In Gratitude for Murray Rogers (1917-2006)
[Mary V. T. Cattan’s Pilgrimage of Awakening: the Extraordinary Lives of Murray and Mary Rogers (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016) is a rich study of an Anglican missionary couple who went to India in 1948. Disillusioned by the Anglican/colonialism nexus, the Rogers relocated to Sevagram, Gandhi’s community, and then in 1957 established Jyotiniketan (“Place of Uncreated Light”), a Christian presence ashram in the India manner on the Ganges Plain overshadowed by the Himalayas. The Rogers’ commitment to indigenization in all matters Christian caused them to leave India in 1971 for the multi-religious environs of Jerusalem establishing a new edition of Jyotiniketan against the wall inside the Moslem quarter of the Old City. Never more than four persons, this circle of prayer, presence, liminal hospitality, and the prophetic became deeply engaged for nearly a decade in spirituality, inter-faith dialogue, and peace/justice activism, while ever “facing east.”
The blogger’s family, affiliated with the Mennonite Central Committee, arrived in East Jerusalem in 1971 only months after the Rogers. But it was primarily during their last year there (1975-6) that Murray’s impact on him became pronounced. During much of that year a group of six anglos (Anglican, Quaker & Mennonite) including the Friesens and the Rogers met regularly for Eucharist, spiritual exploration, and mutual support. Simultaneously Murray served as spiritual director to the blogger, the latter’s first such experience. That year was one of multiple crises: wrenching choices facing all six in the face of the justice case of the Palestinians, and the deteriorating health of the blogger’s son, Chad, occasioning their return to the States in June.]
O Lover,
I offer this prayer of gratitude for the gift of my intersection a half-century ago with Murray Rogers, a grace both retrieved and magnified by recently re-reading Cattan’s book. How am I indebted to You for Your chárism of this most inimitable and indefatigable trekker, one both devout and irreverent? Let me begin to count the ways.
As starters, Murray was the first to call me on my overly cognitive approach to You, the Jesus tradition, and my own personage. In SD sessions, twinkling eyes and laughter ever near, he would respond to my verbal plumes with “LeRóy, you think too much!” or “That’s third leg of chicken!” (abstract gibberish, irrelevancy) or “Get out of your head!” While Murray’s mien got my full attention, it would be well into life’s second half when I would assent to Your re-channeling of me into an experiential awareness of You that was trans-intellect.
Second, O Lover, Murray modeled for me integration of an insatiable hunger for You with courageous choices and action amidst ecclesial, economic and political institutions of his contexts. I was ill-prepared for this idiosyncratic Christian sannyasi, an ascetic holy fool who laughed often and loudly, one who ejaculated crazy things (e.g., “God is enough!” [Enough for what?!]), whose idea of a “night out” was repeated overnight prayer “lock-ins” inside the Church of the Resurrection, a cassocked mystic who seemingly found Your Love better than life itself (Ps 63:3). Only much later—after being encountered by “God Alone” carved into the lintel of the Gethsemani Abbey guesthouse, Teresa’s “God alone suffices,” and the thrice-spoken Tu Sólus in the Mass’s Gloria—did I recognized Murray’s “God is enough” as Your dormant seed. And it was during our overlapping Jerusalem years that Murray’s vocation of prayer and presence was spilling over into a witness both public and prophetic. His emerging response to the question running through western Christian mysticism—“the active and/or the contemplative life?”—was unequivocal: they are inextricable.
Third, largely unnoticed for a half century, Murray laid the basis for my present growing openness to advaíta (“neither two nor one”), the non-dualistic wisdom of India largely neglected in my own western faith tradition. Some of my shift is via the writings of Abhishiktananda/Fr. Henri le Saux, OSB (1910-73), Murray’s principal guru and intimate friend, of whom he frequently spoke. Here too I simply was not ready, nor would I be for decades, until conversations with Vedantic trekkers, the re-reading of Cattan’s book, and the nudges of Your Sophía kairotically converged.
Finally, Murray’s entire faith journey modeled the conviction that You, O Lover, are both ubiquitously active in, and yet immeasurably transcend, any/all religious theologies, institutions, and traditions. You, O Lover, are wondrously unboxable!
Murray passed over into You in 2006. Beyond a finite afterlife on YouTube, he continues in the lives of those of us whom You via him continue to shape. In Your Eternal Now—somewhere, sometime, somehow—he of the twinkling eyes no longer sees as through a glass darkly (I Cor 13:12), for he has been drawn into You, Uncreated Light. I have a hunch that he is laughing for joy.
