Rob Sanders, a Triumphant Life
June 24, 1942 – January 17, 2017
Rob was my older brother – by 17 months. I knew him for 73 years, my entire life and nearly all of his. Just two weeks ago, I got to spend three days with him, a blessing to us both. We talked of his childhood in Kansas, his school days, the events that led to his becoming a Christian. We talked of his work in the church, of his growing love and compassion, and his service to his fellow man. With his life whole before us, the revelation suddenly came to me: his was a life of triumph, a hard-won triumph of the spirit over daunting obstacles and through many trials and tribulations.
We had talked for a day and a half. I was looking at my notes, Rob’s life on one page, trying to grasp the essence of it.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Thinking,” said I. And at that moment, it was as if the idea leapt from the page to my mind.
“What about?”
“I am thinking that your life has been a life of triumph.”
“Are you serious?” he said. It was a new idea.
I was serious. And I am still serious. Here’s why. It’s Rob’s story.
In the beginning, we were two little boys. Our parents took good care of us, protected, fed, and clothed us, attended to our education, took us to church and to the doctor, bought us baseball gloves, and assigned chores. Despite that, Rob’s childhood was troubled. He felt over criticized, unjustly treated, belittled, and oppressed, and frankly, not without cause. Most seriously, he believed he was unloved. He could prove it. It left what I will call a void of unlove in his soul. By eighth grade, he had experienced periods of depression, and felt alienated, an outsider. I will use Rob’s language. He had become possessed by demons: demons that whispered, and I am now putting words in the mouths of demons, “You are unloved. It’s because you are unlovable”; “You are unjustly treated. It’s because you deserve to be treated unjustly;” and “What you want doesn’t matter because you don’t matter”.
And he had accepted that he would never amount to much, a motivation killer, but sometimes it frees one to pursue interests other than getting ahead. And he did pursue. He was a voracious reader all through his school days. He played baseball, ping pong and piggy wants a signal with his brothers, and Monopoly and a home-grown modification of the card game War that we called Cheat. Rob was pretty good at Cheat. And he spent a glorious week in Tennessee every summer. Parental attention was diverted, and he could be what he was, after all, a little boy playing in the hay barn, corralling crawdads in the branch, playing capture the flag late into the evening with his cousins, absorbing the goodness.
And despite his sense of scholastic inferiority, he discovered that he was good in Math, and that his friends in high school were the smart kids. When he went to college at Sewanee, he felt for the first time a glorious freedom. When I joined him there a year later, we sometimes time talked of the wackiness, the emotional barrenness and oppressiveness of our home life. We talked, laughing crazily into the night.
At graduate school at the University of Kansas, Rob earned a Masters Degree in Mathematics. And he fell in love with the beautiful Mona Byers. They married, and moved to East Lansing, Michigan, for further study. It seemed his life was on track, though in fact his childhood demons yet lurked, and the void of unlove in his soul was unfilled.
Global events intervened - the Vietnam War. Convinced that the war was immoral and unjust, and filled with rage, Rob got involved in anti-war activities. Ultimately, lost and alienated, full of despair, he said goodbye to Mona, and set off to Boston to join the Weather Underground for the spring offensive, 1970. His connection was Terry Poe.
As Rob teetered on the brink of something utterly futile and personally destructive, the glorious hand of God intervened. Two apparently unrelated events occurred. One: his friend Ralph Penland had become a Christian and joined a charismatic community of Episcopalians in Ocala, Florida. The other: when Rob got to Boston, Terry Poe was not home. The connection was missed. Rob decided to go to Florida to say goodbye to Ralph.
A new way suddenly opened before him. Rob fell in with Ralph’s welcoming and loving community of Christians, and accepted Christ as his Savior. Mona rejoined him. But this was only the first step; the hard work now began. He endured a dark night of the soul for five years, suffering spiritual torment and doubt, and struggling with his demons. Gradually his anguish and doubts were relieved, with the help of Jesus Christ, with the help of spiritual healers, and much prayer.
Over time, his demons were overcome (“cast out” is the technical term).
Then one night, anguished by doubt about his life’s purpose, Rob opened his Bible at random for guidance. It opened to Isaiah 61:1: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. God’s purpose for Rob suddenly became clear: to preach good tidings unto the meek, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives. Rob accepted.
Finally, three years later, in divinity school at the time, Rob had a most profound experience. In his words, he experienced God directly, personally, and powerfully, and God was Love. Rob survived, and went on his way rejoicing. The void in his soul was filled with the love of God, and his spirit was healed.
From that time, Rob was on a rising trajectory of service and love. He became an ordained priest and served at churches in Kansas and Florida. He led, organized, preached, counseled, prayed with and prayed for people, studied the scriptures, wrote, taught, and worked for social justice. He ministered to the poor in Guatemala for two years and later for two years in Honduras. His was a life of service with a special calling to minister to the poor and the downtrodden, the meek and the brokenhearted.
Rob’s life became ever more filled with love. His capacity to love and - equally important-- to feel loved, grew. He and Mona and daughters Sara and Lilly became an extremely close-knit and loving family. After Mona’s death, Rob and Jerree shared for a time too short a blessed marriage of loving happiness. Beyond family, Rob grew in love and compassion for all that he came in contact with.
It would be inappropriate to view Rob’s life through the lens of the conventional notions of success: wealth, power, position. Rob was not, thank God, a conventional person, and he never sought such success. His was a triumph of the spirit: overcoming a spiritually damaging childhood, persevering through the dark night of the soul, and then meeting for forty years, with dedication and strength, the challenges of the calling he had accepted, a life of service and love.
I do not know to what extent Rob accepted my assessment. Fully, I hope. I know he heard it, for I returned to the topic several times as we talked further. What I do know we agreed on was that three important themes had permeated his life: truth, justice and love. Truth, which he searched for from earliest childhood straight through to the end of his life. Justice, for which he worked, a central concern derived from his own personal experience of injustice. And finally, by the grace of God, Love, the powerful motivating force that led him to act, to minister, and to serve. The pillars of Rob’s life: Truth, Justice, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love.
I am proud and thankful to have had Rob as a brother.
Jack Sanders
January 21, 2017
