The entrance to St. Mark’s Church In-The-Bowery in NYC.
Anne Marie Witchger is the head priest of the St. Mark's Church In-The-Bowery in downtown Manhattan. She also was one of my best friends back in high school. We would do stupid teenage things together and walk around the city together and do class projects together and play Mario Kart in a secret room in the school when we were supposed to be in class. More importantly, Anne Marie was always who I looked to when I was feeling down or crazy about the world. She’s always been a very committed activist. She introduced me to protest and organizing. And then, as we left high school, she took a turn toward the religious. I remember feeling very confused when that happened because I thought that religion was kind of antithetical to our commitments to materially bettering the world. But as the world has gotten crazier and crazier, I now think she was, as she often has been, ahead of her time. She realized that progress and justice and truth couldn’t happen without a deep commitment to community. After the recent election, I thought it’d be nice to check in with her—to see how she’s processing things, to see how she keeps hope alive in these very bleak times, and to see how she remains committed to fighting when she acknowledges that the changes we seek might not even happen within our lifetimes...
Subscribe to Mental Hellth to unlock the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Mental Hellth to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
