Exactly as You Are by Shea Tuttle

Author:Shea Tuttle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Less than a year before Fred died, his friend Tim Madigan, a journalist, asked him to share his favorite poem for a newspaper article. Fred replied, at length, in an email that revealed the staying power of his liturgies:

Those lines which we read, and sometimes memorize, at the beginning of our lives travel with us all our days. . . . And so I must admit there is a “favorite” poem from every poet I have ever loved. But to choose one favorite I find myself going even further back in my life to a psalm of King David, which my parents recited to me many, many times when I was very, very young.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . ”

I can hear both my mother’s and my father’s voices saying that psalm. . . . Throughout my life, I’ve studied that psalm—that song, that poem—in different English translations as well as in different languages and have read countless scholarly commentaries, and while I have long since given up the “thees” and “thous” of most biblical translations, the Psalm 23 that I repeat every day is the one my parents “taught” me all those years ago. In 1970, when my Dad was very ill and I had to go on a two-day work trip I remember as vividly as if it were only yesterday the last things we talked about . . . and right after that we just naturally said the 23rd Psalm together. The next day, while I was away, Dad died. “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” are the last words we spoke with each other in this life.14

The word liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia, often translated as “the work of the people.” Shaped as he was by liturgy, Fred quietly ushered his viewers—and even his staff—into that work too, through songs and shoes and goldfish, and even the piano theme from 1940s Pathé newsreels that he played to signal that the filming day was done.15 Through his liturgies, Mister Rogers discipled millions of people into the work—the hard, sometimes monotonous, always soul-expanding work—of neighborly love.

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