PeaceBang

Take This Bread: A PeaceBang Review

Sara Miles is a fan of this blog and wrote me a note this past spring saying that she wanted to send me a copy of her book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. Would I like to receive it? Are you kidding? You BET I would!

I received the book this summer and am still reading it. It’s not that I’m too busy to finish it; it’s just that I don’t want it to end. Sara Miles is such a sister of my heart that I like to read a little bit of her story then put it away for awhile so I can hear her voice again when I need it. After all, it’s not like anything really happens in this book. It’s not a sexy adventure story. It’s just the story of one person’s attempt to deal with God’s inconvenient call, to struggle to accommodate an old and a new world view, to not be too obnoxious about her new passion for Jesus, and to love her partner and child while riding the bucking bronco of that elusive thing called “Christian life.”

Miles writes beautifully - she has an impressive background as a journalist with specialties in Latin American revolutions and politics (some of us remember with fondness her reporting for Out magazine before it became a campy glam-boy mag) — and her story really begins when she ventures into St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco and takes Communion for the first time. An unchurched atheist, Miles writes that “something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”

Her description of what happens next will cause anyone who has had a similarly shocking experience with Jesus to hoot with recognition and to cheer aloud her disorientation and her subsequent frantic attempts to intellectualize the whole thing. Oh, girl, I feel you! For all my friends and relatives who wonder how I could have become a Christian, I want to xerox pages 58-61 and say, “Here. I totally can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any sense, but here’s a beautiful description of how it doesn’t make any sense.”

Miles is then drawn into giving herself over to the literal fulfillment of Jesus’ exhortation to feed the hungry. She joins St. Gregory’s* and starts a food pantry. One of the things I love and appreciate best about this memoir is that it isn’t the story of how someone found Jesus and then did something nice and social justice-y about it for awhile before becoming a celebrity speaker on the topic. It’s the story of how someone found Jesus, rolled up her sleeves and went to work feeding the hungry, and is still working with that food pantry today. Rock on, Sara Miles! Thank you for writing so honestly about church life. And kudos to your community and its priests for supporting you in this.

St. Gregory’s food pantry feeds hundreds of families every week. It costs $50 to feed one family for a year.
If everyone reading this post over the next day or two contributes $5 to the PeaceBang blog, we could feed 30 families for a year. If you’d like to contribute to St. Gregory’s through PeaceBang, go to the “Support PeaceBang Blog” and follow the links to PayPal. Let’s see what we can do together. I will match all contributions made today and tomorrow. [Update on Sept. 29: we’re up to $400, gang! Woo hoo! Keep it up!! - PB]

I think it needs to be said that this book is the antidote to the rampant narcissism of another spiritual memoir written by a talented and charismatic writer, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Love, Pray (which I have ungenerously re-titled Gripe, Brag, Screw). Sara’s book is the good strong soap I needed to cleanse me after being dipped in Ms. Gilbert’s sticky vat of self-absorption, white privilege and obvious addiction to personal crisis and drama. Take This Bread is also full of personal crisis and drama, but since Miles’ focus is on service and not on self, it is far more meaningful to me. It says a lot about our culture that Gilbert’s memoir has been greeted with breathless adoration by thousands and thousands of Americans and has reached best-seller status, while Miles’ book has had a more modest reception. One book is about spirituality at its most individualistic and self-serving, the other is about the demands of religious life following a radical conversion experience. One is Hollywood, the other, Jerusalem.

Take this book and read.

*Sara, I visited St. Gregory’s in August of 2000 and then again two or three years later. I wonder if I may have met you during one of those times? Your face looked so familiar to me on your book jacket…
The second time I attended was the Feast of Mary Magdalene and Donald preached on a trip to China. I was invited to carry one of the –what do you call them? — liturgical umbrellas?