returning thanks for mr. rogers...

Last night I started reading the new biography of Fred McFeely Rogers, The Good Neighbor: the Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Back in the day, I must now sheepishly confess, I didn't like Mr. Rogers. No, that's not at all accurate: I didn't get Mr. Rogers. With my young daughters sitting on my lap in the late afternoon, I would usually fall asleep during his PBS show. The little trips into the neighborhood of make-believe seemed cheesy at the time. I didn't grasp his intentional use of silence and space that both slowed down an already escalating pace of life while simultaneously respecting a child's natural rhythms of comprehension. I wasn't a fan of the music. Some of the puppets creeped me out. And the whole Henrietta Pussycat's "mew mew mew meew" thing drove me insane. Intuitively, I trusted Mr. Rogers with my children's time and imagination - we didn't watch anything but PBS in those days - but the whole deal seemed flat and static when compared to Sesame Street.

O what a difference 40 years makes! Mr. Rogers was clearly the champion of kindness in his day and would that there had been more artists and innovators like him. Today popular culture moves at the speed of light. Marketing flashy, rude and expensive trinkets to children has become standard operating procedure. And creating quiet space for reflection, let alone sensitive conversations about hard things, is unheard of. Fifty years ago, in 1969, Rogers laid it on the line in his testimony before a Senate sub-committee:

Mr. Rogers turned our grandson on to "Stomp," the dance/percussion celebration of discovering the beauty in ordinary things - so we went together just last month to take in the joy. Mr. Rogers evoked a conversation about how there are always helpers around when hard things happen, so now Louie knows to always look for the helpers in hard times. Small wonder that this past Halloween, guess who my little man chose to be as he cruised around his Brooklyn neighborhood for goodies? His hero, Mr. Rogers. My heart was turned to Fred Rogers in gratitude earlier this morning when I came across this quote by the late John O'Donohue re: the gift of our imagination: 

Each person is always on the threshold between their inner world and their outer world, between light and darkness, between known and unknown, between question and quest, between fact and possibility. This threshold runs through every experience that we have, and our only real guide to this world is the imagination. One of the lovely things a person can do for another person is to awaken the power and sacrament of their imagination, because when you awaken someone's imagination, you are giving them a new kingdom, a new world.

I do not easily give in to despair - even in this era of cruelty and crassness. My heart has been captured by a commitment to the Paschal Mystery. A vision and discipline that trusts the sacramental truth of Christ Jesus: just as God's mysterious presence is in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, so too is God's hidden presence at work in our realm healing and transforming this world from the inside out in small but crucial ways every second. Today I give thanks to God for Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood.

credits:
+Gene J. Puskar/AP @ https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/02/15/ap_17144599155383_wide-7d83c55fb0aa9a19a1833fb4b80d02a79460ac37-s800-c85.jpg