certainly, the mischief maker, the fund maker, Exdals, the
Speaker 1: adolescent all love flying around this place of and look,
Speaker 1: I'm for you all anyway. It's a lot easier, even
Speaker 1: as an adult, for me to have Daniel say I'm
Speaker 1: really scared. Do you think maybe you could give me
Speaker 1: a hug? You know, but that would be hard for
Speaker 1: me to say, I'm really scared. Do you think you
Speaker 1: can give me a huff? When we're teens and our
Speaker 1: social lives become so much more important, we need more
Speaker 1: than make believe in puppets to make life feel manageable,
Speaker 1: even Fred did. I was very, very shy when I
Speaker 1: was in grade school, and when I got to high school,
Speaker 1: I was scared to death to go. But just so
Speaker 1: happened that in our class there was this big man
Speaker 1: on campus by the name of Jim Stumbaugh who was
Speaker 1: every team and he got hurt at a football practice,
Speaker 1: and I was told to take his homework to him
Speaker 1: to the hospital. Over time, a relationship began to develop
Speaker 1: between shy, quiet Freddie and Jim, the big man on campus.
Speaker 1: We started to talk and I could see what substance
Speaker 1: there was in this jock, you know. And evidently he
Speaker 1: could see what substance there was in this shy kid.
Speaker 1: So when he got out of the hospital and went
Speaker 1: back to the school, he said to people, you know
Speaker 1: that that Roger's kids. Okay. That made all the difference
Speaker 1: in the world for me, just somebody saying to the
Speaker 1: others that Roger's kids, okay. It was after that that
Speaker 1: I started writing for the newspaper, got to be president
Speaker 1: of student council. You know what a difference one person
Speaker 1: can make in the life of another. It's almost as
Speaker 1: if he said, I like you just the way you are.
Speaker 1: Did you ever have an experience like this where the
Speaker 1: kindness of just one person changed the course of your life.
Speaker 1: Being accepted and welcomed by this jock healed something inside
Speaker 1: Fred Rogers, and Fred would eventually use his television program
Speaker 1: to demonstrate what he understood to be a religious idea.
Speaker 1: We are broken and we're not really capable of fixing ourselves.
Speaker 1: But there is this God of love that transcends the
Speaker 1: brokenness and enters into our lives and our world to
Speaker 1: love us as we are, and often that love shows
Speaker 1: up through other people. Again. Mr Rogers Neighborhood was not
Speaker 1: a religious show, but Lisa dor Meyer says it was
Speaker 1: a vehicle for the love of a god that Fred
Speaker 1: Rogers deeply believed in. I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: just didn't take the time to listen to what he
Speaker 1: was really saying. They thought that he was very simplistic
Speaker 1: and really didn't have depth to that message. But when
Speaker 1: you listened, when you read, there was an incredible depth
Speaker 1: and call to action in his interactions on the show.
Speaker 1: In Mr Rogers Fish Died, take a look at the aquarium.
Speaker 1: Do you see a dead fish? You might remember he
Speaker 1: had a whole tank of them, and one of the tiny,
Speaker 1: guppy sized ones sank to the stone at the bottom
Speaker 1: and stayed there. Fred scoops it out and stares hard
Speaker 1: into the cameras we better bury it. He solemnly wraps
Speaker 1: the fish in a yellow cloth. Back here in the
Speaker 1: the whole sequence of discovering the dead fish, trying to
Speaker 1: revive the fish, and then Burying the Fish runs longer
Speaker 1: than five minutes, during which Fred doesn't speak more than
Speaker 1: ten sentences. I counted the rest is silence. And finally,
Speaker 1: after all this ceremony, Mr Rogers just tells us a story.
