Tag: sincerity

Cringe for Christ

One of my core memories is sitting in the pew at Mass, shriveling up with secondhand embarrassment. This was in the early 80’s, and the old French Canadian pastor, Fr. M, loved to roam around the apse, emoting.

One of his favorite hymns was “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and when he got to the part that goes, “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” he would demonstrate by rolling his eyes up to the ceiling and doing a sort of jazz hands motion with each “tremble.” The liturgical dancers swooped around him in their polyester robes, he rolled his eyes, and I shriveled in my pew.

It was terrible. Completely terrible. I was old enough to know it was terrible, but also self-aware enough to feel terrible that I felt that way. Because he was talking about being there when they crucified my Lord! And here I was, wishing the roof would fall in so he would stop. What is a girl to do?

I now have a whole category for this kind of thing. It’s called “Cringe for Christ,” and I think it’s what will save me. It’s the same thing I feel when I want to share something on social media, but I hesitate because, even though it’s indisputably true, it’s from The Wrong Group. It’s what I feel when I have to teach my kids things like, “When that couple in the movie you’re watching starts having sex, you need to turn your face away, like THIS” and show them.

I felt something similar when I saw the videos of the protesting Minnesotans walking slowly through the streets, singing their 21st century protest songs: “Ho-o-o-o-o-ld on, ho-o-o-o-old onnnnn, my dear ones, here comes the dawn,” or gathering outside the hotel windows of ICE agents, crooning, “It’s okay to change your mind.”

I’m well aware many readers here do not think the protestors have a worthy cause. That’s okay! I can live with that. My point still stands.

“Cringe for Christ” is a flexible principle, applicable to many situations and to literally everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are: Sincerity is more important than good taste. It’s great to have both, and often we can; but if we have to choose one or the other, we should choose sincerity every time. Virtue over vibes.

It sounds so obvious, and I doubt you disagree. But I think we are more susceptible than we realize …

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Fred, were you talking to me?

When I was an adolescent, our Catholic girl’s group made a large batch of cards for the residents of a nursing home. “YOU ARE LOVED,” we spelled out over and over again, switching to scented markers when we got bored. We added a few stickers, then we threw all the cards in a bag to be delivered, and we got back to our real lives.

I felt obscurely ashamed and angry at the disingenuousness of this exercise, thinking how little it would mean to some ailing old woman to get a card from a girl she never met. Or, I thought, maybe it would mean a lot, and that would be even worse. “You [whoever you are] ought to feel loved [passive voice] by someone who couldn’t even be bothered to sign her name, because she has field hockey now [smiling sun sticker].” How worthless. Worse than no card at all.

But it never occurred to me to fix it by being sincere — by actually showing actual love to actual people, spending time with a lonely stranger. I didn’t want to do that, either. So I scrapped the whole thing.

I felt something of the same angry distaste when I was little and would occasionally watch Mr. Rogers at my grandparents’ house. My sister and I thought he was unbearably goony (and it didn’t help that I was secretly terrified of Lady Elaine). When his show came on, we would elaborately die of boredom, rolling our eyes so hard, we could see the inside of our snarky little skulls.

But I also didn’t like how he was always talking directly to me. You don’t know me! You’re just on TV! You don’t even know if I’m watching or not, so why are you pretending you care about me? I pretended to be bored, but I was also truly angry.

There was something more, though. I couldn’t deal with his face. I just didn’t want to look at it. He had that smile of extreme simplicity that you see in people who have gone through tremendous sorrows, or in the mentally impaired at Mass. It’s a radical openness, a lantern that burns too bright.

Looking at his face now, fifty years after his first show aired, I think that I was very wrong about this man’s sincerity.

Mr. Rogers was remembered by François Clemmons on StoryCorps a few years ago. (The very short StoryCorps features on National Public Radio are almost always worth a listen — sort of the audio equivalent of Humans of New York.) In this edition, Clemmons tells how Fred Rogers invited him to come play a policeman on his show.

Clemmons, who is black, says that the idea didn’t appeal to him. 

“I grew up in the ghetto. I did not have a positive opinion of police officers. Policemen were siccing police dogs and water hoses on people,” he says. “And I really had a hard time putting myself in that role. So I was not excited about being Officer Clemmons at all.”

But he agreed; and one show in particular stands out in his mind. It was 1969.

Rogers had been resting his feet in a plastic pool on a hot day.

“He invited me to come over and to rest my feet in the water with him,” Clemmons recalls. “The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends, but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet.”

 

Something to think about during Lent, as Holy Thursday approaches.

Fred Rogers clearly saw his career as an opportunity to invite, to serve, and to model charity. When he dried Clemmons’ feet, he wasn’t only doing it for the cameras — although that in itself was a momentous statement in 1969. He wasn’t merely modelling charity; he was being charitable, personally, to the actual person beside him.

Rogers didn’t hide behind the TV screen and consider that he had discharged his duty by broadcasting his message to the millions of people who watched his show. Talking to a crowd was not a substitute for talking to the man in front of him. Writers and social media warriors, take heed: There is no substitute for the personal.

[Clemmons] says he’ll never forget the day Rogers wrapped up the program, as he always did, by hanging up his sweater and saying, “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” This time in particular, Rogers had been looking right at Clemmons, and after they wrapped, he walked over.

Clemmons asked him, “Fred, were you talking to me?”

“Yes, I have been talking to you for years,” Rogers said, as Clemmons recalls. “But you heard me today.”

Okay, so, that sounds familiar. Doesn’t it? Who talks that way? You know who. That’s why I still find it hard to look Fred Rogers in the face. He was a holy man.

***

A version of this post ran on Aleteia in 2016.

Photo: By Dr. François S. Clemmons (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons