Sara Miles Take This Bread: Faith Through Feeding the Poor
This paper analyzes Sara Miles' memoir Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, arguing that despite decades of secular political work, Miles unknowingly embodied Christian ideals throughout her life. By tracing her experiences feeding and being fed by the world's poorest communities — from the Philippines to El Salvador — the paper shows how food became the spiritual thread connecting her secular past to her eventual conversion. The essay examines how Miles' decision to open a food pantry, rather than engage in theological debate, became the defining act of her faith and the moment she truly accepted Christianity.
- Introduction: An Unexpected Conversion: Miles' first Eucharist as life-defining moment
- A Secular Education Rooted in Compassion: Global travels build distrust of dogma but deepen empathy
- Food as Spiritual Preparation: Being fed by the poor awakens spiritual awareness
- Following in Christ's Footsteps Unknowingly: Secular activism mirrors Christ's ministry among the poor
- The Eucharist and the Food Pantry: Sharing food bridges secular past and Christian faith
- Finding Faith Through Action: Feeding the poor becomes the foundation of belief
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper builds a clear central argument — that Miles' secular life was actually unconscious preparation for Christian conversion — and supports it consistently with direct quotations from the memoir.
- It draws a meaningful parallel between Miles' habit of eating with the poor and Christ's instruction in Matthew 25:40, giving the analysis theological grounding without overstating it.
- The conclusion ties the argument together neatly by showing how action (opening the food pantry) preceded and enabled theological understanding, rather than the reverse.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic textual analysis: it identifies a single recurring motif — food and eating — and traces that motif across multiple phases of the subject's life to argue for a coherent spiritual trajectory. This technique shows how a symbol or practice can accumulate meaning across a narrative, making the eventual epiphany feel earned rather than sudden.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with Miles' conversion moment, then moves chronologically backward through her secular life to show the roots of her faith. It progresses through her global travels, her political worldview, her Eucharist experience, and her founding of the food pantry, ending with a forward-looking reflection on her ongoing theological exploration. This structure — present moment, past context, future implication — is well suited to memoir analysis.
Introduction: An Unexpected Conversion
One day, when Sara Miles was 46 years old, she did something she had never done before: she celebrated the sacrament of the 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 memoir, entitled Take This Bread, carefully, it becomes clear that this experience was one she had been preparing for her entire life. While she claims to have lived a secular life — and for the most part she did — she unknowingly maintained Christian ideals within herself, expressed through 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 whose mission it would be to spread the word of Christ by feeding the poor and needy.
A Secular Education Rooted in Compassion
As Miles states in the book, "my education had taken place among all kinds of people, on several continents" (p. 14). Because her education was grounded in physical experience and questioning, she had very little trust in official dogmas of any kind. However, her experiences in the poorest places on Earth — such as among the peasants of the Philippines or in El Salvador — taught her the compassion and generosity of the poverty-stricken and their relationship with food. Everywhere she visited, "despite the danger my presence often meant, strangers fed me, freely. Food took on new meaning for me…" (p. 40). Miles began to understand how the sharing of food with the hungry could produce a spiritual happiness that lies at the very basis of Christianity.
Food as Spiritual Preparation
Even as Miles traveled around the world working with the downtrodden and poverty-stricken, she did so in the spirit of a secular political movement. She witnessed atrocities and injustices she found intolerable, but she witnessed them from a political perspective, and her responses came from that same political spectrum. All along, however, in the recesses of her mind, she remembered the generosity of the rural poor 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 carried a greasy taste, but "people gave me food, and I ate it all…" (p. 49). These experiences, accumulating over years of travel and witness, quietly formed the spiritual foundation she did not yet recognize as such.
Works Cited
Good News Bible: The Bible in Today's English Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1976. Print.
Miles, Sara. Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. New York: Ballantine, 2007. Print.
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