The ritualistic tenor of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—the familiar wardrobe change in and out of comfortable clothes; the same opening and closing songs; the mixture of factory visits, make-believe, and perhaps a speedy delivery or two—was meant to make the children (and adults) who watched feel safe. When a young viewer expressed concern about whether he regularly fed the fish—she was blind and couldn’t see him doing it—he quickly added a vocalization to his routine to assure her of each fish feeding.

You always knew what to expect from Mister Rogers (“I like to be told,” he used to sing). The familiarity gave a sense of permanence, and permanent things could be depended on. Mister Rogers’ graying hair and diminishing stature were the only things that changed over the years. Even the curtains stayed the same. Everyday ritual was important. When Mister Rogers left, you knew he was coming back.

Fred Rogers’ real life included the same sense of ceremony. His daily routine was impeccably observed: he awoke at 5 a.m. for prayer, reflection, and Bible reading; took a 7:30 a.m. swim at the local pool (where he weighed in at exactly 143 pounds daily); followed his usual workday routine; and kept to a 9:30 p.m. bedtime. Even his diet had rite-like clarity: no alcohol and no meat.

It isn’t difficult to see why a man with this level of discipline would be able to cultivate an interior life that would inspire awe in others. He once asked me, “You know how when you find somebody who you know is in touch with the truth, how you want to be in the presence of that person?”

People felt that way about him. I’ve seen cameramen on assignment in the Neighborhood moved to tears by his kindness. One woman even remarked to her husband upon meeting Fred for the first time, “I think I just had a religious experience.” He had that unique, transforming presence: Mother Teresa in a cardigan.

Of all his daily disciplines, the one that contributed most to this transforming presence was the one that began at five o’clock in the morning. Slowing down, taking time, and appreciating silence are all foundational aspects of the next toast stick he passed on to me: the importance of prayer. Each morning he prayed for his family and friends by name, still offering his gratitude for those on his list who had passed away.

His prayers didn’t end there but continued into his daily swim. Before diving into the pool, he would sing (out loud but not too loud) “Jubilate Deo,” a song Henri Nouwen had taught him from the Taizé community in France. “Jubilate Deo, jubilate Deo, alleluia (Rejoice in the Lord, rejoice in the Lord, alleluia),” he would sing and dive in. He emerged from the pool ready to face a new day with a fresh slate, as if wet from baptism.

The prayers continued into his workday: “When I walk in that studio door each day, I say, ‘Dear God, let some word that is heard be Yours,’ ” he told me during our first meeting. Not only were his spoken words on television a focus of prayer but also the numerous decisions that had to be made daily. “When I asked for your prayers,” he wrote in an early letter, “I didn’t mean to be vague about the need. I always pray that through whatever we produce (whatever we say and do) some word that is heard might ultimately be God’s word. That’s my main concern. All the others are minor compared to that. As you know in this business there are countless decisions every day (every hour!) and I solicit your prayers for guidance from above in all the decisions which must be made all the time.”

He continued his prayers when he ventured outside the studio. Sometimes he was invited to places in order to pray, as when he received an honorary doctorate (his twenty-fifth) from Boston University in 1992. The university had asked Fred to open the commencement ceremony with prayer. An older academic with a white beard rose to the podium to announce: “The invocation will now be delivered by Mister Fred Rogers.” Before he could finish, the five thousand graduates went wild, whooping and hollering out the name of the man they had grown up with, the man whose daily visits convinced them they were “special.” When Fred reached the podium, the tumult started again, cameras flashing throughout the crowd. How would he ever calm them down enough to pray? The answer seemed like the natural thing to do (to Fred at least). He leaned sheepishly into the mike and said, “You wanna sing with me?” And then chiding ever so slightly, “Why don’t you just sit down, and we’ll sing this song together.” And so together he and his legion of television neighbors began to sing—in perfect unison, because they all remembered the words—“It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Waves of red robes swayed side to side, arms intertwined, subdued by the sense of security and ritual that Mister Rogers had always given them. He was their robed curate, and their congregational response, uplifting and reminiscent, led right into prayer.

“Dear God, please inspire our hearts to come ever closer to You,” Fred began, before praying for families, friends, and teachers. “We pray for . . . those people who know us and accept us as we are. Those people who encourage us to see what’s really fine in life.” Perhaps the graduates were thinking of Mister Rogers just then.

