"Take This Bread"
Salon.com has a chapter from "Take This Bread" by Sara Miles. This is the editor's note that introduces the chapter: At 46, Sara Miles, a left-wing, secular journalist and former cook, found herself an unlikely convert to Christianity. She joined St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where she turned the bread she ate at Communion into groceries for a food bank that now feeds over 450 people a week. The following excerpt is from her memoir about what she calls her "unexpected and terribly inconvenient" spiritual awakening -- "Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion."
This explanation/meditation/I-don't-know-what on the Eucharist literally (and I do mean "literally" in the correct way) took my breath away -- I doubled over as the breath expelled from me. I hope it affects you the same way: All that grounded me were those pieces of bread. I was feeling my way toward a theology, beginning with what I had taken in my mouth and working out from there. I couldn't start by conceptualizing God as an abstract "Trinity" or trying to "prove" a divine existence philosophically. It was the materiality of Christianity that fascinated me, the compelling story of incarnation in its grungiest details, the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected. I reflected, for example, about [my daughter] Katie, and about what it was like to be both a mother and a mother's child. The entire process of human reproduction was, if I considered it for a minute, about as "intolerable" as the apostles said communion was. It sounded just as weird as the claim that God was in a piece of bread you could eat. And yet it was true.
I grew inside my mother, the way Katie grew inside me. I came out of her and ate her, just as Katie ate my body, literally, to live. I became my mother in ways that still felt, sometimes, as elemental and violent as the moment when I'd been pushed out from between her legs in a great rush of blood. And it was the same with my father: He had helped make me, in ways that were wildly mysterious and absolutely powerful. Like Jesus, he had gone inside somebody else's body and then become a part of me. The shape of my hands, the way I cleared my throat, the color of my eyes: My parents lived in me -- body and soul, DNA and spirit. That was like the bread becoming God becoming me, in ways seen and unseen. -- My daily bread | Salon Life