Book Review: Take This Bread

In Take This Bread, Sara Miles tells her story.

She writes about how working in restaurants in New York deepened her love of food. She writes about working as a journalist in the midst of armed conflicts in Central America. She writes about the birth of her daughter. She writes about being raised without spiritual faith by parents who nursed a grudge against the Christianity in which they had been raised.

She also writes about the day she walked into a church for the first time and everything was changed by eating a piece of bread and taking a sip of wine.

Her love of real food, and real bodies, becomes the foundation for an honest, questioning faith that does not turn away from challenges in the church or in the world.

It took time for things to change. Sara read, learned, and prayed, even when she did not realize what prayer was. She came to grasp the values of her church, and to put them into practice by suggesting that the hand-carved altar would be a great place to start a food pantry.

The food pantry began operating the same week that Sara was baptized. There is a cosmic dance that includes both the people who are drawn to Sara’s church to receive Communion and the people who are drawn there to receive groceries. There is a balance, and a tension, between the activist and the contemplative on each step of the way.

Take This Bread tells the story of Sara Miles’ faith journey, as well as the story of the food pantry she organized at her church. Both of these moving stories are filled with life and struggle, and populated by very human, very inspiring characters.