The last thing Fred Rogers ever said to me was “How like you.” He gave so much to me, so much trust and friendship, without asking me to earn it. But still I wonder whether I have. Still I find myself asking for his blessing, and like the aged Private Ryan after he walks away from the grave of the officer who rescued him, I issue a plea that sounds a little bit like a prayer:
Tell me I’m a good man. Tell me I’ve lived a good life, then tell me what to do now.
(Tom Junod, The Atlantic, December, 2019)
By his own account, Tom Junod's background for meeting Fred Rogers was a "state of disrepute," because of a subtly savage article he had written about Kevin Spacey. "In the first cover story I wrote for Esquire, I did an elaborate rhetorical dance around the sexuality of Kevin Spacey, a story of coy ill will that fooled no one. We’d been out to make a splash, and we did, earning national opprobrium and prompting Spacey’s agent to urge a Hollywood boycott of me and the magazine.” Click here for more on Junod and Mr. Rogers.
So here was the cynical journalist meeting the genial children's program host with the expectation that sparks would fly again. But they didn't. If you had heard the story behind the first Mr. Rogers' biopic, the memoir by Tim Madigan I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, you could have predicted what would happen to Tom Junod. He would be loved into submission and start up a friendship that would last five years, when the patron saint of children's programming would die of stomach cancer.
What compels me in this story is the witness of grace: generous, unmerited love, a resource unique to God. The shared amazement of both Madigan and Junod that this man would inexplicably take a liking, then a loving, to both of them that endured as long as he lived. As Junod explained it, the man could see the child in others and would always remind them they were a child of God.
Mr. Rogers' neighborhood extended so far he had to keep a dossier on each person. Junod discovered the files he kept in the archives of St. Vincents College. ". . . in one of those boxes are the names of my wife, my dogs, and one of my nieces, who was facing trouble and for whom he prayed." When Mr. Rogers promised to pray, he wasn't being glib. He indexed his prayers, just to remind the Creator and himself, who needed intercession that day.
Junod tells how he became Mister Rogers' neighbor. He wrote about it in the context of political and social strife in 2019. Eleven people had just been killed in echoing massacres in El Paso and Dayton. What would Mister Rogers have said? he wondered. That is the question everyone will be asking after they see Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, released late this year (2019).
As it happens, says Junod, we know Mr. Rogers’ response to a mass shooting, because he was alive for the shooting of eight students in West Paducah, Kentucky as they knelt in prayer, “Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to the school telling his classmates that he was about to do something “really big,” and he asked, ‘Oh wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘ I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?”
In the huge heart of Fred Rogers was the belief that God could not stop loving anyone, regardless of their offense, their cruelty, their apparent remorselessness. Grace was extended to everyone, the thief on the cross, the school assassin, the perpetrator of high crimes and misdemeanors. It is challenging to live your belief in an enormously gracious God, because no less is expected of you. Fred Rogers came as close as anyone I can recall.
Mr. Rogers' theology was simple and sophisticated. His God was very contemporary, but also persistently faithful. In an email to Junod he offered this credo:
“God’s nature has grown and grown and grown all through the ages,” he wrote on October 25, 1998. "Yet at the heart of the original creation is that Word (call it Love, call it Grace, call it Peace …) that essence which is lodged somewhere within each of us that longs for ultimate expression. If we choose to allow it to grow we’ll be given help. If we choose otherwise we won’t be forced. If there is such a thing as a “dark corner” of God’s nature then I think it’s God’s refusal to go back on the promise of “the creation’s freedom to love or not.”
Although an ordained Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers never mentioned “God” or any vocabulary of religion on his show. He managed to preach volumes by the way he interacted with the characters in his neighborhood and with his audience. He found value in everyone, and treated them like they were the only one.
If you are a Christian, it helps to find a role model in the 21st century: someone who communicates how strong, how unconditional, how generous is the love of God. Mr. Rogers did that without turning water to wine. He extended his arms and gave his heart to strangers in a godlike way. All in the guise of merely being our neighbor.
For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Bill Tucker
