I found myself identifying with her and agreeing with her on certain fundamental principles, or finding strength in my own different approach to worship. Nonetheless, as Sara Miles took me along on her journey from atheist to Christian, unflichingly laying out her biases and weaknesses, I had to examine my own biases and weaknesses.

This author and I couldn't be more different, and I'm sure she'd strongly disapprove of my LDS religion (even the liberal wing of the Episcopalian church was far too conservative for her). I felt uncomfortable and challenged, not by the language but by some of the opinions and views.

I didn't necessarily 'enjoy' reading this book while I was actually reading it. Here, in this achingly beautiful, passionate book, is the living communion of Christ. She writes about the economy of hunger and the ugly politics of food the meaning of prayer and the physicality of faith. She recounts stories about trudging through the rain in housing projects, wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, storing a battered woman’s. Take This Bread is rich with real-life Dickensian characters–church ladies, child abusers, millionaires, schizophrenics, bishops, and thieves–all blown into Miles’s life by the relentless force of her newfound calling. Within a few years, the loaves had multiplied, and she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen more pantries. The first food pantry she established provided hundreds of poor, elderly, sick, deranged, and marginalized people with lifesaving food and a sense of belonging. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church’s altar to be given away. She was certainly not the kind of person the government had in mind to run a “faith-based charity.” Religion for her was not about angels or good behavior or piety it was about real hunger, real food, and real bodies.

In this astonishing story, she tells how the seeds of her conversion were sown, and what her life has been like since she took that bread.Ī lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the woman her friends expected to see suddenly praising Jesus. The mysterious sacrament of communion has sustained Miles ever since, in a faith she’d scorned, in work she’d never imagined. “I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian,” she writes, “or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut.” But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed. Then early one winter morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church. Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer. “Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert.”

Take This Bread by Sara Miles