Miles, Sara | Take this Bread

Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Sara Miles

Paperback: Ballantine, 2008, 320pp.

Introduction

Take this Bread is strikingly different from most of the other books that have been summarized for the Live the Word project. First, this book is a memoir that recounts the author’s personal story of her conversion to Christianity. Miles was raised as an atheist, by parents who had been significantly wounded by Christians, and she was trained with on-the-ground experience as a cook and a journalist. One Sunday morning, when she was in her early 40s, Miles wandered into a local church in her hometown of San Francisco, “with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity” (57). She ended up taking communion with the congregation that morning, and was transformed by the experience: “I couldn’t reconcile the experience with anything I knew or had been told. But neither could I go away: For some inexplicable reason, I wanted that bread again. I wanted it all the next day after my first communion, and the next week, and the next. It was a sensation as urgent as physical hunger, pulling me back to the table at St. Gregory’s through my fear and confusion” (60).

The Eucharist, we found out, was not only central to Miles’s conversion to Christianity, but it also would become central to the way in which her faith was embodied. She would eventually come to found and direct the St. Gregory’s food pantry, based out of her church. This food pantry is an extraordinary ministry that does not merely hand out food and send the recipients on their way, but through food seeks to build relationships across many barriers including race, language, education, and class. At one point, she described the work of the pantry, “It’s not a program, … [it’s] a community of prayer” (134). Her unique conversion and faith formation, was decidedly not an intellectual exercise, but was rooted in bodily practices, and particularly the Eucharist. She writes: “Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to” (265). 

Table Worship-Fellowship

Take this Bread is primarily a story about the transformative power of table fellowship. Not only was Miles transformed by her experience of Christ in the Eucharist, but she worked diligently so that others might similarly experience Christ around the table. In the book’s introduction, she summarizes her journey in faith: “I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all. I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary, yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored” (xv).

Miles possesses the rare capacity to see a deep continuity between the bread and wine that is taken in the Eucharist as part of the church’s worship and the ordinary practice of sharing food around the table with others. Both practices for her are expressions of sharing in the life, the gifts, and the reconciling work of Christ.

Miles’s pre-Christian experiences as a cook in New York City, and later as a war journalist in Latin America and other settings around the globe, instilled in her a deep and meaningful sense of sharing food as a common human experience. “[What] mattered to me was not what I ate,” she writes, “What mattered to me in those years , when everywhere I was wasn’t home, was that I could launch myself into a morning, an unknown town, a war zone, and be fed – usually by strangers and sometimes by comrades, occasionally by enemies, but always by someone who was as hungry as I was or hungrier. We had hunger in common, and we had food” (49-50).

This common hunger, although realized prior to her conversion, would come to be a vital force in her faith formation in Christ. Recognizing the ways in which she was fed by Christ and the church in the Eucharist, the common hunger drove her to start the food pantry, and eventually to incorporate meals into the rhythms of the food pantry. These meals helped deepen the friendships among the volunteers who were doing the pantry’s work. Miles notes: “In the Gospel, a stranger was revealed as Jesus ‘in the breaking of bread.’ And so, as we began to eat [meals] together, and as, over bread, I learned more about the lives of our volunteers, I began to pay attention, to see what kind of community these strangers were building” (208).

Radical Kinship

Although table fellowship was central to Miles’s experience of the Gospel, her practice of the table was inextricably bound with the practice of radical kinship. Driven by our common hunger as humans, and our common creation in the image of God, all humans were invited to and welcomed at Christ’s table. A crucial theme of Take This Bread is the powerful way in which God continually brings diverse people together around the table. “[The Eucharist] reconciled, if only for a minute, all of God’s creation,” she writes: “revealing that without exception, we were members of one body, God’s body, in endless diversity. The feast showed us how to re-member what had been dis-membered by human attempts to separate and divide, judge and cast out, select or punish. At that Table, sharing food, we were brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole” (76-77). This inclusion into the reconciling work of Christ was not just a privilege of the well-educated church professional, but rather was open to all who desired to follow Christ. “’Real’ Christians,” Miles writes: “weren’t the ones who happened to control the levers of ecclesiastical power, those who belonged to the biggest churches or oldest traditions. They could be total outsiders and still perform rites that evoked the Gospel messages of healing, new life, shared food, shared grief, shared peace. They included anyone who, like those first unqualified disciples, got a taste of Jesus and followed him” (241).

Discernment in Conversation

One final theme that stands out in Take This Bread, is the church’s practice of discerning in conversation, however slow and frustrating that process might be. Miles tells two particular stories of this kind of discernment. The first story is that of her proposing the idea of the food pantry and the barrage of opposition that she received as a result. Even the pastoral leaders of the congregation were not thrilled about the idea. Eventually though, the idea of the pantry was one that could not be resisted, and it would come to fruition and thrive.

The second story of this sort is one about the food pantry’s growth and success: how was it to expand once it reached its maximum capacity? Miles labors over this decision, recognizing the pains of working at or over capacity, but also not wanting to turn away any hungry person who came in search of food. After many conversations and a prolonged season of operating at capacity, Miles receives a significant and unexpected monetary gift that will enable similar food pantries to open in adjacent neighborhoods, expanding the horizons of their work, but allowing each pantry to function on a smaller, more hospitable, scale.

Reflecting on a different season of disagreement and turmoil in her church, Miles poignantly observes: “Being a Christian … was turning out to be the opposite of having ‘God on our side.’ It meant expanding not just a personal capacity to suffer but the personal and institutional capacity to dwell in ambiguity and unsettledness. It occurred to me that the church was a place, maybe the only place, where that could happen” (167).  This sort of vision for the church, rooted in the scriptural witness of Jesus and those who followed in his footsteps, is a radical and compelling witness of what it might look like to live the Word.