Speaker 1: When I was very young, I had a dog that
Speaker 1: I loved very much. Her name was Mitsy mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And she got to be old and she died, and
Speaker 1: I was very sad when she died because she and
Speaker 1: I were good pals. Mm hmm. And when she died,
Speaker 1: I cried. My grandmother heard me crying, I remember, and
Speaker 1: she came and she just put her arm around me
Speaker 1: because she knew I was sad. She knew how much
Speaker 1: I loved that dog. And my dad said we'd we'd
Speaker 1: have to bury Metsy, and I didn't want to. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to bury her because I thought i'd just
Speaker 1: pretend that she was still alive. My dad said that
Speaker 1: her body was dead and we'd have to bury her,
Speaker 1: so we did. By this time, Fred Rogers had used
Speaker 1: this program to talk quite frankly to four or five
Speaker 1: and six year olds about assassination and racism and war,
Speaker 1: and now he was doing a whole episode about death,
Speaker 1: about mortality, and never once does he say a thing
Speaker 1: about God, just Mitzi and a song. Why Why? Why? Why?
Speaker 1: Wonder why? He shows that it's okay and important to
Speaker 1: ask a big unanswered question and to keep asking it. Why.
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Speaker 1: com and start feeling better today. Fred Rogers, Uh, we
Speaker 1: live in his neighborhood. In my office was right across
Speaker 1: the street from w q e D, the public television
Speaker 1: radio station from which Mr Rogers was broadcast. My name
Speaker 1: is Aaron Bisno, Rabbi at Rhodef Shalem Congregation, which is
Speaker 1: the largest Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh. And you have a
Speaker 1: you have a picture of Fred Rogers in your office?
Speaker 1: Is I do I do why um Well, he is
Speaker 1: the full picture from the magazine quotas what if Heaven
Speaker 1: is the relationships we make here, and that rather than
Speaker 1: waiting for a world that we might one day inherit
Speaker 1: or merit, we have an opportunity in a few number
Speaker 1: of years, while we're with each other, to make of
Speaker 1: this world the world of which we speak and dream.
Speaker 1: Fred's own spiritual activity was rooted deeply in Presbyterian faith,
Speaker 1: but he understood that not everyone finds God or religion
Speaker 1: to be a source of solace or sustenance. Even if
Speaker 1: people believe in some kind of greater power, that faith
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily give them answers about what to do about
Speaker 1: loneliness and fear hurt. Believing in God doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: feeling all of God's love, So the the Christian theologian C. S. Lewis,
Speaker 1: in a very small monograph he wrote in the year
Speaker 1: following his wife's death, called a Grief Observed, he is
Speaker 1: a line where he says, do not speak to me
Speaker 1: of the comforts of religion, or I shall know that
Speaker 1: you do not understand. We're hurting, right, And it's not
Speaker 1: that we want your theology or your pronouncements about how
Speaker 1: this is all power of God's plan, or you're in
Speaker 1: God's hand, but rather I need a hug, or I
Speaker 1: need to be able to cry right now, or I
Speaker 1: need to just be silent with you and not have
Speaker 1: you demand anything of me. It's so interesting because Fred
Speaker 1: wasn't an ordained minister who in a sense saw his
Speaker 1: show as a kind of ministry, I would believe, and
Speaker 1: the television was his pulpit. Yes, you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: given all that, it strikes me as particularly meaningful that
Speaker 1: he uh did not very very rarely is as far
Speaker 1: as I know, said the word God um in his work.
Speaker 1: He's not there to edify you about religion. He's there
Speaker 1: to do this other thing, which is this kind of
Speaker 1: comfort and support, and he doesn't need to mention God
Speaker 1: in order to do that. Uh. And in fact, maybefore
Speaker 1: a lot of people mentioned God would would interfere with
Speaker 1: his ability to do that. And so I think that
Speaker 1: that's right. And Fred Rogers lets everybody know that, Hey,
Speaker 1: I like you just the way you are. You're good enough,
Speaker 1: you're wonderful, right, You're exactly who you're supposed to be.
Speaker 1: There's no one in the world just like you and
Speaker 1: the world will be a poorer place in your absence. Um.