He moved from the particular to the general: “We pray for all the people of Your world, our sisters and brothers whose names we may not know but whose lives are ultimately precious in Your sight. With all our hearts, we pray for all Your children everywhere—yes, everywhere,” he said, emphatically stressing the last word.

After praying for others, he turned the prayers to himself and to the graduates: “And finally we offer our strengths and our weaknesses, our joys and our sorrows to Your never-ending care. Help us to remember all through our lives that we never need to do difficult things alone, that Your presence is simply for the asking and our ultimate future is assured by Your unselfish love. In our deepest gratitude we offer this prayer. Amen.”

RELATIONSHIP, THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER

Everything Fred Rogers did was a prelude to—or an outcome of—prayer.

Volumes of books have been written on prayer, perhaps because it’s sometimes easier to read about it than to actually do it. But the essence of prayer is relationship, and Fred understood that. Even when he was explaining prayer to a young girl (I had asked him a question on her behalf about unanswered prayer), his seemingly simple explanation would enlighten even the most seasoned supplicant: “Now, you know prayer is asking for something, and sometimes you get a yes answer and sometimes you get a no answer,” he carefully explained. “And just like anything else you might get angry when you get a no answer. But God respects your feelings, and God can take your anger as well as your happiness. So whatever you have to offer God through prayer—it seems to me—is a great gift. Because the thing God wants most of all is a relationship with you, yeah, even as a child—especially as a child. Look how Jesus loved the children who came around Him,” he told her.

In another attempt to help children understand about prayer, Mister Rogers once took his television neighbors along for a visit to the Sturgis Pretzel House, founded by Julius Sturgis, in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. The baker explained to Mister Rogers and the viewers (my then–three-year-old son and I were watching that day) how monks long ago gave pretzels as treats to children who had remembered their prayers. The dough was rolled into strips and crossed, to represent a child’s arms folded in prayer (pretzel means “little arms”), and the three holes in the pretzel represented the Trinity.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that remind us: dough molded into pretzels serves as a gentle reminder to pray; bread sliced into toast sticks brings back memories of the kindness of friends who are no longer here.

A COMMITMENT TO PRAY

By now I wonder if there has been a decision about your move. Please know that I’ve been thinking about you all. All that matters is your motives. God will lead the way. You know that.

Postcard from Fred, sent from Memphis on the eve of another commencement, regarding our decision to take a new pastorate

After our first meeting, Fred and I committed to pray for one another. The prayers may have started out as a sophisticated version of “God bless Fred” or “God bless Amy,” like a child’s litany at bedtime, but evolved into something more, due to the indispensable guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives. These very special prayers, when each of us “sensed” the other was going through a difficult time, are outlined in the following chapter, which focuses on the Holy Spirit. But we didn’t limit our prayers to one another; over time we began to trust each other with those in our lives who were also in need of prayer. Such a story follows.

In addition to those, like Fred, who know the value of prayer, there exists another group of people. This group—from noted philosophers (Nietzsche’s “It’s a shame!”)¹ to politicians (Ventura’s “It’s a sham!”)²—sees prayer as a sign of weakness, as a crutch for the feeble and weak-minded. To the statement “God will lead the way,” they would respond that no, the strong walk freely, without support or leading. They would agree with eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, who observed that while rattles amuse the child, it is “beads and pray’r books” that are “the toys of age.” He wrote, “Pleas’d with this bauble still as that before, ’Till tir’d he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.”³

Crutches for the feeble, baubles to amuse in old age—prayer, they insist, has no place in the life of the strong.

Fred Rogers always wanted to be strong. As a teenager, he saved up his money and purchased a Charles Atlas exercise kit. Immortalized by ads depicting a skinny guy at the beach getting sand kicked in his face, Charles Atlas, the father of all bodybuilders, promised, “I turned myself from a 97-lb. weakling into the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. And I can change your body too!”

