Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
by Sara Miles
Ballantine Books, 304 pages

Reviewed by Scott Korb

On April 18, 1906, an eight-year-old Dorothy Day, then living in Oakland, was introduced to charity. “When the earth settled,” she recalls in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, “the house was a shambles, dishes broken all over the floor, books out of their bookcases, chandeliers down, chimneys fallen, the house cracked from roof to ground.” Following the great earthquake that struck San Francisco that morning, Day explains, “All the neighbors joined my mother in serving the homeless. Every stitch of available clothes was given away.” In those days, God, like the earthquake, was a “tremendous Force” unrelated to love, and likewise — some twenty years before her radical conversion to Catholicism — totally unrelated to Jesus. Though she claims God had haunted her her entire life, Day’s reminiscences from those early days in California were simply about “the joy of doing good, of sharing whatever we had with others.”

In the winter of 1999, a forty-six-year-old Sara Miles, having felt the mysterious, yet unconscious tug of God for most of her life, wandered into San Francisco’s St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, and was introduced to Jesus. Drawn to what she would describe as the “collective experience” — something she had felt incompletely as both a restaurant cook in New York and war correspondent throughout Latin America — following the routine of the rest of the congregation, Miles “sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang.” Then, still following along more or less unaware of what was happening around her, Miles was handed some bread (which she ate) and a goblet of wine (which she drank), and experienced her first communion. Before “Jesus happened” to her, Miles had been a leftwing journalist, a lesbian, and, like her parents, an atheist. Yet this tiny meal, the central moment of her new book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, would change her life.

Though politically Miles still leans to the left, and she married her girlfriend as soon as San Francisco sanctioned it, taking the bread made her a believer. With Jesus “lodged in [her] like a crumb,” through the food pantry she founded at St. Gregory’s in 2000, Miles dedicated herself to feeding San Francisco’s homeless and needy, as Day said, “sharing whatever we had with others.”

While like The Long Loneliness, Take This Bread is a confession, Miles’s book feels smaller. (Although, placed next to Day’s masterpiece, what spiritual memoir wouldn’t?) This is no insult to Miles, whose story is inspiring and well-crafted, and whose work among San Francisco’s poor would have greatly pleased Day.

The comparison may say as much, in fact, about the religious tenor of their times as it does about either writer’s success in telling her story. Day notes that The Long Loneliness was difficult to write not just because, as a journalist, she was “not a book writer,” but more, because with it she was giving herself away. Without apology or embarrassment, in her opening pages Day equates confession, writing, and charity — all hard, sacramental work that comprised her religious life and stood together at the center of her religious genius. In Day’s day, she could begin a memoir by stepping entirely outside of herself, asserting: “When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness.” Your only embarrassment as a religious person is in being recognized by a priest who knows “your ugly, gray, drab, monotonous sins.”

Miles’s confession likewise begins during a Christian sacrament: She receives communion. Conceding that this is a “routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans,” yet “appalled by [religion’s] fundamentalist crusaders,” today Miles must contend with the political implications of merely receiving the sacrament, especially as a lesbian, and like Day, with a “bastard” daughter. And so, her Christian apology in the name of collective experience becomes a steady, and sometimes embarrassed, march of I, I, I.

. . . I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people. And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I’d experienced. I started a food pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where I’d first received the body of Christ. I organized new food pantries. . .. Without committees or meetings or even an official telephone number, I recruited scores of volunteers and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so on. Against all odds — and just as often against the wishes of her liberal and inclusive, yet remarkably stuffy, congregation — Miles does the work she was made to do: She feeds people. She gives people communion.

Even so, Miles shows no lack of gratitude to God, her friends, and her corps of volunteers alike. In its way, Take This Bread does them all real justice, ending, as it does, with a fanciful meditation on the community she imagines will gather at the food pantry forever.

Yet each time she claims to be as flawed as the self-righteous fundamentalists who hate gays or the narrow-minded members of her church who refuse to share their altar with stinking poor people; each time she claims to be doubtful when encountering the “impossible reality of God,” or asserting that faith provides no “set of easy answers or certainties” and only raises more questions than it resolves; each time she claims to be abashed by what sounds pretentious to her own ears — each time she reasserts herself. In one instance, after claiming what seemed obvious to her, that the point of church was “To feed them, so they can go out and, you know, be Jesus,” she writes: “My voice trailed off. But I meant it. You have been greatly loved, said a piece of the Gospel that had stuck with me. Go and do likewise. That seemed pretty damn clear.”

During the Depression, Catholic Workers fed a thousand men a day. And even then Day refused to take credit:

We never started a bread line. We didn’t intend to have a breadline or a soup line come to the door. . . . During the Seamen’s Strike of 1937, six of them showed up. They said, “We’re on strike, we have no place to stay, we have no food. We’re sleeping in a loft on the waterfront.” We took in about ten seamen. . . . They could make sandwiches all day and there was coffee on the stove. While we were doing that for the seamen, one of the fellows on the Bowery said. “What the hell are you doing down there feeding the seamen? What about the men on the Bowery? Nobody’s feeding them.” . . . That’s how the first breadline started. . . . It stared simply because that Bowery guy got mad.

It’s easy to imagine Dorothy Day saying to a poor Bowery boy, “Here, take this bread.” Yet of her life of service she concluded: “I feel that I have done nothing well. But I have done what I could.”

Yet, coming from Miles, Take This Bread often seems more like a command than an offer. Her book was written for a time when it’s hard to imagine the transcendent you that Dorothy Day saw in “religious” (to say nothing of the easier to locate “us”). Like Day, Miles is a gifted writer who has accomplished great things in the name of Jesus. She’s written a good book in evidence of that. Yet unlike Day, who once claimed that “everything we’ve done we’ve been pushed into,” Miles too often seems pushy and alone.

Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God.

Read an excerpt from Take This Bread at Killing the Buddha.