Paul Wilczynski's Observations

The spirituality of Mr. Rogers

When I first saw Mr. Rogers quite a few years ago, I quickly wrote him off as pandering to kids in a sing-song voice. Then, one day, I got who he was, and became incredibly impressed with the depth of his simple message.

Holly Lebowitz Rossi has an article in Beliefnet called Mister Rogers' Theology of 'Neighbor' which is worth reading.

The book is called "The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers." How was Mister Rogers’ faith simple?

Sometimes the word "simple" is confused with the word "simplistic," and it wasn’t. His philosophy of life is not simplistic, but it’s simple in that there are some basic tenets to it that seem simple but are so profound and so hard to live out on a daily basis. Probably the central tenet of his faith and the theme of the Neighborhood is just the idea of loving your neighbor. When I asked him who is your neighbor, he said, whoever you happen to be with at the moment. So right there, there’s no loophole—that means we have to love everybody. He said, once you realize that everybody’s your neighbor, you have a choice. You can either be an advocate or an accuser. An accuser is somebody who only sees what’s awful about themselves so they look through those eyes and look for what’s awful about their neighbor. An advocate is somebody who looks through the eyes of God at their neighbor and sees what’s good about that person because they’re created in God’s likeness. That’s a very simple, basic truth, but to live that out in our daily lives is tremendously difficult.

When we wonder about our spirituality - which Unitarian Universalists often do - it's worth thinking about how Mr. Rogers viewed life.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:35 AM