Excerpt From Life's Journeys

After my earlier post about Mr. Rogers, I checked out one of his books. Life's Journeys is very short but I find myself taking a great deal of time to read it. There is a lot of space for reflecting in its pages.

This is an excerpt from Life's Journeys:

When I was a kid, I was shy and overweight. I was a perfect target for ridicule.

One day (how well I remember that day, and it's more than sixty years ago!) we got out of school early, and I started to walk home by myself. It wasn't long before I sensed I was being followed-by a whole group of boys. As I walked faster, I looked around, and they started to call my name and came closer and closer and got louder and louder.

"Freddy, hey fat Freddy. We're going to get you, Freddy."

I resented those kids for not seeing beyond my fatness or my shyness. And I didn't know that it was all right to resent it, to feel bad about it, even to feel very sad about it. I didn't know it was all right to feel any of those things, because the advice I got from the grown-ups was, "Just let on you don't care, then nobody will bother you."

What I actually did was mourn. I cried to myself whenever I was alone. I cried through my fingers as I made up songs on the piano. I sought out stories of other people who were poor in spirit, and I felt for them.

I started to look behind the things that people did and said; and little by little, concluded that Saint-Exupery was absolutely right when he wrote in The Little Prince:
"What is essential is invisible to the eyes." So after a lot of sadness, I began a lifelong search for what is essential, what it is about my neighbor that doesn't meet the eye.

"Let on you don't care, then nobody will bother you." Those who gave me that advice were well-meaning people; but, of course, I did care, and somehow along the way I caught the belief that God cares, too; that the divine presence cares for those of us who are hurting and that presence is everywhere.

I don't know exactly how this came to me, maybe through one of my teachers or the town librarian, maybe through a muscian or a minister-definitely across some holy ground. And, of course, it could have come from the grandfater I was named for: Fred McFeely, who used to say to me after we'd had a visit together, "Freddy, you made this day a special day for me."

My hunch is that the beginning of my belief in the caring nature of God came from all of those people-all of those extra ordinary, ordinary people who believed that I was more than I thought I was-all those saints who helped a fat, shy kid to see more clearly what was really essential.