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I Love You Just the Way You Are
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on May 12, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
The first time I saw Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on television I was not
impressed by the simple stage set, the cheap puppets, and the tuneless
songs.
It was 1968–the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the
assassination of Martin Luther King, race riots in major American
cities, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, the beating of peace demonstrators in Chicago at the
Democratic National Convention, and the election of Richard Nixon. It
was all enough to make a seventeen year old believe in the doctrine of
original sin. The saccharine sincerity of Fred Rogers, with his Polly
Anna smile made me, with my adolescent passion, want to scream at the
television, " Fred, you are totally irrelevant to what is happening to
the world!" I dismissed Mr. Rogers as a product of the do good liberals
of public television who had no idea how to talk to the children of the
Baby-Boom generation.
I held on to this opinion for about fifteen years. I laughed when
Johnny Carson, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy did parodies of Mr.
Rogers.
Then one day I was at home with my first child who was about three
years old. We turned on the television and there was Mr. Rogers’
Neighborhood. Slowly I started to see the program, not from the eyes of
a passionate and idealistic adolescent, or a cynical adult, but from the
eyes of a three or four year old child. It was the moment of my
conversion. My son was sitting in my lap with his eyes on the
television, completely absorbed in the program. This guy in blue tennis
shoes, who I found irrelevant, knew how to speak to my three
year-old-son.
By the time my first child was five years old, he lost interest in
Mr. Rogers. Still I observed the same attraction to the program in my
other two children. By the time my daughter lost interest in Mr. Rogers’
Neighborhood, I had watched the little man from Pittsburgh, off and on,
for nine years, and I had become a loyal follower.
He was born in Latroibe, a small industrial town in western
Pennsylvania, which is also the home of Arnold Palmer and Rolling Rock
Beer. He came from a wealthy family. His father was president of the
McFeely Brick Company.
As a child Fred was a lonely, sickly boy. He started playing the
piano at five. He was an only child until he turned 11, when his parents
adopted a baby girl. His mother doted on Fred, fearing always for his
safety. He was not allowed to play outside by himself. When he was ten,
she tried to cure him of his hay fever by providing him with an
air-conditioned room where he spent an entire summer, day and night.
Each winter he spent three months in Florida, which made it difficult
for him to maintain childhood friendships back in Pennsylvania.
The boy found strength in playing with puppets, playing piano music,
and from his relationship with his grandfather. He said,
I remember one day my grandmother and my mother were telling me to
get down or not to climb a stonewall, and my grandfather said, "Let the
kid climb the wall! He’s got to learn to do things for himself!" I heard
that. I will never forget that. What a support he was! He knew there was
something more important than scratches and broken bones. I climbed that
wall. And then I ran on it. I will never forget that day.
After graduation from high school, he enrolled at Rollins College in
Florida where he majored in music composition. He planned to be a
musician or a minister, or both. In 1951, in his senior year of college,
he was accepted by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
Home for Easter vacation, he saw a television for the first time. He
said:
I just hated it. I looked at these people on television, throwing
pies into each other’s faces. And I thought: I’m just going to go into
television! And everyone was so flabbergasted. Because literally, I
was supposed to start in the seminary in September.
He was hired by NBC in New York City, where he worked as a network
floor director on the Kate Smith Hour. He moved back to Pittsburgh,
where he took a job with the nation’s first community-supported public
television station. For the next ten years he worked in public
television and began his studies at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His
education included training in child psychology at a center founded by
Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. When Fred Rogers was ordained a
Presbyterian minister in 1963, he was given the charge of ministering to
children through television.
The program began as a local broadcast seen on Pittsburgh TV. In 1967
the Sears Robuck Foundation agreed to fund the program nationally. It’s
purpose was to encourage people to be honest with themselves and with
each other, and to grow in the conviction that each one of us is a
unique and precious part of the world. Thirty-five years later, Mr.
Rogers’ Neighborhood is broadcast on 290 stations and is watched by more
than eight million people a week. It is the longest running show on
public television. For many years Fred Rogers’ success was a mystery to
me. As the nation traveled from Vietnam and Watergate, to the invention
of the personal computer, of CNN and of MTV, Mr. Rogers seemed totally
out of step with the times.
Then I had children, and I began to understand the attraction. Fred
Rogers always talks to just one person. He learned this approach in the
early days of television when he worked as a floor manager for the
cowboy actor, Gabby Hays. He asked Hays how he felt about talking to a
huge audience of children. Hayes replied that he only spoke to "one
little Buckaroo." This one-on-one philosophy is the key to the intimacy
in television that Fred Rogers developed to a high art. He treats each
boy or girl to a one-on-one affirmation of their self-worth, telling
them that they are unique and valuable and worthy of recognition.
In a busy, noisy violent culture, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is a slow
program. He speaks softly, pausing between words. Like a good mother or
father, he creates an atmosphere of trust, in a simple home in a
pleasant neighborhood.
With the aid of songs and stories, travel and puppets, and guests he
captures children’s attention and contributes to the courage to grow. He
understands a child’s natural curiosity. Feeding his gold fish, causes
him to think out loud about mouths, and how we use our mouths to eat
with and to whistle with, and to talk with. And this leads him to remark
about how wonderful it is that we can speak with our mouths.
He freely expresses deep feelings. From the anxiety that comes with
the first day of school, to the death of a pet, the trauma of divorce,
even global conflict, Mr. Rogers has been there, exploring feelings
without embarrassment. He sang:
Sometimes you feel like holding your pillow all night long.