Speaker 1: That's a really beautiful message. And we don't need to
Speaker 1: uh to muck it up for to confuse it, or
Speaker 1: to uh uh divide ourselves one from another by overlaying
Speaker 1: it with words like like god fed Rogers saw the
Speaker 1: opportunity to use television as a means of reaching a
Speaker 1: pulpit from which to reach, not preach, quite more to
Speaker 1: pastor right more, to be there as as one who
Speaker 1: comforts reassures. What's that distinction between preach and pastor, as
Speaker 1: you just made it well. So often in in um
Speaker 1: describing clergy work, UM people speak of of being a preacher,
Speaker 1: a pastor, or a priest, and so preaching is what
Speaker 1: you do in a pulpit or teaching or in a
Speaker 1: classroom kind of thing, right, and pastoring is holding someone's
Speaker 1: hand and being with them. Fred Rogers chose to understand
Speaker 1: the medium and what incredible insight to do so to
Speaker 1: comfort and to reassure, and to serve as a guide
Speaker 1: and a friend who's gonna walk with you through this divorce,
Speaker 1: through this death, through this experience you're having, through the
Speaker 1: pains of growing up Fred's program was his pulpit, not
Speaker 1: metaphorically literally. A few years after he started making children's
Speaker 1: TV programming, Fred started attending classes at what is now
Speaker 1: known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on his lunch breaks. Eight
Speaker 1: years later, he was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church.
Speaker 1: He received an extremely unique assignment from the body that
Speaker 1: oversees ministry. Fred was tasked quote to minister to families
Speaker 1: through the mass media. But the thing is, if you're
Speaker 1: ministering through mass media, especially public media, then you're not
Speaker 1: just ministering to your congregation. You're not just reaching Presbyterians
Speaker 1: or Christians or even believers. Anyone can be on the
Speaker 1: other side of that TV screen. Your congregation has to
Speaker 1: include every kind of person that might be in the world,
Speaker 1: and that requires a very skillful pastor. You know. I
Speaker 1: my ex wife gave me a ride to the airport
Speaker 1: for this trip, and we were talking about this on
Speaker 1: the way and she said, she said, what I remember
Speaker 1: about Fred Rodgers is that's where I learned to use chopsticks.
Speaker 1: And I said, oh really, She said yeah, and she
Speaker 1: described it and she said, you know, it was really slow,
Speaker 1: and we just sat there together and he taught me
Speaker 1: how to use chopsticks. And I thought that was such
Speaker 1: an interesting phrasing that she said we just sat there together,
Speaker 1: because she was clearly watching TV, and yet even through
Speaker 1: this medium of separation, she felt that Fred Rogers was
Speaker 1: sitting with her showing her how to use chopsticks. And
Speaker 1: that's what he referred to Carril as holy ground, the
Speaker 1: space between Fred in the studio and all the millions
Speaker 1: of people children, youth and adults watching the neighborhood on television.
Speaker 1: George Worth is a Presbyterian minister and was a close
Speaker 1: friend of Fred's for twenty years. He told me that
Speaker 1: Fred's communication with kids through the television was sacred, an
Speaker 1: almost inexplicable communion. Something happened across that space that he
Speaker 1: believed was deeply spiritual and mystical um and so he
Speaker 1: he really thought about himself sitting there with just one person,
Speaker 1: even though there were millions of people watching. He thought
Speaker 1: about being with one person at a time. They called
Speaker 1: it Fred time it was on the program. Things would
Speaker 1: slow down as the program would begin. He'd take his
Speaker 1: sneakers off, he'd put on his sweater. He slowed the
Speaker 1: pace down and that gave him the opportunity not only
Speaker 1: to see other people, but to be able to express
Speaker 1: his love and care for other people and reach out
Speaker 1: and touch our hearts as well. This was no TV gimmick.
Speaker 1: It was some sort of technique of attention kindness that
Speaker 1: Fred developed that he was able to communicate through the
Speaker 1: cameras and air waves and TV sets, But he communicated
Speaker 1: that attention and kindness in person too. What was true
Speaker 1: about fed Rogers is he was he was tuned in
Speaker 1: at a deeper level than most people. Uh. Fred could
Speaker 1: see with his eyes. He was very observant of what
Speaker 1: was happening around him, especially of the people with whom
Speaker 1: he was talking at whatever they were doing. But he
Speaker 1: also could see with his heart. Um. He had um
Speaker 1: an open heart to people. You know, this is particularly
Speaker 1: timely for me because I have a sixteen year old
Speaker 1: son and he and I are embroiled in a long term,
Speaker 1: friendly but philosophical argument about religion, and my son has
Speaker 1: now reached the point where he's he's really he really
Speaker 1: enjoys the what he thinks is the intellectual rigor of
Speaker 1: atheism and uh right. He likes to point out that
Speaker 1: that the people of religion have been responsible for so
Speaker 1: many terrible things, and that there's so much hypocrisy, and
Speaker 1: and I absolutely understand where it's coming. Um, And it
Speaker 1: is true that you can look at a lot of
Speaker 1: Christians and Christianity and see a lot of problems and
Speaker 1: a lot of violence against people and a lot of hatred.
