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"Take this Bread" by Sara Miles

Sara Miles’ book, “Take This Bread,” literally jumped off the table into my hands at a ministers’ conference. At least, that’s my story … since I promised myself not to buy any more new books until I read all the ones I already had. Perhaps this book jumped into my hands because I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or because seeing a cross carved in the middle of a piece of white bread was intriguingly irreverent.

Perhaps this happened because the words “radical” and “conversion” were used together in the subtitle, and I happen to be one of those strange people who resonate with both of those words. Regardless, I didn’t realize how “hungry” I was for an authentic and honest word about faith until I “finished this feast” and found myself hungering for more.

Miles was a self-proclaimed blue-state, secular-intellectual, lesbian, left-wing journalist with a strong skeptical side. Church was the last place she expected to find herself. At the age of 46, however, that is where she landed. Miles wandered into a church one winter morning for no apparent “earthly” reason. She was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian or, as she called it, “a religious nut.” She describes Christianity not as “an argument I could win, or even resolve. It wasn’t a thesis. It was a mystery that I was finally willing to swallow.” Swallow it, she did. Miles took a bite of bread and sip of wine at the communion table of St. Gregory’s of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, and the transformation of her life began. She describes her experience as a “terribly inconvenient Christian conversion told by a very unlikely convert.”

“I still can’t explain my first communion,” she writes. “It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb, or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind. The disconnect between what I thought was happening — I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening — the piece of bread was the ‘body’ of ‘Christ,’ a patently untrue, or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening — God, named ‘Christ’ or ‘Jesus,’ was real, and in my mouth — utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry.”

Participating in communion connected Miles not only with a church but also with those in her city who were physically hungry. She turned the bread she ate on Sundays into tons of groceries piled onto the church altar week after week, to be given away. Her original pantry served hundreds of poor, elderly, sick and marginalized people, but those loaves multiplied again and again, leading to the establishment of nearly a dozen pantries in the area.

I highly recommend this book. Allow me to warn you, however, that it is not traditional devotional material. It is authentically real — at times, even raw — but maybe this is exactly that for which you are hungering.

Faith and Values Advisory Board member Susie Smith is the pastor of Peace Congregational Church, UCC, in Clemson.