Take This Bread
Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First-Century Christian
By Sara Miles
New York: Ballantine Books, 2007
Review by Carl McColman
If, like me, you love stories like Chocolat or Babette’s Feast because of their eucharistic overtones, then you will simply adore Take This Bread, which is quite likely the most explicitly joyous eucharistic conversion story I’ve ever read. I’m struggling to avoid all the obvious gustatory puns: it’s a feast, you’ll eat it up, and so forth. There, I’ve gotten them out of me, so now I can just tell you what a delightful and theologically nimble book this is. Author Sara Miles begins with a candid assessment of the irony that courses through her story: the leftist lesbian atheist who in her mid-40s wanders into a church, receives communion, finds herself eyeball to eyeball with God, and then goes off and starts to live the gospel. Yee haw! And while Miles dances around the question of how she came to be in that church to begin with (the book’s major, and really only, misstep), she keeps her story gut-level honest by never shying away from her incisive criticism of churchianity (both before and after that momentous communion), her impatience with academic theology, and her willingness to acknowledge the messiness of juggling her emergent enthusiasm for Christianity with ongoing commitment to loved ones who do not share her faith.
But this is not really a book about conversion so much as it is a book about communion, which means it is a book about food. (more…)
