Paul Santmire’s annual Christmas Letter*
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” – Matthew 5:5
Back in the day when I was a young and allegedly radical college chaplain, one of the well-known activists whom I brought to my college chapel was the then popular singer, Holly Near. Not too long ago, I came across one of her songs, which I can’t remember ever having heard her perform: “The Meek Are Getting Ready.”
“The meek” in the first century were from “the people of the earth,” mainly poor peasants who barely survived by working the land in Galilee or others of low estate who labored with their hands in behalf of those impoverished farmers. It so happened that the traditions of the meek in Galilee were uplifted by the Gospel writer Luke and also attested by the Gospel writer, Matthew, in his collection of the sayings of Jesus known to us as the Beatitudes.
Are the meek getting ready? Everything in our day suggests that, if they are, they’re going to have a tough time. Ours is the era of the rank suppression and dispersal of the meek by the Strong Men. The Christmas Gospel, in marked contrast, is about the emergent power of the meekest of all: the strange promise of a certain baby, born in a peasant’s stable, who would become a constant threat to all the Herods of this world.
After that birth, can the liberation of all the meek be far behind? Is now the time for countless numbers of the meek to inherit the earth? And with them, at the end of a very long line, you and me? The Christmas promise announces: Yes.
This is a countercultural faith, to be sure. But I’ll go for it. And this Christmas season I invite you to do the same, whether for the first time or all over again.
And a little child shall lead them? Why not? Dear Herod, you have no idea what’s in store for lord-it-over-everybody hierarchs like you. Dear Herod, Merry Christmas! Who was it that said, dear Herod, “How the mighty have fallen!”? Do check out II Samuel 1:27.
Let’s hear it for all of us, then, as we find our own places at the end of the line behind the meek, as they get ready. Which is to say: the meek do matter ultimately to God (see also Matthew 20:16: “The last shall be first”) and, in their entourage, so do all the rest of us (see John 3:16: “For God so loved the world…”).
Contemplate, then, Mary’s agonizing labor pains and then – would those pains ever end? – empathize with her ecstatic joys. See her holding the wailing newborn in her arms, while good old Joseph and some poor shepherds and three distinguished wise-guys and probably two or three peasants who lived in the hovel where Mary and her newborn lay, as well as a cow or two, look on. Join me at the same time in celebrating our own rebirth-in-Christ this Christmas, as the end-of-the-liners we are. Join with me, finally – only if you wish – not all will want to do this – in finding some way to savor some of our own family and friendship memories.
So here are some down-home notes of my own. The big news for Laurel and me this Christmas is the continued blessings of our life together, now approaching sixty years; and our gratitude for being able to be around long enough to witness the stellar grown-up lives of our own children and their families. Yes, I myself have been experiencing some serious health issues of late, but methinks at age eighty-nine, should I be surprised? Actually, I recommend eighty-nine, this, in view of the huge birthday blast that my family just threw for me.
And who could have a better spouse than Laurel? Never mind her unwavering care for me and her celebrated cuisine, she’s got an amazing life, for sure. She’s an online political sparkplug and, when we travel, as we sometimes still do, she’s a tour guide extraordinaire. She also adeptly manages our finances and regularly enriches our domestic spaces with her lovely flute music – all with the most beautiful smile in the world. She even listens to me intently when I launch off into abstruse theological adventures, such as talking out loud about how God as Trinity relates to the natural world. Mercy.
Further, who could have a more enlivening Church community than our own “UniLu” in Cambridge, MA? I began my ministry at University Lutheran in 1965 and have always been grateful for that experience. UniLu is now served by a pastor who knows her way around many corners, from the complexities of Jerusalem to the complications of Harvard. She also does the longstanding liturgical excellences of UniLu proud, and then some.
Laurel and I have also been blessed this year by our own family and our own friends, a thought that comes to me, like many others, every Christmas, as I meditate on the Holy Family – soon to flee into Egypt. Let me tell you about this now, with sober awareness that millions of families around the earth are beset this season by sometimes unspeakable anguish and overwhelming distress.
Consider our daughter-in-law, Corina, a practicing physician, who, all by herself this past fall walked the pilgrim way from St. Jean Pied de Port, crossed the Pyrenees to Roncesvailles and continued on to Santiago de Compestella: exploring not only the heights of mountain vistas, but also the depths of her own soul. She slept often in hostels, initially walking 15 miles a day, eventually even 25. After arriving in Compostela, she did the remaining 60 miles to Finesterre (“the end of the earth”), for a total of 560 miles. I won’t even speculate about what drove her to undertake that spectacular journey. In particular, I won’t speculate whether it’s possible today for humane physicians to thrive in today’s cut-throat, profit-driven medical world, without finding some cosmic way to trump (as it were) that world – to see vistas and to face challenges that might remind them how spiritually gratifying the practice of medicine could be, should it ever be freed from the clutches of corporate capitalism.
Meanwhile, back at home with their two teenage boys, son Matthew steadily held the fort, even as he worked to develop new ways to reach middle school kids who have been denied or who have not been able to grasp the essentials of the reading life. Consider daughter Heather, too, likewise energetically engaged in a life of public service, hers as a tech support phenom and dedicated Quaker. In her own way, in her own backyard, she is at the front lines of the struggles for peace and justice that the Friends have consistently championed.
Consider, too, the striking witness of our five grandchildren, Kaitlyn, Maya, Althea, Maxwell, and Marlow, that comes to expression not only in their relationships with their parents and their grandparents and their teachers or their employers, but also in their generous care for their peers, as well as in their imaginative hair-styling and creative writing and energetic acting and powerful celloing and zestful soccering, even as they all are well-aware of the dynamics of our larger world of chaos and promise.
In this season, when family relationships are often at the fore of our consciousness, I also want to remember the life of my brother, the Rev. Gary C. Santmire, who died this past year. Although our relationship from its earliest days was sometimes bumpy, it was always rooted in loyalty. This came to expression, dramatically and audibly, in the thoroughly biblical and deeply affirmative sermon that he preached at my ordination in Eggertsville, N.Y. in 1965, and also in the conversations he and I had over the years about the Church’s Liturgy, for which we both long had deep affection.
Then there’s my good friend, David Gagne, of Minneapolis. I dedicated my new book, to him: The Earth and the Fullness Thereof: A Down-Home Reader in Ecological Theology. Run out and buy a dozen copies to give away to friends and family members, and read there about all that David has meant to me.
This kind of mundane, but blessed family and friendship stuff writ large, I believe, is what this world is most fundamentally about, hallowed by the birth of Jesus, that particular infant-at-risk in Bethlehem once upon a time, whose name is above every other name, by that baby’s parents, and by the dedication, later, of this Jesus’ own friends (see John 15:15).
Herod? Forgettabout it! His days are numbered. Rather, hold on to that hope that springs eternal, not in the human breast more generally, but manifest so gloriously in that particular manger in Bethlehem: peace on earth, good will to all!
In that spirit, I wish you a Blessed Christmas, and I am, I would like to say, meekly yours,
Paul
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*For many decades, I have been sending Christmas letters to many dozens of coworkers, friends, and family members via the U.S. mail. In doing so, I have long treasured the almost sacramental feel of communicating by using something that I can touch, in this case: stuffing envelopes and then imagining others tearing open those envelopes, like breaking a loaf of bread in half. Typically, however, being among the last to discover things that others have long known, I have only this year been convinced by my dear wife that touching a keyboard can occasion such a sacramentalizing experience of communication, akin to thoughts impressed on paper and then delivered by the USPO into your hands. It sometimes takes a long time for an old dog to learn new tricks.