Speaker 1: Even though I'm forty four, that still feels like a
Speaker 1: little child who's just learning that people can be bad.
Speaker 1: And I feel shocked by that. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the natural human responses is to go into fear, defensiveness, protection.
Speaker 1: And I wonder what made Fred Rogers so good at
Speaker 1: merging Christianity with love and and the expansion of rights
Speaker 1: and with care for each human being. And how how
Speaker 1: did you see Fred dealing with things that were things
Speaker 1: in the world that were really bad murders, assassinations, violence, uh, genocide?
Speaker 1: How did he face those things both in his personal
Speaker 1: life spiritually and also just in his public work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a problem with a person in the church
Speaker 1: that I was serving who really was not only disagreeable,
Speaker 1: but was was eager to see me move on to
Speaker 1: another place. He just didn't like me. And I was
Speaker 1: telling Fred about it over lunch one day, and he
Speaker 1: looked at me and he said, George, I wonder what
Speaker 1: happened to that man when he was a child that
Speaker 1: has caused him to be so angry and so um
Speaker 1: determined to hurt you. I wonder what ho what pain
Speaker 1: that man suffered when he was a child that blew
Speaker 1: me away? Um. That's one part of the answer. And
Speaker 1: also he believed that ultimately God prevails and that God
Speaker 1: is good. God can cause no harm. God loves with
Speaker 1: an redeeming love all of God's children on earth, and
Speaker 1: God is sad and feels the pain when bad things happen.
Speaker 1: The question why does God allow bad things to happen,
Speaker 1: of course, is the theological question that all of us ask.
Speaker 1: There's no answer to that. Ultimately, we just don't know.
Speaker 1: But what we do know is when the bad things happen,
Speaker 1: God comes alongside us. God is present to us not
Speaker 1: only through our prayers to reading the Bible, but through
Speaker 1: other people. And Fred believed in doing God's work in
Speaker 1: the world, being with people through the difficulty, no matter
Speaker 1: who those people were or what they believed. Fred's ministry,
Speaker 1: the enormity and diversity of his TV congregation require that
Speaker 1: He look for and communicate the things that people hold
Speaker 1: in common with one another, rather than the things that
Speaker 1: differentiate or divide them via sect, or denomination or creed.
Speaker 1: He was a very receptive person to other faith traditions
Speaker 1: and very sensitive to people who came from no faith
Speaker 1: tradition at all. He was um, i would say, broad
Speaker 1: gaged in that respect, a Christian and eventually became, as
Speaker 1: you know, a Presbyterian minister. But Fred went to school
Speaker 1: on other religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the other religions and
Speaker 1: found the good in all of those faith traditions and
Speaker 1: the people who adhered to them. And while Fred studied
Speaker 1: other faiths, Lisa dor Meyer says that Fred also knew
Speaker 1: that institutional religion could be coopted for political or social gain,
Speaker 1: and sometimes he questioned how his own Presbyterian church was
Speaker 1: responding to the larger culture. There was tension there the
Speaker 1: Presbyterian Church back in the time that he was in seminary,
Speaker 1: and are amazing alums that came through in the late
Speaker 1: fifties the early sixties. Those were folks who went to
Speaker 1: Alabama to take part in the freedom marches, and they
Speaker 1: drove the food trucks and were so concerned about justice
Speaker 1: in the world, and and their preaching was prophetic about
Speaker 1: changing the world. And then we kind of shifted in
Speaker 1: the eighties and into the nineties into a more evangelical bend,
Speaker 1: and it was much more i would say, self reflective
Speaker 1: on personal relationship with Jesus rather than kind of this
Speaker 1: world changing theology and philosophy. And I think that that
Speaker 1: shift was difficult, not just for Fred, but a lot
Speaker 1: of others from his generation. For many years, the Presbyterian
Speaker 1: Church was not affirming of all people, and Fred was
Speaker 1: very affirming of all people, and so I think there
Speaker 1: was some discomfort there. Ask yourself again, what you feel
Speaker 1: when you hear the word religion. Today, it's nearly impossible
Speaker 1: to hear that word and not think of certain churches
Speaker 1: coming out in support of hurtful, harmful, even violent people
Speaker 1: and causes, the pain inflicted in the name of religion
Speaker 1: on gay people, or single mothers or divorced couples, or
Speaker 1: the untold numbers of children who suffered sexual abuse literally
Speaker 1: at the hands of a Christian church. What happens when
Speaker 1: you're so convinced of the rightness of your cause that
Speaker 1: human beings are less important than values, or commitments or commandments.
