Our family has lost a very good man.
My brother-in-law Glenn Rodgers, whom I’ve known for more than 40 years, passed away last week from injuries he sustained in a tragic fall a month ago. He had just turned 70 in October.
Glenn was the rock of our family. He was hard-working, level-headed, generous to a fault. He was always there for his family, his friends, his church, and for anyone who needed help.
When I was in my early twenties and didn’t have a clue how to make a living with my English Literature degree, he suggested I go into the corporate world where good writing skills were much in need. I followed his advice and was able to make a career of it.
When I needed a place to live while I was saving up money for my first house, and then twenty years later when I was homeless after my divorce, he and my sister took me into their home and asked nothing for it.
When I needed advice after finding out I would be losing my long-held corporate job at the delicate age of 55, Glenn suggested contacts and routes I could take to find another job. Everything would work out, he told me with his characteristic cool confidence. Don’t worry, be happy.
And happy he was. Alongside a very successful career as a software salesperson, Glenn was an adventurous soul. He was a great skier and loved taking on black diamond slopes. He went scuba diving and swam with sharks. He lived life with gusto.
That adventurous spirit, that calm demeanor and constant voice of reason, is now gone. And at Christmastime too.
There’s no good time to lose a loved one, but holidays are the absolute worst. Our family feels like it’s been living under a dark cloud for the past month. How we prayed that he would get better. We have a huge extended family, and every one of us, as well as Glenn’s huge network of friends, were praying for him.
All told, we had dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people sending prayer missiles to the heavens, including Glenn’s pastor and my Catholic bishop friend. We prayed and prayed and prayed. But in the end, we lost him, leaving our family devastated and my sister, nephews, and niece heartbroken.
The funeral is at the end of the week. It will be brutal. So much for a merry Christmas.
All of which leaves me wondering—what is the value of prayer if it doesn’t deliver the miracles we are praying for?
I grew up believing that miracles happen if only we pray. My mother said so. The nuns in Catholic school taught us so. The priests preached so from the pulpit on Sunday mornings. Pray hard enough and good things happen in the world.
My lived experience, however, has shown me that it doesn’t work like that. Sure, there have been times in the past when I’ve prayed for something and it came true, but those were almost always things having to do with myself and my own trials. When it came to praying for things outside myself, such as for the recovery of seriously ill loved ones, I was almost always disappointed in the end.
I think of my good friend Peter, who passed away four years ago at the too-young age of 71 after a two-plus-year battle with a rare form of blood cancer. How I prayed that he would get better. But he died anyway.
I think of another good friend, John, who I used to work out with at the gym. In the same year that I was diagnosed with colon cancer, he was diagnosed with melanoma. He and I used to talk about our shared experience with cancer, how we were going to beat it.
But while I was fortunate, he was not. He died later that year, at the age of 43, leaving behind a wife and four children, while I lived on.
Why? Were my prayers somehow better than his and those that his family was offering up for him? Was I somehow more deserving of life than he was?
Of course not. I am not a theologian, but I know that no all-loving God would work like that. I cannot believe that God would be so petty as to sit up on the throne with a checklist to see if people are fulfilling all the necessary requirements for their prayers to come true.
After my friend John passed away 11 years ago—also right before Christmas—I decided this whole prayer thing was illogical. No more paying for miracles, I said to myself. It's a waste of time.
But then over the years that followed, I found myself praying again. I prayed for my father; for aunts and uncles; for Peter; for Glenn. They all passed away anyway, but I realized that while my prayers didn’t change anything in the outside world, they did something for me.
They gave me hope. They softened the crusty, cynical side of me. They deepened my belief that there was something going on here that goes much deeper than the intellect. It was the spirit at work, trying to effect change within me even as my logical mind resisted.
I realized that this whole idea of expecting prayers to change the world is just an extension of the ego-mind’s mad belief that it can control everything, when it can’t. Prayer reminds us--reminds me--that we're not in charge and either we embrace the mystery and be comforted by it, or we stay stuck in our cynicism with only this ephemeral world to hold onto.
You may insist that miracles do, indeed, happen in the world, and I’m not going to argue with you. But in my view, miracles are an inside job. The value of prayer is not in the earthly transactions they yield, but in the power to change us from within.
That’s why I will continue to pray, in the absence of evidence. My brother-in-law now joins the long and growing list of departed loved ones whom I pray to as I lay down my head at night.
Hey, Glenn! In between skiing the black diamond slopes up in heaven, keep an eye on us down here, will you? We need it.
RIP, my brother. You will be greatly missed.
What a phenomenally beautiful and honest writing.
What a beautiful tribute and introspection.