Take This Bread.

Book Review

Miles, Sara. Take This Bread. A radical conversion. The spiritual memoir of a twenty-first-century Christian. Ballantine Books. 2007.
S.M.- an author who has written extensively on military affairs, politics, and culture.

Comment. Henry
This is an amazing story of a person whose ‘conversion’ is unusual. Her subsequent experience as a Christian is also unusual. There is much food for thought here regarding the challenge of carrying out the scriptural mandate to provide for the needy (poor).


Sara says of her own experience, “Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert”. She is a lesbian and has a daughter from a previous relationship. Her grandparents on both sides of her family were missionaries and/or ministers. Her parents were atheists.

She was converted as she partook of the ‘mysterious sacrament of communion’ at St. Gregory’s Episcoplalian Church in San Francisco. Sara says about this experience, “Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb” (39) It became a source of spiritual food that wanted to return to again and again.

Out of this focus on the Eucharist providing spiritual nourishment a ‘ministry’ was developed providing for the needy through a food bank operated out of St, Charles Church and regular celebrations of the Eucharist around the altar by those who received food. This became Sara’s life purpose and it grew as she was instrumental in starting many other food banks in San Francisco.

In her spiritual journey Sara shares her understanding of truth as she experiences it in her chosen work. I think of it as the gospel according to the ministry to the needy. She offered food to anyone who showed up and she also offered communion to these people. There were no restrictions on who would receive what was being offered. James Alison, a Catholic theologian, says of this book, “The story of how people grow though becoming empowered to be givers is a wonderful glimpse at a true emergence of Church”.