Sometimes you hugged your teddy bear tightly:
He’s old, but he’s still strong.
And sometimes you want to snuggle up closely with your own mom and
dad.
At night, you even need the light sometimes,
But that’s not bad.
Please don’t think it’s funny when you want an extra kiss.
There are lots and lots of people who sometimes feel like this.
Please don’t think it’s funny when you want the ones you miss.
There are lots and lots of people who sometimes feel like this.
The average preschooler watches three and a half hours of television
each day. A few years ago a study was conducted, aimed at trying to
discover what effect all this television might be having on our
children. One group of children at the Pennsylvania State University
nursery school were shown violent cartoons such as Batman and Superman
each day for four weeks. Another group were shown Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood each day for four weeks. Then the television shows were
stopped and the children’s behavior was observed for two weeks.
In the group of children who were shown the violent cartoons there
was a sharp decline in patience as well as a decline in acceptance of
the ordinary rules of the nursery school.
On the other hand, the children who saw Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
showed increased persistence in the amount of time they spent
concentrating on projects. They had a greater ability to carry out
responsibility without adult intervention in tasks like helping with
cleanup, and greater patience waiting to take their turn or to be served
at juice time. They showed increased cooperation, increased ability to
express feelings and increased sympathy and help for others.
Certain programs remain in my mind as Mr. Rogers’ classics. I believe
I watched the trip to the crayon factory, the trip to the post office,
and the trip to the dairy several times with each of my three children.
We all know how they mix wax to make the crayon, and how to squeeze a
teat to get milk. I also remember the time in 1987 that he took his
program to the Soviet Union, the place that our own president had
described as the Evil Empire.
I also remember the time a few years ago he had as his guest, the
cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Ma played a little snippet of the Dimitri Shostakovich
cello concerto. It is a very angry piece. Mr. Rogers and Ma talked about
feelings.
A few years later one of my children played the first movement of
that same cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma at a master class. It is not clear
how big a role the TV program played in my son’s interest in the cello,
but I do not under estimate the influence of Fred Rogers. It is possible
that in future years my children will become dairy farmers, or letter
carriers, or even work in a crayon factory, all respectable occupations.
Nothing we do with a child is ever lost or forgotten.
In reading about Mr. Rogers this week, I was fascinated to discover a
little about his private life. He awakes each day at 5:00 a.m., and goes
swimming, in the nude, at 6:00 a.m. He weighs in at precisely 143 pounds
after the swim. When he was working on the television program, he would
spend several hours writing the script. He wrote all the scripts
himself. Next he would conduct business at his office at Family
Communications. He does not go out at night. He does not watch
television. He is a strict vegetarian, and he is a pacifist. He does not
drink or smoke, he reads constantly and he is in bed by 9:30 p.m. each
night.
Fred and his wife Joanne have a small summer house on Nantucket.
Believers in recycling, they have furnished the house with items they
have picked up in thrift shops. On Nantucket Mr. Rogers spends long
hours reading and playing the piano. He goes to the pool every day.
One of his hobbies is taking pictures. When he is in a picture taking
mood, Fred Rogers keeps a miniature, automatic Olympus camera in his
jacket pocket. He takes it out and takes pictures of the people that he
meets. Then about two weeks later he sends a letter to the person
enclosing one or two or a half dozen pictures he had taken of them. On
the backs of some he may make a comment like "I like this one a lot," or
"You look surprised here." The card he sends with the photos is never
signed. Instead, he will put his message on a yellow post-it note and
affix that to the card, so that the recipient can use the card again.
The last new Mister Roger’s Neighborhood Television show was produced
in December of 2000, and broadcasted the last week of August of 2001.
However, the program survives on video tape. One of over three hundred
of his best programs is played each day Monday through Friday at 11:30
on Channel 26. On the occasion of his retirement he said, "I got into
television because I hated it. I thought there was some way of using
this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and
listen." One of his sweaters now hangs in the Smithsonian.
Today Fred Rogers has turned his attention to the internet. He says,
"I have an idea of doing programs for people as they are going to sleep.
I would read stories and the children could see the books right on the
computer. I don’t know another voice in America that could put people to
sleep better than mine."
On Mother’s Day we have mothers and fathers in the congregation, who
each day face an exhausting task. For them Mr. Rogers has set a high
standard. The story is told of a parent who said to the child, "You make
me so angry when you don’t wash your dishes."
The child replied "That’s all right dad, Mr. Rogers likes me just the
way I am."
The ability to say Fred Rogers’ trademark message "I like you just
the way you are," is one key to successful parenting. The phrase is a
direct quote that Fred Rogers has taken from his grandfather. He said:
I think it was when I was leaving one time to go home after our time
together that my grandfather said to me, "You know you made this day a
really special day. Just by being yourself. There’s only one person in
the world like you. And I happen to like you just the way you are."
Theologically, Rev. Fred Rogers rejected the doctrine of original
sin. Rev. Rogers rejected the belief that each baby, each child, is born
in a state of sin because Adam and Eve disobeyed God in eating the
forbidden fruit and transmitted their sin and guilt by heredity to their
descendants.
Original sin is a despicable view of a newborn child. When I look
into the eyes of a baby, I see awe and wonder; I see openness and
freshness; and I see faith and trust. Later, in exasperation and
frustration, when I yell for the tenth time to one of my children, "Wash
your dishes," I try also to communicate that in spite of my aggravation
and annoyance, I still deeply love my children, just the way they are.
And in those moments I say a silent thank you to the Rev. Mr. Fred
Rogers.
Office@CedarLane.org
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