Sara Miles and the practice of taking communion bread

¶ … Bread

Sara Miles "Take This Bread"

One day when Sara Miles was 46 years old she did something she had never done before, the celebrated the sacrament of Holy Eucharist for the first time. She described this monumental event as "outrageous and terrifying," and said it "made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced." (Miles, p. 59) But if one reads her book, entitled "Take This Bread," and reads it carefully, one will see that this experience is one that she had been preparing for her entire life. While she claims that she had lived a secular life, and for the most art she did, she unknowingly maintained Christian ideals inside of her in the guise of secular ideology. When she said that she had spent 46 years living a secular life, what she did not realize was that she had spent 46 years preparing for her role as a Christian who's mission it would be to spread the word of Christ through her feeding of the poor and needy.

As the author stated is the book, "my education had taken place among all kinds of people, on several continents." (p. 14) But as it had been based upon physical experiences and questioning, she had very little trust in official dogmas of any kind. However, her experiences in the poorest places on Earth, such as when she visited the peasants of the Philippines, or El Salvador, taught her the compassion and generosity of the poverty stricken and their food. Everywhere she visited, "despite the danger my presence often meant, strangers fed me, freely. Food took on new meaning for me…" (p. 40) The author began to understand how the sharing of food with the hungry could bring about a spiritual happiness that is the basis of Christianity.

But even as Miles traveled around the planet, working with the downtrodden and poverty-stricken, it was in the sense of a secular political movement. She witnesses atrocities and injustices that were intolerable, but she witnesses them from a political perspective, and her answers came back from that same political spectrum. But all along, in the recesses of her mind she remembered the generosity of the poverty-stricken when it came to sharing the sustenance of life: food. She described how the food of the rural poor tasted like dirt, and the food of the urban poor always had a greasy taste, but "people gave me food, and I ate it all…." (p. 49)

While Sara Miles traveled the world writing about Marxist, socialists, and other revolutionary types, she was setting the stage for her own epiphany, simply by eating with the ordinary poor. Without realizing it, she was following in the footsteps of Christ by eating with those who were normally considered to be too low class to eat with. Many may call this pragmatism, and by following in the path of Christ, even unknowingly, is to embrace pragmatism is one's life. Sara Miles spent her time among the poorest people on the planet, similar to Christ's instruction that performing acts of kindness to the "least of these my brothers, you did it to me." (Matt. 25:40)

So when she finally decided to enter a Episcopal church and celebrate the Holy Eucharist, it would seem a natural extension of her life experiences. Food had always been an underlying, but important part of her, and there she was sharing the body and blood of Christ. She had always been involved in social justice, albeit in a secular way, and had not embraced the Christian Liberation Theology that was popular at the same time. This could have been caused by her acquired distrust of theological dogmas. However, it seems that the sharing of food was the connection she needed to recognize the Christian ideology that was already in her heart.

For the first few years, Sara Miles allowed herself to become entangled in the theological and ideological discussions and arguments surround the teachings of Jesus. But when she decided to open the food pantry and not engage in theological arguments, but simply feed the poor, that she finally understood the role that God had chosen for her. And not unsurprisingly, Sara Miles finally received baptism, "the Sunday after the pantry opened." (p. 121) It was through the act of feeding the poor that Sara Miles accepted Christ into her heart, not through the complicated theological studies or discussions.