No Referees in Heaven

In Memory of Thomas Rogers

Thomas F. Rogers passed away on June 24, 2024. Rogers is generally recognized as “the Father of Mormon drama” in Eugene England’s words. Huebner was the most famous of some thirty dramas he wrote. He had a storied career teaching at Brigham Young University, and served as mission leader in the Russia St. Petersburg Mission from 1993-1996. From 2007 until 2014, Rogers was a traveling LDS patriarch assigned to Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. During his eight years serving in this capacity, he made 24 trans-Atlantic crossings and bestowed over 2600 patriarchal blessings.

Tom Rogers once wrote, “It is very hard to live for and maintain [the Lord's spirit], but so worth it that anyone who has once experienced it [should] do everything necessary to have it with him or her at all times.”

Those of us fortunate enough to know the great heart behind decades of literary production know that he was doing everything in his power—and mostly succeeding—in bringing a radiant portion of the Lord’s spirit into his life and into the world.

I want to briefly touch on two aspects of Tom’s legacy. First was his picture of faith as a great intellectual adventure. That is a legacy he richly elaborated. And second I want to say a few words about a legacy that he left us more in the way of a challenge. A theme that is richly relevant at this moment of looming cultural Armageddon.

The first legacy: I discovered the gospel as a teenager. I came of age in the church when many giants walked the earth—one of those was Thomas Rogers. I encountered Brother Rogers at BYU when I was a freshman. He was one of a handful of professors who did more than inspire me. They nurtured in many of my generation a passion for this gospel—a gospel they so conspicuously apprehended as endlessly interesting. And a gospel that could sustain rigorous interrogation. In an era when many question of LDS intellectuals, why do you stay, Tom’s answer was that his faith was a joyous offering, not a position of last resort. 

Tom persistently reminded us, without saying so explicitly, that according to our narrative of the grand human epic, the great adventure loomed outside of the Garden, in a world of competing imperatives and perplexing dilemmas. He knew, as C. S. Lewis remarked, that all life is lived on the edge of a precipice. The more intimately we know anyone, the more we know this to be true. This did not mean for Tom that we should take gospel principles and standards less seriously, but more seriously. His was an adventuresome mind and spirit, and he was as well-travelled in his moral imagination as he was in geographical reality. He exemplified as well as any person I know the mandate to “stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity.”

Tom’s insights were no cheap palliative to the weary road-warriors on the path to Zion. Like Orson Pratt’s simple adobe observatory erected in the shadow of the Salt Lake Temple, Tom brought together in vibrant harmony the sacred and the searching. He was astoundingly well-read, and harvested a rich bounty of insights and wisdom from the vast library of Western—and Eastern—literary and religious texts. To read his essays is to be both moved by his erudition and embarrassed by one’s own limited repertoire. More importantly, perhaps, one will be inspired by his capacity to question himself, his presuppositions, and his own judgment—all in an effort to refine and preserve that which is most essential, most indispensable, in the life and belief of a disciple of Christ. 

As for the second element of Tom’s legacy, I will close with a few words about his last, wonderfully provocative work of art and theological questing.  A few months ago, Tom shared with me his recently completed novel. Its subject is a tragic episode in Utah history called the Aiken Massacre. Tom found in life’s toughest questions and darkest conflicts fodder for his most celebrated dramas. Art, said William Hazlitt, can refine our sense of beauty to the point of agony. In Tom’s great work, Huebner, a young latter-day Saint opposes Hitler, and finds himself arrested by the regime, disowned by his church, and martyred at the age of 17. In the story, we find precisely what Hazlitt described: our experience of moral beauty refined to the point of agony. In Fire in the Bones, he again explored the dilemmas of discipleship we encounter, when we find our call to Christ is mediated by flawed humans. His final project about the Aiken tragedy, the soon-to-be published Desperate Measures, is a troubling episode involving the killing of five travelers through Utah. Tom chose the rending subjects he did not because it is easy to sensationalize tragedies, but because they are so difficult to theologize. Tom wanted to confront the greatest challenges our faith involves, because of his absolute confidence that such faith can and must sustain the hardest questions. 

This last work by Tom is a play set within a novel. It is poignant to me that the setting of the play is the afterlife. The motif running through this work is judgment in all its multiple manifestations. The judgments we pass upon those in the past. The judgments we make about each other, and about other faith traditions. And, quietly between the lines, Tom is writing about our expectations surrounding the great and final judgment that awaits all of us. 

Tom wanted us—the readers—to interrogate some of our clichéd thinking about what final judgment might look like. Tom felt that our problem as earnest disciples is not so much under-belief but over-belief. We suffer not from too little faith but from too many assumptions. Assumptions that what are really open questions have already been settled. 

Tom’s thesis in his final work—which I applaud—is that God fills, and has yet to fill, many roles. But referee is not one of them. Characters arrive in the afterlife with unanswered questions, with hurts and regrets and misjudgments—but with a dawning awareness of each other’s circumstances, perspectives, and capacities for growth. In this beautiful work, Tom Rogers reveals a possible eternity where we—we ourselves—have to continue the exacting work of resolving those dilemmas that fracture conscience and families and communities alike. 

I love the fact that Tom Rogers ended his literary career, and his life as a disciple of Jesus Christ, not with closure but with a challenge; not with a depiction of resolution and healing imposed from without, but the invitation to a more rigorous love that must resound from within. Healing is hard work, and I take Tom to be telling us that we cannot employ a narrative of facile resolution and happy endings to abdicate our work of reconciliation and peacemaking, both here and hereafter. Reconciliation was the theme he most loved in film and literature. Reconciliation, he wrote, was one of the most sacred impulses within the human spirit.

In one of his finest addresses, he ended with this testimony. “As we arrive at and maintain an awareness of how we and others really are…we become more sanctified, and One. We each assume therewith a certain burden. That burden is a great privilege, for it is the burden of life—our life with others, and the burden of divine love.”

I’m grateful that Tom was a living witness to both that burden and that privilege.

These remarks were delivered at Tom Roger’s funeral on June 29, 2024.

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