Mike Rogers In Memorium

For my Neighbor; September 1st, 2021

Mike Rogers passed away today. 

In his honor, I just listened to Spirit in the Sky. I don’t know if I have a true memory of talking about this song with him, or if I imagine I did simply because it is a mirror image of his perspective on God. Either way it hardly matters; memory and imagination are, in essence, one and the same experience. 

Spirit in the Sky a joyful song, a dancing song, a song about the divine which does not elevate the spiritual to an inaccessible higher plane. “I’ve got a friend in Jesus.” That’s how Mike saw it—figures like Jesus 0r the Buddha were holy, but they were also what he’d call “good guys.” And while I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him describe God as “the Lord,” I recall his making frequent reference to “The Big Man Upstairs.” His relationship with spirituality was playful and never pretentious. During our discussions of philosophy over the course of my youth, Mike was never dogmatic. But at the same time, his conviction was adamant. For some people, this mix of flexibility and solidity on spiritual matters would represent a contradiction; confidence in the capital T Truth of one’s religion often depends on ignorance or outright hostility to any alternative religions or frame of thought. But Mike, more than anyone I’ve ever known, was a true pluralist. 

In the stained glass mosaic of human beliefs, he didn’t see a million discordant shapes and colors; he saw a single collaborative human artwork, with each fragment of glass a tinted prism through which shone unique rays of light sent forth from the same hidden sun. He pulled from Christianity and Buddhism, from Celtic paganism, gnosticism, Hindu mysticism, alien conspiracy theory, the Kabbalah, indigenous animism… Only the Big Man Upstairs knows his bibliography unabridged. 

When I was growing up, I would visit the Rogers quite frequently during the summers. It was just a walk across the street, which I would navigate while carrying whatever piece of show-and-tell I thought might make a good conversation starter. When I’d knock, Mike was often sitting right there at the kitchen table and would invite me in. I would relish the blast of cool air as I came inside—the swampy heat could be oppressive at my house, which wanted for both the shade and the air conditioning enjoyed by Mike and Gloria. I’d take a seat at the table, separated from Mr. Rogers by a half-read newspaper, and he’d get up to prepare for me a plate of sugar cookies and a tall glass of milk. 

We’d talk about any number of things: my flourishing career as a grade school colored pencil artist, his latest adventures in tennis or golf, the crush I had on this or that classmate...what happens when you die. 

In all the times I visited Mike when I was little, and as I gradually grew to be big, I don’t remember his ever speaking down to me. He brought up profound speculations without condescending: gods, past lives, holy texts, alien technology. And though he had sharpened his personal cosmology to a fine point, he didn’t broach these subjects to convert, but rather to share. His thoughts were neither factsheet to memorize nor scripture to worship but scattered clues upon which he had stumbled and wished to discuss. Mike had a rare and genuine zeal for the historical and metaphysical mysteries of this strange world in which we find ourselves, and his enthusiasm was infectious. And young child though I was, he wanted to know my own thoughts, in my own words, on questions of life and death. I relished those afternoons. 

Of course, most of the specifics to those conversations have been dissolved by the years, the chemicals which once structured their recollection long since repurposed for the sake of other memories, for better and for worse. But as is so often the case, the feeling of our lazy afternoons has stayed with me, rooted in place somewhere deeper than memory. 

It felt different to be so little. 

I saw the world through new eyes then, without judgment or presumption. I knew little of the mechanistic rules of physics; of the long arch of history; of epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge. Everything I knew, I knew via intuition, filtered through a meager handful of culturally circumscribed symbols and personal experiences. My intuition led me to the belief—the mistaken belief, I’m now assured—that the world around me was one of pure and limitless magic. I searched for fairies and gnomes in the woods around my home. I imagined unseen continents awaiting my discovery in the uncharted midst of the vast Pacific. I viewed my own subjectivity, imagination and force of will, as contiguous with the world around me; reality was the land and dream was the sea, and the line between them was in a steady state of ebb and flow, eternally wavering, a push and pull where no borders could ever be fixed. To live, to me, was to play a game of make-believe. Each day I practiced my part in a slightly different way, as did all the kids who played with me, and the toys, and the animals and plants, as did the wind, and the water, and the stars, and the books, and the cars, and the past and the future. 

When we say that childhood is carefree, I think that this enchantment is the root of the feeling. But even then, I knew that the game would not be played like this forever. Most adults, though very kind, did not see much of the magic that was so obvious to me and all little children. They didn’t believe in made-up fantasies like fairies, or the friendly dragon that lived under the graveyard, or in Santa; for some reason they were fixated on different fantasies, like car insurance, fiat currency, and clocks. Though the grown-ups were good sports, they didn’t really play pretend with me—they only pretended to. They humored my magical thinking and whimsical notions, but their tolerance was conditional. Time would run out—I would get big—and then I’d be expected to do as they had done: learn the rules and join the game of make-believe best known as the “real world.” In a word, adulthood looked like dogma. 

But when Mike Rogers sat with me at the kitchen table, offering sugar cookies and talking about guys who got it like the Buddha, he offered me a very different vision of adulthood. Here was one man, one mentor, who saw the world much the same way I did: as indisputably suffused with a kind of magic. 

He was not childish, certainly, in any sense—but in his capacity for wonder, Mike Rogers was childlike. He was a man who had learned all the rules of adulthood and thrived there: had worked a good job, had married a wonderful wife, had bought a nice house, had raised loving children and grandchildren. 

And yet maturity had not come at the expense of his openness. He played the “real world” make-believe, but had not forgotten that there were other truths and other games to play. What in childhood I might have called thinking like a kid I now might call spiritual wisdom, but all that changed was my vocabulary. In a word, he took children seriously. He took me seriously. With more sophistication but the same joie de vivre that characterized my own magical thinking, Mike Rogers took stock of irreconcilable ideas—monotheism and shamanism, science and conspiracy—and found there was no paradox in the unity of opposites. 

Though radical and difficult, his may be the one sound response to the post-modern situation of culture made global. How can it be that we are tasked with working as one world, yet are separated by numberless irresolvable schisms of belief? The answer—which I am only beginning to grasp, but which Mike Rogers considered deeply for many years—is to look beyond language, beyond geography, and to listen for the song of one truth produced by the ensemble of the whole human choir. He did not look to stained-glass shards for explanations, but through them towards the invisible sun to which they owe their glow. 

~

I can’t know who I’d be without having known Mr. Rogers. I’d have eaten somewhat fewer sugar cookies, I guess, and thought a bit less about extraterrestrial life. But the deeper impression he made upon my life defies articulation, just as colors can be named but never described to one who has not seen them. Perhaps unaware he was doing so, Mike helped train my sense of sight as the world was first coming into focus. 

To know that he is gone from this world electrifies me with a consummate grief—a grief which, rather than defined as intense sadness, is just intense, period. Like ice so cold it burns to touch, I feel a grief as complete in its joy as its sorrow. Mike knew better than anyone that a loss as great as this one for the mortal world is a triumphant gain for some other space and time. 

He dedicated so much of himself to making sense of a single Something. Mike Rogers saw a single Something in Christ and Buddha and conspiracy and paradox and a hundred religions and a thousand books.  He never once looked away from it; he talked about that Something like the Something was a friend: with gratitude, with admiration, with curiosity, with love. All feelings I owe in equal measure to him. 

The truth is that when it comes to the secrets of the single Something, Mike Rogers never could have cracked the case down here. The clues are all scattered, and none of us have enough time. Now, though? He’s on the other side of the stained glass mosaic. I can’t say for certain, but I’d venture that the light from the unseen sun is coming through the prism of our window a little bit brighter.