Take This Bread. Steal This Book.

Take This Bread by Sara Miles (Ballantine Books, 2008) serves up a nourishing and enthralling spiritual memoir. The book tells the true-life story of a lesbian atheist whose life is totally changed through one experience of Radical Hospitality. (Radical Hospitality is one of the Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations; see www.five practices.org). The story begins simply but dramatically:

“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.”

Through partaking of communion at a table where she felt unconditionally accepted, Sara Miles found herself transformed in ways she never expected. And in being transformed, she transformed her own church and the community around her. But it all started with the Radical Hospitality lived out at Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco (www.saintgregorys.org). The parish’s unconventional liturgy is rooted in the sharing of the Eucharistic Bread, taking very literally Jesus’ command to “feed my sheep.”

Miles felt instantly and fully welcome at Saint Gregory’s. She was a stranger; she was welcome. She did not first believe; but she was welcome. She did not understand; she was welcome. She was not a regular; but she was welcome. She did not dress for the occasion; she was welcome. She was an unprepared outsider; yet she was welcome. Saint Gregory’s parishioners did not treat her as someone crashing a private party; they did not react to her visit as if she were an interloper, a rude uninvited guest. The parish practiced Radical Hospitality. The parish practiced Christ’s message.

Of course, Miles took the parish and its message of Radical Hospitality seriously. In doing so, she challenged old assumptions. She challenged how committed the parish really was to its core message of feeding Christ’s sheep. Her church membership and communion had consequences: she was baptized, she was confirmed, she got involved. More important, she saw food as a literal metaphor for spirituality. She started a successful food pantry that was built around the Eucharistic Table. Hungry people (mostly working families) got food with no questions asked, no complicated forms, no test for neediness. Unconditional acceptance. This unruly and unsettling step challenged the comfortable life of the congregation and had far-reaching consequences beyond the church, ultimately spawning grace upon grace with the creation of food pantries well beyond the parish’s neighborhood.

Here is a sampling of some provocative passages from Take This Bread:

• “What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: You can’t be a Christian by yourself.”
• “My first, questioning year at church ended with a question whose urgency would propel me into work I’d never imagined: Now that you’ve taken the bread, what are you going to do?”
• “ ‘At St. Gregory’s we have great community dinners—everyone brings, you know, pasta with truffle oil—but we don’t feed people who aren’t like us. We’re all arty and overeducated and terrified of people who are different.’ “
• “My suspicion was that committees in churches served the same purpose as committees in other institutions: They were holding tanks for people who professed interest in an issue but didn’t always want to act.”
• “ ‘Churchly legitimacy get its hand in rather than crazy hospitality, the open extravagance of the Last Supper. And you get further and further from the power and genius of that meal.’ ”

Food for thought, indeed.

In the early Seventies, Abbie Hoffman wrote a book with the provocative title Steal This Book. It caused a stir with its title and its contents. While I cannot be so reckless as to recommend that you steal this book, I am tempted.

May you likewise be tempted.

p.s. I rather doubt that the author of Take This Bread would be strongly opposed to your theft of this book if it were to lead you to faith in action, although I'm sure she has bills to pay, too.