I know; the name of the show is “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  But I don’t want to talk about the show; I want to talk about Mr. Fred Rogers and his neighborhood as separate entities.  Rogers died in 2003, but he’s been receiving a lot of attention lately, largely due to the new movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”  It’s an excellent movie starring Tom Hanks.  He does a great job; as you watch the film you forget about Hanks and actually see Fred Rogers on the screen.  The movie is roughly based on the November, 1998 article in Esquire magazine by Tom Junod, entitled “Can You Say  .  .  .  Hero?”  The article is informative and inspiring, and it’s well worth looking it up online.

“Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was on for 31 seasons and 895 episodes.  To adults the show seems juvenile (how apt) and saccharin – overly sweet with an aftertaste, but to young children it was great.  The show was created by Fred Rogers, and he was involved with almost all aspects of its production – writing, being the principal character, puppeteering, etc.  As opposed to Sesame Street, which concentrated on intellectual growth, the Neighborhood was concerned with the emotional development of children, and it did not shy away from difficult topics such as illness, death or divorce.  Rogers depended on child development experts to a great extent, but most of all he was guided by trying to put himself in the child’s place.  That was the advice he gave to ophthalmologists who were writing a textbook and asked him to add a chapter on dealing with children.  The first sentence of his chapter was, “You were a child, too.”

The first seeds of the program were planted when Rogers was an undergraduate at Rollins College.  [Many years ago I had a brief conversation with a colleague who had been a suite mate of Rogers in college.  He said that the person you saw on the TV show was pretty much who Fred Rogers was.]  When Rogers went home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania for a visit, he found that his parents had bought a TV set.  He saw people throwing pies at each other and worse, and developed a distaste for the media.  At the same time, he realized that he could use it “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.”  Rogers went to seminary and became an ordained Presbyterian minister.  He never had a church, but considered his flock to be the children of America.

There were a number of times that people would ask Rogers how to pray.  He would always start with a very simple prayer, “Thank God.”  That’s a good prayer for all of us to say in gratitude for God’s unconditional love for YOU and me.

Jim