The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers: Spiritual Insights from the World's Most Beloved Neighbor

by Amy Hollingsworth

Fred Rogers was always saying things like that to the people around him: “How blessed your wife is to have you for a husband!” “How blessed your colleagues are to have you to work with!” “How blessed your children are!” (He once even told me that a magazine I was working for at the time was “blessed” and “lucky” to have me on staff.) But no matter how often you heard him say it to others, you never doubted his sincerity when he said it to you.

Fred was more connected to his childhood than anyone else she knew, that he hadn’t “shed” the vestiges of childhood as most of us have.

I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give anybody is the gift of one more honest adult in that person’s life—whether [the recipient] be a child or an adult.

“I wonder if you don’t have somebody in your life that just the very thought of that person makes you feel better,” he spoke passionately into the camera, to the person beyond the camera. “It would be wonderful if you could take a minute, at least a minute every day, to think of such a person. “Just think. Just be quiet and think,” he said softly. “It’d make all the difference in the world.”

What is offered in faith by one person can be translated by the Holy Spirit into what the other person needs to hear and see.

Mister Rogers’ constancy is what stayed with people. (This is a possible explanation for why studies have shown that children from lower-income homes, who often have to deal with inconsistency in their lives, showed a greater positive impact from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episodes than their non-poor peers.)

(One of Fred’s favorite writers, Frederick Buechner,

Years later, reading Cardinal Bernardin’s book of personal reflections, The Gift of Peace, I found that others had had “religious experiences” around him as well. And that was his intention: I tried to look everyone in the eye and make each person feel that he or she was important, the only one present at the moment. . . . When you convince people that you really care and that, even if hundreds of others are around, at that particular moment they are the only ones that count—then you establish a new relationship. . . . You have somehow mediated the love, mercy, and compassion of the Lord. In other words, the encounter also has a significant religious dimension: It helps strengthen the bond, the relationship, between each person and God.

Another time he added this question: “Do you know the sermons of Fred B. Craddock? I’ve been reading one collection, The Cherry Log Sermons, which is SUPERB!!

Well, I would want [those] who were listening somehow to know that they had unique value, that there isn’t anybody in the whole world exactly like them and that there never has been and there never will be. And that they are loved by the Person who created them, in a unique way. If they could know that and really know it and have that behind their eyes, they could look with those eyes on their neighbor and realize, “My neighbor has unique value too; there’s never been anybody in the whole world like my neighbor, and there never will be.” If they could value that person—if they could love that person—in ways that we know that the Eternal loves us, then I would be very grateful.