Despite Fred’s herculean efforts, he never came close to being the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. The exercises did little for his frame, which he described as “weak and fat” at that age. (Perhaps it was this inherent sense of weakness that later helped him to identify so well with children.) And then in high school, Fred met another exemplar of strength in fellow student Jim Stumbaugh. Jim was the anti-Fred. Fred was shy; Jim was outgoing and popular. Fred hung from a doorjamb trying to become Charles Atlas; Jim handily lettered in three sports. It wasn’t just a case of athletic versus bookish; Jim was also a scholar who made straight A’s. In most worlds their paths would never cross, much less merge into one. But when Jim missed school because of a football injury, Fred took him his homework. That act of kindness, from an almost complete stranger, forged a lifelong friendship.

I first came to know of Jim in a letter from Fred in the fall of 1995. (I remember the letter clearly because he had written it on Friday the thirteenth and had scribbled “King Friday XIII’s b-day!” in jest next to the date.) But he was very serious when he told me about Jim. “I think about him all the time,” he wrote as he told me of Jim’s battle with liver cancer. “If you are able, would you pray for him and his wife?”

I heard about Jim often after that—his courage, how his illness had inspired his church to start regular healing services. Jim, who once looked like Charles Atlas, was now being wasted away by disease. His physical strength disappeared, but his spiritual prowess remained. “He has used his long illness,” Fred wrote, “to help his church understand what real devotion means.”

No longer hero worship, this was one friend seeing the greatest spiritual strength emerge from another’s greatest weakness.

Despite his strength, Jim lost his battle with cancer. Fred understood that sometimes God’s answer to prayer is no. But he understood something else too: “Jim gave us all an enormous gift by helping us understand the many forms of healing (not just physical) in this life.”

I learned about Jim’s death through a message Fred left on my answering machine at home. “I wanted you to know that Jim Stumbaugh went to heaven on October 28”—his voice was slow and thoughtful. He rarely used the word died or the term passed away but preferred to say “went to heaven,” underscoring the ultimate destination for God’s children. “I had visited him [five days before his death], and we had such a wonderful visit together—he and his wife and I. And I just want to thank you for your prayers. He was an enormous influence in my life, as you well know. And I’m so grateful that you would have continued to pray for him. He helped so many people during those last years of his because he knew who was in ultimate charge. And the grace that flowed from his life into others’ lives even at the times when he was the weakest was very, very powerful.”

So perhaps the philosophers and politicians and poets are wrong; perhaps prayer isn’t a crutch or an old man’s bauble. Maybe it’s a necessity for both the strongest and the weakest among us.

WITHIN THE TOAST STICK OF PRAYER, A DOUBLE GIFT

In the postscript of the last letter Fred wrote to me before he was diagnosed with cancer himself (the last request he ever made of me) was a note about Jim’s wife, Dianne. He wanted me to meet her, to contact her if I was ever in her hometown. He jotted down her phone number and ended with, “You all would just love each other!” (as he had been sure I would just love the works of his friend Henri Nouwen).

I reread the letter after he passed away, feeling a twinge of guilt for never contacting her. I was hoping to introduce myself to her just a few months later, at the family reception that would follow Fred’s public memorial service at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh (which would winnow down the twenty-six hundred who attended to a hundred or so). But when I was waiting in Heinz Hall for the doors to open, crammed in the lobby with the hundreds of others attending the memorial service, I heard a voice over my shoulder, a woman introducing herself to some people behind me. “I’m Dianne Stumbaugh,” the voice said. I reeled around in disbelief. I approached Dianne without thinking and then told her about Fred’s letter. I was finally able to do the last thing he had asked of me.

Dianne responded with the grace and sincerity I’m sure I also would have found in her husband, had I been fortunate enough to meet him. I was astounded. I had half-expected to be able to search her out in a reception of a hundred people but never thought she would be standing right next to me in a symphony hall that held more than twenty-six hundred. At the reception that followed (where I didn’t see Dianne at all), I told one of Fred’s longtime associates about what happened. She drew her breath in quickly and then declared, “God is among us!”

In the same letter where he first requested prayer for Jim, Fred had also photocopied a lengthy quote from Gerald May’s Will and Spirit. This part he put a star and an arrow next to: “There are some things that are eternally reserved in privacy between the individual soul and the Creator. There is a dimension of delicate pain in this, but even in our aloneness we are together, for we each have it.” And so with that Fred was handing down another toast stick: Prayer is not only a daily discipline that deepens our relationship with God; it also provides a way for us to be together in our aloneness.

Amen.