Speaker 1: Seeing the harm that people in the world have done
Speaker 1: in the name of faith, how can you ever be
Speaker 1: certain about the moral goodness of the things that you've
Speaker 1: been taught about your tradition. Fred grew up with his
Speaker 1: appellation Presbyterianism, where feelings where expected to remain beneath the surface,
Speaker 1: but his own experience helped him see that the things
Speaker 1: we feel as human beings are our shared common ground.
Speaker 1: Our feelings are where we can meet and understand one another.
Speaker 1: And Fred didn't waiver from that. His constant goal was
Speaker 1: to manifest love in the world, and that, Lisa says,
Speaker 1: makes him exceptional. I think that God sends saints to
Speaker 1: walk among us who are deeply spiritual people that somehow
Speaker 1: are able to I think a lot of us have
Speaker 1: been given gifts by God, and we we don't find
Speaker 1: within ourselves the ability to use them. And I think
Speaker 1: that he, for reasons that I can't explain, was able
Speaker 1: to fully embrace the gifts God gave him. Is this
Speaker 1: just out of reach for people like you and me?
Speaker 1: Fred didn't think so, and that's why he made his
Speaker 1: program as a beacon as a map as a guide
Speaker 1: for how to treat one another with care and kindness.
Speaker 1: Really take the time to see each other, to listen,
Speaker 1: to understand and to see ourselves in one another, and
Speaker 1: to accept the ways in which we're different, but to
Speaker 1: extend kindness and understanding and caring to everyone, regardless of
Speaker 1: what faith we do or don't subscribe to. Fred Rogers
Speaker 1: believed that we could make a better world here in
Speaker 1: this lifetime by accepting people, by helping people even in
Speaker 1: their brokenness. And it's a challenge. I'm not suggesting that
Speaker 1: I or Fred Rodgers have the ability all the time
Speaker 1: any want of us to live in this but to
Speaker 1: aspire to it, to be imperatively implore, or to strive
Speaker 1: towards that. That's that's the life schal I think that
Speaker 1: Mr Rogers was sharing with us next time, and you
Speaker 1: could hear the beat beep beep of the heart monitor
Speaker 1: and the dripping of all the I vs, and in
Speaker 1: the background you hear there are many ways to say
Speaker 1: I love you. Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media.
Speaker 1: The team is Dan O'donnald, Jordan Bailey, and Mattie Foley.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter
Speaker 1: Media is Gretta Cone. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon
Speaker 1: Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I
Speaker 1: Heart Media. Special thanks this week to the sixth Presbyterian
Speaker 1: Church in Pittsburgh and the Reverend Vincent Colb, Reverend John McCall,
Speaker 1: and the Reverend Bill Guy Fred Rogers. Interview tape courtesy
Speaker 1: of the Television Academy Foundation and Interviews. The full interview
Speaker 1: is available at Television Academy dot com slash inter Views.
Speaker 1: Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan, music by Blue
Speaker 1: Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown. If you like what
Speaker 1: you're hearing, rate the show, review the show and tell
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