I. When Scale Took the Body
There is a particular grief that comes not from loss, but from success.
Things work.
They reach more people.
They scale.
And somehow, in the process, something essential thins out.
Santa is one of the clearest traces of this.
He did not begin as magic, logistics, or spectacle.
He began close—embodied most clearly in Saint Nicholas,
whose generosity was quiet, proximate, and dignifying.
Care moved hand to hand. Joy required presence.
But joy wanted to travel farther than bodies could manage.
So Santa scaled.
Through ritual, tradition, mass media, and eventually advertising—
most visibly through Coca-Cola.
Santa became omnipresent, tireless, and cheerful without limit.
He could arrive everywhere without needing to stay anywhere.
Presence became delivery.
Joy became proof.
Being became having.
This was not corruption.
It was relief.
Relief from exhaustion.
Relief from scarcity of time.
Relief from the growing weight of the world.
Santa did not cause the hollowing.
He absorbed it.
II. A Parallel Loss — When Teaching Lost Its Body
The same thing happened to teachers.
Once, teaching was inseparable from presence.
The teacher did not deliver knowledge;
the teacher was the medium through which coherence formed.
Learning happened in attunement—tone, timing, relationship, patience.
Knowledge was not extracted.
It was grown.
But coherence also wanted to travel farther than bodies could.
So teaching scaled.
Curricula standardized.
Classrooms expanded.
Distance increased.
Content abstracted from the knower.
The teacher slowly shifted from embodied guide to information conduit—
not because teachers chose abstraction,
but because systems increasingly asked them to carry more students, more standards,
and more outcomes than presence alone could hold.
Presence became access.
Formation became instruction.
Understanding became measurable output.
Again—not failure.
Adaptation.
The system worked.
More students were reached.
More information was transferred.
And quietly, the same hollowing occurred.
III. What Santa and Teachers Share
Santa and teachers occupy different emotional territory,
but they trace the same migration.
Both were originally incarnational roles:
- Joy required a body.
- Learning required a relationship.
Under scale, both became infrastructure.
Reliable.
Efficient.
Repeatable.
And in both cases, spirit was relieved of embodiment and reassigned to function.
Joy without presence becomes consumption.
Learning without presence becomes information.
Neither is evil.
Both are incomplete.
IV. The Deeper Loss — Being Itself
What scale ultimately stifles is not joy or knowledge.
It stifles being.
As children, joy and learning live in presence:
- wonder
- attention
- shared coherence
As adults, under pressure to optimize, they migrate into things:
- presents
- credentials
- outcomes
- proof
Not because we grow shallow.
Because responsibility is heavy, and systems reward what can be counted.
Santa and teachers simply show us the cost early—because childhood reveals what adulthood learns to hide.
V. Recognition — Before Scale, There Was Proximity
And yet, neither story begins in abstraction.
Saint Nicholas did not act from doctrine or obligation. He acted from nearness—shaped by a faith centered on a God who does not remain distant, but draws close. His generosity was not meant to scale; it was meant to arrive.
Likewise, the earliest teachers did not transmit content. They walked with people until coherence emerged. Knowledge was not downloaded; it was caught.
This is the pattern beneath both roles.
Before systems, there was proximity.
Before delivery, there was presence.
Before having, there was being.
You might call this the Christ of Proximity in action—not as theology argued, but as posture lived.
VI. What Still Knows How to Return
There is no undoing scale.
But there is remembering.
Remembering that spirit was never meant to live without a body.
Remembering that joy and learning still recognize presence when they encounter it.
Remembering that systems were meant to carry spirit—not replace it.
Santa still appears each year.
Teachers still show up each morning.
And sometimes—quietly, locally, imperfectly—the old posture returns.
In a room where someone stays.
In a voice that slows down.
In a moment where coherence forms not because it was delivered,
but because it was shared.
The question is no longer whether scale is bad.
It’s whether, amid all that reaches farther and faster,
we will still make room for what only arrives close.
This musing traces the pattern at scale.
If you’d like to see how this movement looks in one small, lived moment—through a neighborhood, a group of kids, and a name spoken casually—you can read the personal reflection that sparked it: