A Hunger for Faith

...She had that sense honed early when she was a college student in Mexico...

...Because of my journey much of what Miles writes in this intensely personal and wonderfully irreverent book strikes a chord...

...As she puts it, "Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find what God was up to...

...While she never made the connection at the time of the way their religion and their politics were connected, she did experience the sense of community that came when poor families living under threats from the death squads took her in and fed her along the way...

...The Episcopal Church, like many other denominations, does not allow just anyone to consecrate bread, so Miles was breaking the rules...

...She has chronicled her own struggles in what she calls "an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion...

...She worked as a no-nonsense cook in restaurants in New York and as a radical journalist and organizer in Central America during the wars of the 1980s...

...During the wars in Central America, she met many Christian activists engaged in struggles against the Contras in Nicaragua and the military in El Salvador and their American patrons...

...Or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut...

...Miles's book offers bread for the mind, much as her other works have offered bread for the body...

...As I received authorization to work as a pastor in the UCC, I learned that I had the authority to lead the communion ritual...

...And like Dorothy Day and Anne Lamott, Sara Miles has not lost her political edge as she has adopted a new value system, although she does approach politics differently now...

...There I was, at a mid-summer evening vespers service with a small crowd of mostly older folks, holding up bread, blessing it, and breaking it...

...Flying was not in the cards for Miles, but feeding people was...

...There are echoes in this book of the devout writings of Dorothy Day-the radical journalist of the 1930s who converted to Catholicism and started the Catholic Worker houses that have fed people and fostered activists ever since...

...It was to be passed on...

...For me, one part of the journey was shedding at age fifty a Catholic identity to the dismay of a wide network of Catholic family and friends...

...And in that kind of sharing, I began to experience something similar to what Miles describes in her book- shared bread as the way people experience God in one another...

...Then as I moved toward working as a pastor in a new denomination, I faced that odd juxtaposition of newsroom and sanctuary, of colleagues who were trained to doubt everything and congregation members whose lives revolved around their beliefs...

...My friends, at most, read about Buddhism or practiced yoga...

...Her story holds particular interest for me...

...She also recognized that the bread was not to be hoarded...

...It reminded her that the Jesus she was following made a habit out of eating with all the wrong people: the tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, women, random people who might gather hungry on a hill...

...This connection of bread- bread shared with the hungry around a table at a meal program, bread blessed and broken around a communion table-is elemental to the Christianity that Miles experiences and that is so much a part of my life today...

...She became passionate "to learn the difference between the official story and the physical reality...

...My spiritual journey has been more evolutionary and less abrupt than that of Miles, but I surely can identify with her trying to redefine herself in the midst of skeptical friends...

...And for her, that action became all about feeding people...

...We shared bread and concern for one another...

...She started coming back to this church and sharing in communion there regularly...

...So she became a reporter...

...She is a lesbian, mother of a child born outside of marriage, someone who deeply distrusted dogma of any kind...

...She witnessed a student demonstration in Mexico City that ended in the deaths of twenty-five students but that never made the news...

...I don't mean I slipped into a we're-all-God's-children kind of mush, where I felt at one with John Ashcroft...

...Kansas City was on his dangerous list...

...Miles moves distant theological debates right down to the nitty-gritty of dealing with cantankerous poor people at the door of the food pantry...

...Phil Haslanger is a contributing editor at The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, and associate pastor of Fitchburg Memorial United Church of Christ...

...She writes that she went in with "no more than a reporter's habitual curiosity...

...I share a passion with Miles for the centrality within the Christian experience of taking bread and sharing it...

...She saw it as bread that gave life...

...Miles is aware that in discovering Christianity, she is not just making claims about faith that her secular friends find very hard to swallow...

...Like politics, faith had to be about action...

...As I got to know them," she writes, "I started to see more clearly how the people who came to the pantry were like me: messed up, often prickly and difficult, yearning for friendship...

...She also bears the brunt of their antagonism toward the Christian right, the electoral force that has fueled so much of the spiteful and regressive politics of the Bush era...

...But the holy meal took precedence...

...I mentioned that my daughter in college took classes there...

...Both of them were curious about how I could live in the "other" world...

...I now straddle the skeptical world of journalism at a hell-raising progressive newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin ( The Capital Times, a longtime cousin of this magazine) and the faith-imbued world of religion, where I work half time as a pastor at a congregation of the United Church of Christ (which is at the liberal end of American denominations...

...But the last few years have been a period of transformation for me, as well...

...As Miles goes deeper into her life at church, she first helps distribute communion during worship services, then finds herself one day actually saying the holy words of consecration as she prepares toast for a friend at home who is dying...

...Miles opens a way for people captured by the power of Jesus's story to reconcile that story with progressive politics...

...And then there was the night at Luke House, a place in my hometown that offers two meals a day for folks who can't always afford food...

...She joins an important cadre of religious voices offering a view of engagement with the problems of the world that seeks change without driving wedges between people, that combines the authenticity of her work and life with the politics she espouses...

...If this book were simply a conversion story, it could easily get shelved along with lots of other sweet stories of people finding God and changing their lives...

...She found that her own views about religion and politics shifted a bit...

...At the heart of Miles's conversion was her stroll into an Episcopal church in San Francisco on a Sunday morning in 1999 when she was forty-six years old...

...Miles, though, has written far more than that...

...Along the way, she offers biting insights into the role of religion in American society, gives an inside look at the way this country provides-or doesn't provide-for its poorest citizens, and delves honestly into the contradictions of organized religion, even within politically progressive congregations...

...As a Catholic, I had grown up with the understanding that only an ordained priest could consecrate the bread...

...She was raised in Greenwich Village by confirmed atheists who gave her "boundless love, liberal politics, and secular morals...

...I don't mean I became a right-winger," she hastens to write...

...The religious symbolism is important to those of us who have chosen to be followers of Jesus, but in a society rife with disparities in wealth and in a world where hunger is all too prevalent, the notion of sharing bread is a powerful image and a vital need for far more than just believers...

...But she found she could also get impatient with progressive Christians "who thought it was enough to proclaim sanctimoniously that they were committed to 'peace and justice.'" She grew to reject a Christianity that insisted on people taking sides...

...Then she convinced them to start a food pantry...

...In America, I knew exactly one person who was Christian," she writes in her new book, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion...

...Her explanation was simple: "If I wanted to see God, I could feed people...

...By Phil Haslanger Sara Miles was a pretty unlikely candidate to convert to Christianity...

...It is those images of food-food served in a restaurant, food served in a war zone, food served in church on a Sunday morning-that recur throughout this book...

...As I passed the bread to a fellow diner, he rattled off his self-created list of safe and unsafe cities...

...And Christians weren't exactly part of her social network...

...So, as she puts it, "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian...

...She observes that the Christians who supported American military might without reservations were the same people who were all about rules in their religion and all about criteria for who would get to heaven...

...A holy meal was taking place, and I was in the midst of it...

...It couldn't be about wrangling over the Bible to find justification for your convictions," she writes...

...She was not interested in Bible-quoting debates that drew sharp lines in the sand...

...Miles recognized that when she took the bread of communion on that Sunday morning in 1999, the bread changed her life...

...True, our backgrounds are very different: I was raised in a religious household, have been active in church all my life, am a heterosexual, married father of four grown children, with a longtime career in local journalism...

...Miles has a good sense of the contradictions in life, whether it's in the stories of the people who come to eat, in the actions of her Christian companions, or in the world of power and politics...

...In the process, she came to see this piece of bread as way more than a symbolic wafer...

...She passed it to the next person, "compelled to find new ways to share what I'd experienced...

...But I doubt I am alone in finding this book spot on for the activist seeking a deeper meaning to life than just getting ready for the next strategy session...

...The experience is not always comforting...

...Tell her to be careful," he advised me...

...Then she helped start other food pantries...

...Jesus's meal had left the building," she writes of the moment...

...There is also a sense of the hip irreverence of contemporary author Anne Lamott, who left behind a wild life but not a wild sense of humor as she found that faith gave new texture to her life...

...Once inside, though, she wound up eating the communion bread as it was passed to her...

...And she knew how that sounded to her friends: "It seemed as crazy as saying I had eaten a magic potion that could make me fly...