How Do We Encourage Reflection?
How do we encourage reflection?
A few days ago, I ran across a clip of Mr. Fred Rogers while perusing social media, and it struck such a chord that I shared it in my feed. The response I got was so overwhelming that I am attempting to do a little of my reflection here with you.
I spend very little time on Twitter, and for good reason. Yesterday I popped my head in for a few minutes and found what can only be described as the epitome of doom scrolling. A headline about an assassination, another about a food shortage, sound bites from a presidential news conference, hot takes about said president. Name-calling, scandals, bad faith arguments, keeping it extreme so we don't dare wade in the muck of complexity. I'm not about sticking my head in the sand, no, but generally speaking, this is not a place that prompts me to use my imagination for the good.
Scroll, scroll, scroll. And then, all of a sudden, a friendly face. None other than Mr. Fred Rogers. My thumb had been put to rest.
The tweet quoted these words.
"I don't think we give that gift anymore (the gift of silence). I'm very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder. In noise, rather than silence…how do we encourage reflection? Oh my, this is a noisy world. I get up every morning at least by 5AM. I have a couple hours of quiet time, reflect about what is important. What can we do, to encourage people to have more quiet in their lives, more silence? Real revelation comes through silence."
The tweet included a video clip, so I clicked on that too, and included the clip below. You could hear the concern and perhaps the urgency in Mr. Roger's voice. A prophetic plea of sorts. He must have said this forty years ago. Back when TVs had antennas, phones had cords, and we got the newspaper delivered to our door. There was no such thing as a twenty-four-hour news cycle. I guess the point is that Mr. Rogers could see even then our tendencies as people and where we were headed as a society, obsessed with consuming rage-inducing quantities of information—putting ourselves in the path of images and actions that work to form our souls away from the ways of God. Calling it entertainment softens the blow of how it can slowly but surely erode away what is good, noble, and true. He saw the television industry for what it was and the problems it offered us and made it his mission to disrupt it.
The quote on reflection starts about forty seconds in, although the whole interview I think you will find worth your time. In some ways, Mr. Rogers was issuing a warning. Listen to the way he says it. Words matter, and how we say them matters. Oh my, this is a noisy world. This question he asks, how he asks it, it's something we ought to consider.
How do we encourage reflection?
The caveat is that I love to reflect, maybe a little too much. I can get stuck in the past, love all the feelings of nostalgia, and come alive when discussions dig layers deep. I'm comfortable looking in the mirror, even if I don't always love what I see. At the same time, I can get lost in information. I can attempt to self-preserve by gathering up all the worst-case scenarios to make sure that if that thing happens, at the very least, I won't be blindsided. And can we all agree that we can find anything we are looking for and far more. I've followed rabbit trails straight to doomsday a time or two, and all for what? It's a futile exercise.
Speaking of futile, I have found myself doing a deep dive into the book of Ecclesiastes. What this book offers us is a whole lot of mystery and a lot of questions about what we are to do with it.
What is the meaning of life? Why am I here, and what is the point of it all? These aren't the prompts we find scrolling through Twitter or when we open the news, and we don't find the answer in the search bar. Instead, in fifteen seconds or less, we are force-fed ways to think about this and how we can argue about that. We wade into the extremes and race through life with our hair on fire. These are questions that should call us to reflection.
I wonder what Fred Rogers would say today if he were alive today? More than likely, the very same thing. Oh my, this is a noisy world.
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 4:1-11
There is nothing new under the sun. It was a noisy world back then, and it is a noisy world today. Mr. Rogers understood that. He had a way of absorbing our greatest fears and our deepest pains and making them, in his words, "both mentionable and manageable." He looked at the times he was living in and resolved to live his life from reflection. He seemed to understand why he was here and what it was all for. The preacher in Ecclesiastes spends most of his short book doing the same thing, offering wisdom and leaving plenty of space for reflection.
Think about Mr. Roger’s tagline. "Please won't you be my neighbor." I guess it never dawned on me until now that line must have been intentional, too. I don't want to put something on him that wasn't there, but it sounds a lot like this." You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:36-40) Knowing that Mr. Rogers lived from his faith, I can at least make a good argument that this played into choosing his invitational tagline. It's hard to demonize our neighbor, somebody we look in the eye. Mr. Rogers was inviting us all into the greatest and first commandment. And from that, he invited us to live from a place of reflection.
After starting this letter, I sat down to watch the documentary made about his life. I view it a couple of times a year, always once around Christmas time. We all know that documentaries are one-sided, and they set out to prove their point. I guess the point of this documentary was to tell us that there are people who have paved the way for us. Imperfect people showing us that the world is big and scary and that we get to choose how we interact with that. It tells us a story of how our outsides are expansively diverse, but our insides carry around the same empty soul longing to fill it with something that looks like eternity in our hearts (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). That is what our Creator placed there. An empty space called the soul filled same longings in you and me.
What is held within that soul looks like different iterations of the same fears. This is what Mr. Rogers looked to get to the heart of. In one part of the documentary, they speak about the assassination of President Kennedy. I teared up because, as you remember, there was a headline about this very thing earlier in the day as I was scrolling Twitter. There is nothing new under the sun. Fredrick Buechner said it this way. "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid."
I believe this was the first month that Mr. Rogers was on television. Instead of blaming, taking sides, holding to theories, or asking somebody to commit to the right or the left, this is what he did.
He took one of his signature hand puppets, Daniel the Tiger, and sat down with Lady Aberlin offer a place to ask honest questions about a hard and confusion topic.
“What does assassination mean?” Daniel asks.
“Have you heard that word a lot today?” Lady Aberlin asks.
“Yes,” Daniel says, “and I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Well,” Lady Aberlin explains, “it means somebody getting killed in a sort of surprise way.”
“That’s what happened, you know,” Daniel says. “That man killed that other man.”
Lady Aberlin asks if Daniel would like to come to a picnic with her.
“I don’t feel much like a picnic today,” Daniel says, to which Lady Aberlin replies, “I can understand that when you feel sad sometimes you don’t feel like a picnic.”
Of course, this was scripted—but in that moment each one of us could place ourselves in middle of that conversation. You and I. We know what assassination means, and nothing of that definition brings us peace. Quite the opposite, in fact. What it wells up in us is fear and the end of some sort of innocence. It etches away at our childhood where we seek after only what is good, noble, and true. What transpires between Daniel and Lady Aberlin? A time that encourages reflection. And I would argue that time offers us many ways to respond. Lady Aberlin gave a simple, truthful definition and allowed space for Daniel to simply reflect. This, it seems, may be the quickest route to the heart of the matter.
I guess my hope is this. That way may learn more to reflect. And that what we may find, what we all share in common, is the fear of something. To be human is to fear. And to fear is to admit that we aren't God. And if we are not God, then what?
Thank you, Mr. Rogers. You not only asked good questions but gave us plenty of space to seek the answers.
I think you may have been on to something all along. Your question, if we let it, answers itself.
How do we encourage reflection?
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we share such kindred perspectives. this is excellent, julie. resonated with every word. thank you.
Beautifully said.