In Memoriam: The Rev. Gary Santmire
The Rev. Gary Santmire (October 8, 1938 - July 28, 2024)
The Rev. Gary Santmire died peacefully in the care of tender hospice nurses on Sunday evening, July 28th. Earlier that day his older brother, The Rev. Dr. Paul Santmire and his wife, Laurel, and their family gathered with Gary to be part of the Saint Peter’s 10:30 Mass – as Gary has done every week either in person or virtually since retiring from his final call in Scarscale, NY at which time he joined Saint Peter’s – via our live stream, shared communion together and prayed in fervent hope of the resurrection to eternal life. More family members arrived in the afternoon, much as they have every day since Gary entered hospice care following a brief hospitalization due to complexities with cancer treatment.
Gary was born in upstate New York, a son of the Buffalo Synod of the United Lutheran Church. Later, with the creation of the Lutheran Church in America, this Synod became a part of the New York-New England Synod. He earned a Master of Divinity degree from the Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia, and later a second Masters degree in Near Eastern studies. With a call to Holy Trinity, Staten Island, Gary was ordained before his older brother (who, in having attended a non-Lutheran seminary, was delayed in ordination to complete Lutheran studies and secure a call). This sort of playful feud seems in so many ways Biblical – think Peter and Andrew – and brought many memories and laughs to my final visit with Gary last week. With Paul serving at Wellesley College and then at University Lutheran, Cambridge, Gary took a call to South Quincy, MA. It was there that he met Charles Fisk, the patriarch of the firm which restored Saint Peter’s organ in 2023.
Gary’s love for the church was intertwined with his love of music, art, history, nature, and more. The liturgy sustained his life. He shared this passion with his uncle, the late Rev. Richard Pankow. Thanks to the wide age gap between Gary’s mother, Jean (Pankow) Santmire, and her youngest brother (Richard), they were very much contemporaries. For years, until Richard’s death, the back pew on the organ side of the church had its regular occupants. The liturgies of Holy Week held a particularly important place in Gary’s heart. In fact, the Scarlet red vestments worn for Passion Sunday and throughout Holy Week, as well as for Holy Cross Day, are a gift from Gary in memory of Jean.
A Mass of the Resurrection will be celebrated here, though a date has not yet been set. We will give thanks to God for Gary’s life and faith, celebrate his 61 years of ministry to Christ’s church and support his family as they mourn.
In closing, allow me to share Gary’s ordination verse, which he and I meditated on with tearful confidence earlier this month:
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35, 37-39)
Gary would have us see his life and his death this way: we are, as we have always been, together in the body of Christ.