“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”- Doris Lessing

One of you emailed me this quotation from Lessing, the Nobel prize winner who grew up white in what is now Zimbabwe. Fiercely against apartheid, her work as a writer meant remaining in solidarity with those who do not share an equality of opportunity.

No matter where you find yourselves these days, you get this email because at some level you have a spiritual home at 24th and G Streets, NW.

Having Western as a spiritual home connects you in a meaningful way to the lives of Waldon Adams and Rhonda Whitaker, two members of the Miriam’s Kitchen community who were hit in a fatal car accident last Saturday at Hains Point. Some of you may have read the piece in the Post; here’s a more recent update from DCist. For those connected with them and their commitment to communities experiencing homelessness in DC, their death feels like a “gut punch.”

In our lectionary, the Sunday after Easter always brings the story of Thomas from the gospel of John. It’s a great passage, not just because Jesus acknowledges Thomas’s doubts, but because we get to “see” Jesus, too. John reminds us the resurrection doesn’t magically erase Jesus’s wounds – or the pain, suffering and trauma of the past. Instead Jesus keeps on showing up, impossibly, bearing witness to a life stronger than his trauma.

Easter doesn’t erase Jesus’s suffering, nor does it erase ours, as much as I sometimes wish it would. The resurrection reminds us that Jesus does show up, that life has a power stronger than we imagined.