Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
–Sara Miles
Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer. Then early one winter morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church. “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.
The mysterious sacrament of communion has sustained Miles ever since, in a faith she’d scorned, in work she’d never imagined. 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.
A lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the woman her friends expected to see suddenly praising Jesus. 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. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church’s altar to be given away. The first food pantry she established provided hundreds of poor, elderly, sick, deranged, and marginalized people with lifesaving food and a sense of belonging. Within a few years, the loaves had multiplied, and she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen more pantries.
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. She recounts stories about trudging through the rain in housing projects, wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, storing a battered woman’s .375 Magnum in a cookie tin. She writes about the economy of hunger and the ugly politics of food; the meaning of prayer and the physicality of faith. Here, in this achingly beautiful, passionate book, is the living communion of Christ.
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24 Reviews
| From: Amazon Posted: Sep 20, 2007 Type: User Review |
Take this bread: A radical conversion
I loved this book, i could not put it down. Sarah had such a way of presenting her life and her love of Jesus who she met through the communion in the eating of bread. As a woman priest i appreciated the role food played in the development of...
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 5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Sep 13, 2007 Type: User Review |
Communion is for Everyone
Sara Miles tells an inspiring story of how she found her connection to Christ and his Church. A friend said "I read it in about two days. Awesome awesome. ... " Saying that "... congregations that will live on the edge [like Sara's] are tapping...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Aug 29, 2007 Type: User Review |
Practical Christianity
I found Take This Bread to be an interesting, practical approach to understanding and applying Jesus' message, especially as regards to inclusion and accepting one another. Sara Miles opens herself up, sharing very personal experiences and...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Aug 12, 2007 Type: User Review |
an excellent and inspiring story
an inspiring story that mirrors my journey through my work with our local food bank. I can relate totally to all of her joys and frustrations, and to the yearning to "love my neighbor", to follow Christ, "go and do likewise"
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Aug 06, 2007 Type: User Review |
Very good...
I really enjoyed Sara Miles's "Take This Bread." Even without the religious angle, Miles's life is an interesting one: raised in Greenwich Village by athiest parents, she worked in food service for several years before getting involved in...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jul 21, 2007 Type: User Review |
Take this Bread...and this book!
This book came recommended by Anne Lamott from the Sun Valley Writer's Conference newsletter. I am so glad I took her up on her suggestion. Sara Miles' conversion story is one of the best books of biblical exegeses I have had the pleasure to...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 08, 2007 Type: User Review |
W O W !!!
This book was written with heart and the story was lived with heart and soul at the ready...Christ is expressed as the food of Love...I was not surprised that she has become a beacon to those who don't "do" church because of all the restrictions...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 17, 2007 Type: User Review |
A spiritual memoir for the 21st century
I am a life long Christian so I was especially interested in reading how an atheist in her 40's experienced a conversion upon wandering into an Episcopal church and taking communion. What led up to that and what followed that conversion are...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 15, 2007 Type: User Review |
hunger and holiness
Sara Miles describes herself as a blue-state, secular intellectual, a lesbian, and a left-wing journalist who developed habits of deep scepticism from covering revolutionary movements in Central America. Her grandparents on both sides were...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 20, 2007 Type: User Review |
Hang on for a wild ride
Passionate--open hearted--piercingly intelligent--earthy--occasionally profane--absolutely unconventional--Sara's raw story of her own life pulled me along to its hopeful conclusion, all my other reading set aside for later. This is NOT a "how-to"...
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5.00/5 |
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