Take This Bread by Sara Miles

I never go to the library to read. I go to work on my own writing, where I can escape the distractions of home. One afternoon, while distracting myself from writing by perusing the New Books section, I came upon Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, by Sara Miles.

Subtitled “The Spiritual Memoir of a 21st Century Christian,” Sara Miles story is nothing less than radical. A self-proclaimed “secular intellectual, lesbian, left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism,” Miles wandered into a church, took communion, and her life changed. “I became a Christian, claiming a faith that many of my fellow believers want to exclude me from; following a God my unbelieving friends see as archaic superstition.” Miles later started a food pantry at her church and helped organize food pantries all over San Francisco. Hers is a story of unconventional faith with works to boot.

Miles journey of food and faith begins in childhood. Raised by atheist parents (who were children of missionaries), Miles worked as a restaurant cook, a journalist covering the wars in 1980s Central America, then settled in San Francisco with her partner and daughter. While Miles admired the radical priests she met in Central America, she felt religion was a gene she didn’t possess. Until that afternoon she wandered into a church and took her first communion. Not surprisingly, it was in the act of “eating Jesus,” that she awakened to a spiritual hunger that had lurked under the surface all along.

But Miles’ new faith brought as many questions as it did answers. She feared rejection from family and friends, not to mention conservative Christians. She faced the foibles of those in her community as well as her own. But her hunger for God propels her forward, to pray, to change, and to take action.

Miles account of running a food pantry may seem anticlimactic to her years as a journalist in war-torn Central America. But there’s more to pantries than food. Miles writes about the conflicts of running such a ministry: homeless drug addicts, pushy immigrants, the ravished by poverty and abuse, uppity parishioners who’d rather listen to Bach than feed a bum. Miles cops to her own self-righteousness and impatience and lauds the unexpected generosity of skeptics and strangers. God is in the details, and it is in these smaller stories where Miles’ journey is most moving. Miles sees the face of Jesus in the messy, the outcast and in feeding the “least of these.”

Miles does touch on how her faith and vocation affects her home life, but she keeps her personal life private. Rather, Miles deals with larger questions such as those she poses in her forward: “Why would any thinking person become a Christian? How can anyone reconcile the hateful politics of much contemporary Christianity with Jesus’ imperative to love? What are the deepest ideas of this contested religion, and what do they mean in real life?”

Miles is a pleasure to read. She is neither lurid nor sentimental, yet she can devote pages to describing a New York City restaurant kitchen; the line of people outside the food pantry; or dealing with a homeless person while on the phone teaching a skeptic to pray. If you’re looking for a morph from radical lesbian to Republican housefrau, this book is not for you. If your heart is for the outcast, if you want to challenge your beliefs, if you want to be moved from ideas into action, I heartily recommend Take This Bread.

Read her foreword here.

Please also check out my “An Interview with Sara Miles.”

All excerpts from “TAKE THIS BREAD” by Sara Miles. Copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.”